Hello, I am trying to lose weight and I decided to give chatgpt my exact data along with what exact exercises i do. (I dance for 30 minutes non stop everyday and do core exercises every other day. I also walk almost 10k everyday)
This TDEE just seems way too high though, what do you think?
by East_Creme317
8 Comments
Record your daily calorie intake for 2 weeks. Weigh yourself on the first and last day. Input that info into chat gpt and you can get your TDEE based on how much you gained/lost.
I honestly just calculate my activity as sedentary every time and have ended up with more precise calculations. But it really depends on what deficit you think is sustainable for you to keep.
I’ve had similar troubles before and the advice I found useful was to lower the activity level of the calculation to low.
If we do that, then your estimate maintenance calories is around 2000-2100 which seems more accurate.
I am a senior software developer with almost 30 years of professional experience. I do use ChatGPT as it can churn out boiler plate code quickly and it can be impressive. It can also spew out absolute garbage and sound impressive while doing so. Without experience, it is hard to know when the AI gets it right and when it is just making stuff up. Based on that, I’d recommend using a calculator designed for this purpose instead of ChatGPT: [TDEE Calculator](https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=20&csex=f&cheightfeet=5&cheightinch=10&cpound=165&cheightmeter=179&ckg=86&cactivity=1.465&cmop=0&coutunit=c&cformula=m&cfatpct=20&printit=0&ctype=metric&x=Calculate). My confidence in these numbers would be much higher.
I’d also recommend taking whatever number you come up with and compare it with experience. If you eat 2300 Calories a day and stay even over a month (yeah, a month… menstrual cycles add noise to tracking), then you expend 2300 Calories per day on average.
Edit: I know we are both on 1500isplenty, but I’m more of a 2000 Calorie a day guy myself. I’m very active and 1500 just doesn’t fit. Make sure you aren’t going for an arbitrary 1500. Based on your activity level, 1500 seems unhealthy for you. If you are looking to drop, start with your TDEE and drop maybe 300-500 Calories a day tops. 1500 or lower is generally bad for active people unless they are really small. It is tempting to want to drop weight quicker, but slow and steady is much more likely to be successful and sustainable.
Currently on maintenance as a 168 cm male with moderate to high activity (4 full body workouts per week + 10k steps per day) and I’m around 2440 calories per day. If you are more active than me and accounting for the fact you are taller then it *could* be correct but I would lean more to the 2700 – 2800 range. I usually don’t account for activity level, I just use TDEE without it and then increase calories for the next few weeks until I stop losing to find my maintenance. If you are looking to lose weight, you could impose a deficit to 1500 calories and monitor how much you are losing per week for a month or so and then check back in with the AI to ask it “OK so based on me losing X over Y amount of time with Z amount of calories per day, what would be my actual TDEE?”
Ah yes, the laundry-pods-are-a-significant-protein-in-your-diet chat machine.
Certain LLM models are probably a little “smarter” about this kind of thing nowadays, but at the end of the day, that’s just what all CHATGPT-adjacent chatbots are: **large language models**. Emphasis on **language** that sounds good to the average user, but is actually just bullcrap they made up in a few seconds to provide an answer that sounds confidently right. Good for simple proven questions, bad for everything else.
Take this as a precaution to using chatgpt for absolutely anything even remotely health-related or life-altering, and do the TDEE calcs yourself — multiple websites on Google for this, and you literally don’t need to give them anymore information than your height, weight, and activity level.
500 below your TDEE is generally considered a good benchmark.
I am quite similar to your stats and my maintenance from Apple Watch is around 2500cal on active days. I do not walk as much as you do, so I would add 100-200cal max to that.
Most people who think they are moderately active are not.