Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

lol you're preaching to the choir, here. I work out in the gym every day, and I'm also vegan. However, I've done some work calculating macros, and your math looks a little bit loose to me. For example, I think any 70kg guy who thinks he needs 3000 calories a day is likely wrong. We're talking at least a 10k run or equivalent and another hour of weight training each day, and even at that I'm not sure you'd hit 3000. I'd say anything more than a couple nuts or a tablespoon of peanut butter, and you're likely going to overshoot.

hmmm, I think part of the confusion about calorie requirements is around what BMR is.

Lets say we start with our 70 kg athlete. His BMR is around 1745 kcals. If we were just to add exercise kcals to this, say 750 for a 10K run, and 500 for an hour at the gym, he would as you say not even reach 3000. However BMR is a measure of energy expenditure at complete rest, eg sleeping. For all your daily activities this will add to your calorie requirements. Even for light leisure activities like watching tv, one burns 0.4 times on top of your BMR according to the FAO. That's why if, for example, you use the nutrition data calorie calculator, and enter in the the details of a 70 kg man who runs 10k but is otherwise sedentary, the calories it says the man requires is actually above 3000 kcals.

Athletes will burn way more than 3000 kcals, and thats why every now and then you get people like Michael Phelps saying he burns 12,000 kcals! (although perhaps its more like 6000) For athletes the normal rules about how many cals they even burn at rest don't apply because they have extremely low body fat, and high muscle. And of course muscle has a much higher RMR.

Hmmmm. I've used other calorie calculators before, and they definitely would not have given this result-- but now that I think of it, I used http://scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/ , set for weight loss (I wasn't really overweight, was just going for that 6-pack)

It occurs to me that a person trying to lose weight while also doing intensive exercise is at some risk because getting a good macro balance with sufficient protein will be harder due to the calorie deficit you are setting up. But I doubt that many long-term vegans have that problem.