[claudiawerner]

I'm about 145lb 22 y/o, and also doing 1100 calories/day but usually in the form of one meal for dinner. How did you calculate the amount you should lose per day/week? I'm interested in filling such a spreadsheet myself.

[sl1ck731]

When I started I used a metabolic rate calculator.

https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/calories for example.

The amount of calories lost per day = the metabolic rate from the calculator - the amount of calories you eat that day.

The amount of pounds lost per day is: burned calories (above) / 3500 (number of calories in a pound of fat).

After a couple months of measuring my weight daily and knowing exactly what my caloric intake was, I calculated my real average metabolic rate by doing the reverse.

total calories lost in a period = lbs lost * 3500

calorie burn (metabolic rate) = total calories burned + total calories eaten

The above is per period so I calculated the average values for the days in a month and used them.

I didn't exercise much so the basal metabolic rate was fairly close to my real burn.

[dragonwriter]

If you aren't exercising much,the assumption that all loss is fat is optimistic, and lean body mass has only 600 kcal/pound instead of 3,500 for fat.

[sl1ck731]

Yes that is also true. I accounted for about 20% of lean mass loss included and then had to hit the gym after the few month diet :)

Though it wasn't my biggest concern since I overshot my loss by about as much.