What is your target daily calorie deficit?

Just wondering what daily calorie deficit everyone here aims for.

Bump! 

500...but i'm only 10 lbs away from my goal!

~H~

Congrats!   So what was your deficit when you first started out?  Do you remember?

I've always gone with 500-700 calorie deficits.  If I have a superactive day (i.e. spending the whole afternoon digging in the garden or hiking), I might let it get up to 1000 calories, but 1000 calorie deficit on a non-superactive day just leaves me feeling too hungry and I'd wind up sabotaging myself.

I aim for 500-800 calorie deficits but sometimes I only end up with a 300-400 calorie deficit if I wasnt very active or super hungry. Like today, I only walked and I eat more than I planned so I only ended up with a deficit of 265 cals. Oh well, its still a deficit.........

I aim for about 500, or maybe a bit more. I'm trying to lose weight pretty slowly. 

Weeeeelllll   I am sort of odd man out here.  I AIM for about a 2000 Kcal deficit each day, not counting any exercise I do.  That said there are provisos.  I am on a doctor's supervised, and devised weigh management/loss program.  I am morbidly obese (BMI 51 +++) so my Kcal normal equalivalant point is about 3500 or so the math says.  The doctor put me on a 2000 Kcal a day diet, with a high protein component (to get ready for possible bariatric surgury).

However the clinic / doctor I see also stress changing the metabolism.  They stress that it is not an imaginary thing that FAT people often do eat the same amount of food as their skinny counterparts at work for instance, yet they keep on putting on weight.  It is because over time, our metabolisms, already gentically predisposed to storing food better than many people (it was a good thing in times of famine, and when there were no fast food places and supermarkets!), have gotten messed up.  We have often messed up our metabolisms trying to do what doctors in the past have told us to do!  Eat less and exercise more!  That may be OK for someone with a few vanity pounds, but for someone in the obese catagory, (obesity is a disease, not a condition, not a weakness) eating less can actually HURT your metabolism, because often we interpret it to mean "skip a meal here or there". 

So the clinic I am at espouses eating 8 times a day (6 minimum) to keep the metabolism fired up all day long, not to let it go into storage mode.  Eating slower, and with more protein, and of course healthier.   I can't do the whole seminar / lecture etc...but it is working.  I have lost 23.2 lbs in less than a month. 

Now I do try to do about 30 min - 45 min on a stationary bike every other day as well (about 300 - 500 Kcal burn) so that helps bring the weight down a bit too, though it also increases muscle which can actually increase weight over the short term.

In short you really should find a good doctor supervised or multi-disciplinary weight management place (no not a Jenny Craig or some place like that) to craft a plan that works for you, especially if you have a hard time losing weight as I have over the years.  I still think I shall need the surgery as I have so much weight to lose (hundreds of pounds) but, finding a place that finally didn't hand me a sheet of paper that said "eat less food, and exercise more" was key to helping me begin to understand I had an illness, and that I needed to treat it like one.

Grumpy

My defecit stays somewhere between the 500-700 range.. nice and healthy. I used to have a waay higher defecit (over the 1000 mark) and started binging like crazy in retaliation. But now I've smartened up and I'm eatting about 1500 cals a day!

I'm only needing to lose 5 more lbs. before my goal weight, so I'm trying to do it the healthiest way possible. My deficit goal is between 250-500 a day. Although I'm not getting anywhere... *shakes fist*

Can someone please explain to me what a calorie deficit is!?

A calorie defecit is basically the intake vs. the burned calories. Let's say you eat 2,000 calories in a day, but overall burn 3,000...your defecit would be 1,000. A rough rule of thumb I've heard is to have a 1,000 defecit everyday in order to lose 1-2 lbs/week.

Actually you need to have a calorie deficit of 3500 kcal to lose 1 lbs of fat. So about 500 calorie deficit a day. Try cutting 250 cals and burning and an extra 250 with exercise a day. You should lose 1 lbs of fat a week. I'm aiming to lose of 3-4 lbs a month.

I zig zag my calories to keep my metabolism guessing but on average I aim for 500 to 800 of a deficit.  my numbers are unfair thought because I am like Gumpy in that I was extremly overweight so it was really easy to get a huge deficit and still eat 2300 calories per day.  now that I have lost 1/3rd of my body weight I am having a harder time by the day of keeping the larger deficit.

I actually don't think about the deficit; I just aim for around 1450 calories a day. I'm fairly active so I'd guess I have a 1000+ calorie deficit most days (weight loss is around 2-3lb a week). I try not to drop below 1200 calories in any one day, and I have 2000-2200 calories in a day once every week or so to stop my metabolism getting too comfortable.

I aim for about 500 deficit when I don't workout, I can have a deficit of anywhere from 800 to 1500 when I do workout. I try not to let it go over 1500 and I make sure I'm not famished, especially during a workout.

I always have a hard time eating enough on workout days and stopping myself from stuffing my face when I'm not working out.  Does anyone else find working out stops them from being hungry?? Especially hard cardio, I'm just not hungry after.

I agree with Grumpy - you should decide your deficit on what your weight loss needs are.  Make sure you're not going hungry just to get that extra 100 cal deficit and consult a doc if you're not sure if you're being healthy about it.  Good luck!

I just joined the site, what is a calorie deficit

 NEVER MIND I read back and the answer was there

I try and have a deficit of 2500 cals a day.  I increased my cals burned to a low of 3,800 to a high of 5500 and eat 700-1400 a day based on what I am burning.   I have lost 10 pounds in 10 days!  I eat a balances diet, according to the daily nutrition grade a always have a B+ to an A. 

That may be a little extreme. 10 lbs in 10 days.

What I have found is that safey you can loose 1% of your body weight per week. Depending on your size will the deficit will vary. Examples:

250 lb person  X   .01  = 2.5 (lbs per week to lose)   X 3500 (amount to burn 1 lb) = 8750  (weekly defecit) /  7 days = 1250 (daily defecit)

150 lb person  X .01 = 1.5 lbs X 3500 = 5250 /  7 = 750 daily defeict

If weight loss is your goal run the above with your current weight.

I AIM for 500... I typically GET 200!! LOL. But that's okay, I'm still loosing. Just slower. =)