How Many Calories Should I Be Eating Per Day?

Your stress fractures are the most problematic and combined with the other symptoms make it likely you are underfueling.

The online calculators will give you a reasonable first order appreciation of your maintenance calories, but they as well nutritional food labels will have up to 20% error and won’t account for your body’s NEAT reduction, so here’s a more accurate strategy:

1) Get a scale that automatically syncs with your phone and tracks averages, and weigh yourself everyday at the sands time, preferably first thing in the morning, but ignore daily variations.

2) If your weekly average tends down, you are certainly underfueling.

3) If your weight is stable but you don’t feel at your energetic best during the day, it is likely you are underfueling and that increasing intake will not cause any weight gain, just make you feel better.

Bottomline is your body is the ultimate ground-truth-accurate tracker of caloric surpluses or deficits.

If there are other clinically diagnosed causes of your stress fractures like osteopenia, you’d need to address that first with your doctor.

It is not rocket science.

At complete rest, you need 12 times your body weight (for women it is 11 times body weight), so at 135 you need 1620 to maintain.

You get to add 100 calories per mile you run (this is approximate), so if you run 90 miles per week, that is 12.85 mile per day or 1285 calories added, so now you are up to 2,905 calories per day allowed to maintain. The standing desk is not a big contributor. Walking an additional 2 miles a day adds 200 calories, so you are up to 3,105 per day based on the criteria I had laid out.

If you start counting calories and you have never done so before, you MIGHT find that you lose a lot of weight in the first week, and even in the first 2-3 days. This is almost ALL water weight due to less sodium and fewer carbohydrates being consumed (which usually happens when someone pays attention to what they are eating).

Once you get past that one-week adjustment period, if you are using the calorie allotment I have prescribed above and you find that you are either gaining or losing weight based on that, then adjust your calories accordingly.

For reference:

3,500 calories = a pound of fat, so if you want to gain or lose a pound over a period of one week, up or lower your calories by 500 per day.

I like that Flagpole's advice points to using the calculated calories (based on weight and running) as a guide, not a hard-and-fast rule, and then tweak as needed based on needs. I have follow-up question – hopefully this adds rather than hijacks the conversation – but is there any research or guidance out there about additional calories needed for recovery? I understand that we need a certain amount of calories to maintain a given weight and support the energy expended from running, but I can't help but wonder if that's an underestimate of how much we actually need to recover so that I can eventually run more miles or hit harder workouts. If anyone has an insight, I'd love to hear!

Sedentary TDEE calculator, OMNI Running calorie calculator = profit. Used for myself to maintain my weight when I count.

Fascinating point! I'd be interested to know this too.

I am not as educated about recovery as I am calorie expenditure and needs. Recovery involves so many other things...proper amount of water (not too little OR too much), proper nutrition, proper sleep, and then whatever the sweet spot of training is for you (or any other specific runner).

People like to throw out the idea of "overtraining", but that is not just one thing. Too much training CAN just lead to fatigue that hampers performance, but it can also really mess with things like testosterone levels that can really cause performance issues (in more ways than one).

Recovery is hard to define because it's a complex term. As a runner, you need enough protein to rebuild damaged muscle/organellas/etc and to suppress excessive catabolism. Let's say 1 to 2g per kg of bodyweight is the ballbark. 1.5 should be fine for most. You also need fat for hormone production and intramuscular fat replenishment (that's the fat that is actually used immediately by your muscles). So try to get decent amount of MCT-rich healthy fats, like coconut oil. Last, but not least, you need to replenish glycogen. That's carbs. About 50g/day for brain alone, plus whatever amount you burned in muscles and liver. As long as you have nutrients covered you don't need to allocate a specific amount of calories for "recovery" - just make sure you're at a stable weight over time. If you are - and feeling decent/sleeping well - you are recovering just fine.