I am an 18 year old male who is 6'4" and weighs 218 down from 254. I have used a bunch of different calculators/formulas to find out how many calories I need to maintain my weight so that I can figure out a good deficit but I've been getting a lot of different numbers. How many calories do I need to maintain my weight assuming I'm sedentary.

There is no perfect formula to calculate one's BMR, however most of the formulae available are fairly accurate. A more accurate method, however, especially for obese individuals is one that takes body fat/lean body mass into account like the Katch-McArdle forumla.

Here's an article on measuring body fat: What's Your Body Fat?

Hope this helps!

thanks for the help!

Anytime.. All the best!

Yeah, I have to agree. Because we're all so different, calories are - at best - a guideline. You can calculate a figure, but then it will take some experimenting and tweaking to see what works for you.

It's also about WHAT you eat as much as how much you eat. For example, I lose weight really well if I eat more protein. When I'm really on track eating a full 35%-40% of my calories as lean protein, my weight loss increases, even though I'm eating about the same amount of calories. For some people it might be cutting out more carbs, and so forth.

The formula I like to use is super easy and it's based on calories per pound of body weight.

I start with 14 calories per pound. So for example, I weigh 177, so my baseline would be 2478 (177 x 14).

Then I figure 80% of that figure: 1982 (2478 x 0.8).

So for me, a 20% deficit is around somewhere between 1900 and 2000 calories.

Now, that's a starting point - a guideline. I know, from having done this for about 2 years now, that if I eat 1900 calories and work out 3x-4x a week, I will lose weight, but veeeeerrry slowly. Like less than 1lb a week. So I tweak a little. I started dropping 100 calories at a time over a period of about 4 weeks.

Now I know that if I eat between 1600 and 1700 calories a day, get at least 30%-35% of that in protein, and am consistent with my exercise, I will lose close to 2 lbs a week.

The trick for me is sticking to both the calorie level and the exercise.

But as you can see, it wasn't just a straight calculation. It was starting with a guideline and tweaking and fixing and figuring it out as I went along.

Does that mean that, since your weight loss has stalled (not to rub it in, believe me, just for clarity's sake), you have been eating around 2400 calories a day? It seemed like a lot less.

Fair question.

I suspect, as I mentioned in my journal, that I've been sloppy in my measuring and counting over the last several weeks. It was just this past Monday that I got back to measuring *all* of my food consistently and tracking every single bite again, rather than just eyeballing things.

My weight has recently bounced between 174 and 178 ... and I know that I'll have a string of days where I'm on plan and weight starts dropping, and then something will come up and I'll slack again, and my weight goes back up.

I wouldn't be surprised if I had been hitting at least 2000-2200 calories on an average - not so much on a daily basis, but on those days I've let those "treat meals" sort of slide into whole days on the weekends, and on those days that I've had other obligations and used it as an excuse to stop counting. I've also had a couple of very stressful weeks dealing with personal issues and my vodka tonic consumption has increased as well.

I also slacked off quite a bit on working out - both in regularity and in intensity.

It all boils down to my personal accountability, to be honest. I know how to lose weight. I know what I need to do, how I need to eat, and how I need to exercise. I got complacent and ... well ... lazy.