Confused

Hi everyone! I've been on this site a few weeks now, and I am curious about something:

I am eating about 1500 calories a day, and I set my burn meter to sedentary so that I could imput each of my activities, to give me better tracking.  On Sedentary, CC says I burn about 2300 calories a day. The deal is, I actually exercise at least 30 mintues every day, often an hour, and some days two hours. On days when I eat 3000+ calories a day, should I be eating 2000 calories? Will it hurt me to stay at 1500? And on rest days, is it OK to eat 1300 calories, so I can still lose weight?

"On days when I eat 3000+ calories a day, should I be eating 2000 calories?"

I'm sorry, this should be

On days when I BURN 3000+ calories...

You should aim to never have a deficit greater than 1000.

So if you burn 3000 cal in a day, eat at least 2000. If it's more than 3000, eat more than 2000.

Essentially, your body can only metabolize a certain amount of fat each day. So having too great a deficit will mean that your body will have to take the calories from another source, which you don't want.

Thanks for your reply!

So my body can only get rid of about 1000 calories/day of my fat? So a deficit of more than that is taking from muscle and bone? Yikes! Is this true even if I'm doing things to build my muscle, like strength training?

Well, the 1000 cal deficit/day is a generalization.

Another generalization - you can lose 1% body weight/week. So if you are 200 lbs, you could lose 2lbs of fat a week, or carry a 1000 cal deficit. But if you are only 150, you'd only be able to lose 1.5lb/week, or 750 cal deficit/day.

Yet another one says that you can have a max deficit of 31 calories per pound of body fat per day. So if you know your body fat %, you can work out what your max deficit it (although I've done this, and it definitely told me that I could carry a much higher deficit than I know that I can, and still lose weight successfully).

Strength training is a great way to help ensure that you maintain your muscle (plus is a great calorie burner) while dieting, but if you keep too great a deficit, your body will still try to get rid of excess stuff.

Don't try to go too fast - remember that it's not a race. 1-2lb fat loss per week is a very healthy goal.

Amethyst summed it up well.  Basically your body requires energy for you to exercise and not pass out and if you aren't eating enough calories for that then either it starts storing more fat out of what you are eating as reserves or it draws the calories out of your body as you said.

Try not to exceed the 1000 cal deficit to prevent this happening.