how many calories should i be eating a day?

Question

i'm 15, fairly active, on average i walk over an hour a day, do 30 mins jogging or running, and 200 - 300 calories burnt on my dancemat, how much should i be eating? is 1200 - 1400 calories enough? i'm 5'6 and 100lbs if that makes any difference to anything

Answer 1

No - it's definately NOT enough.
Based on your age, weight and gender, the amount of calories you are burning are:
249 kcal - 1 hour walking quickly
292 kcal - 1 hour dance mat
146 kcal - 30mins jogging
assuming you sleep for 8 hours, during which you would burn 432 kcal, that's already a total of 1,119 kcals that your body requires - and that's not counting the kcals that you require for the remaining 13 and a half hours in the day!

Here's a breakdown of the kcal a female of your age and weight requires for various activities (per hour):

54 kcal p/h - at rest
70 kcal p/h - sitting
81 kcal p/h - standing
178 kcal p/h - washing, dressing, etc.
151 kcal p/h - walking slowly
249 kcal p/h - walking quickly
449 kcal p/h - walking upstairs
178 kcal p/h - light work (housework, golf, driving, etc)
292 kcal p/h - moderate work (dancing, jogging, tennis, etc)
411 kcal p/h - strenuous work (swimming crawl, football, cross country running)

As you can see, you would need a minimum of 1,296kcal even if you spent an entire 24 hours at rest!
You do really need to take in more calories - you can do this with a healthy balanced diet.
It's good that you are taking regular excercise - concentrate your efforts into fitness and health as opposed to spending too much time worrying about what you weigh.

Answer 2

Only if you want to starve!
1200-1400 calories is probably just enough to keep you conscious. In actual fact you need about 800-1000 to keep you alive, brisk walking for an hour burns about 300, 30mins running burns another 2-300. Add that lot together and just to wake up and exercise you need at least 1600! Then you've got to grow (you're 15!), study, work, get through the day etc. Add at least another 1000 for all those and you're probably getting close.
If you're exercising, at 15 years old, as long as you eat healthily, 2-2500 calories is not going to be a problem.

Answer 3

Well, 1400 calories is FAR too low. It sounds like you should get 2000 calories at the very least, and since you sound very active, it should be more than that, even. Most runners I know have to eat constantly, they are hungry often and their metabolisms are high because of it. If you exercise AND you eat, your metabolism is at its best... eating only 1400 calories will slow you down horribly.

It sounds like you shouldn't worry about calories anyway! Wow, only 100 pounds at 5'6? You must be unbelievably thin; I am 5'6 and I was anorexic in high school and my period stopped at 108 pounds... I really hope you're not obsessed with food and weight like I was, because it ruined my life and my family as well.

Answer 4

You need 1800-2000 calories at least. But you do sound very underweight already - what's with the exercise regime at your age? Give yourself a chance to go out and have some fun, you shouldn't be stuck on a stupid dance mat to get your body moving, you need to let rip on a dance floor. It's a bad sign if you have time to count calories - get out there and do something!

Answer 5

1200-1400 is not enough.
Considering your age, weight, height, activity level... you need 1908 calories a day.
Also, you are underweight (BMI is only 16.1, which is a tad low for a 15-year-old!) You might want to have a little more food to get to a healthy weight (just so you can be a little more perfect.)

Answer 6

1200-1400 sounds low to me, but I wouldn't know if a 15 year old should try and hold a 2000 diet

Answer 7

nicely first, that's totally risky... you may combine weight-help plan and exercising to shed extra pounds, tone muscle and save it off... in case you are going to be able to desire to understand for the different reason, there are approximately 3500 energy in a million pound of bodyweight... so which you are going to be able to desire to calculate how numerous energy you regularly could eat in an afternoon and do the mathematics... case in point: in case you eat approximately 2000 energy an afternoon, that's 14,000 energy each and every week in case you eat approximately 2 hundred energy an afternoon, this could be a million,4 hundred energy each and every week a distinction of 12,six hundred energy, and then divide that by 3500 to make certain how numerous kilos it rather is you will get approximately 3...6 kilos... in case you're burning energy on an analogous time which would be much greater weight lost... yet i'm doing this for hypothetical purposes, i nonetheless do not advise it by any stretch...

Answer 8

No-one can tell you. You need to run trial and error yourself acording to your metabolism.

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