daily calorie intake / net calories / BMR

KelseyLK1

ok so i'm a 19 year old girl...i weigh 146 pounds. i wanna lose about 20 pounds so i'm trying to figure out how to deal with all these complicated numbers & what not lol A website says i have a BMR of 1500..thats how much calories i burn per day if i do nothing. I plan on having a daily calorie intake of 1200 calories + i'll probably burn about 300-500 calories a day through exercise. i'm not quite sure how to incorporate these numbers to make sure i have the proper calorie deficit, so is anyone able to help?? (ideally i'd wanna lose 2 pounds per week) thanks for any help!!

oh & i'm so confused by net calories!
on my fitness pal tracker (this is my first day using it) my goal is 1200...i logged 1194 calories worth of food, exercised and burned 459 , so it says my net is 735...is this a good or bad number at the end of the day if i wanna lose weight??

grimendale

There are two methods available to you. MFP uses the NEAT method. Based on your vital statistics and daily activity level, you are given a number of calories per day. This number includes a deficit, determined based on what you said you wanted to lose per week, and does not take into account any exercise. It assumes you won't do anything you don't normally do. If you do exercise, you burn more calories than MFP had anticipated, so it expects you to eat more that day to keep your predetermined deficit from growing too large. At the end of the day, the Calories Remaining (your net) shown on your homepage should be at or close to zero. Log any exercise you do into MFP each day, and it will automatically adjust your daily allotment to include the extra. If your daily goal is 1200 and you burned 450, you should be eating a total of 1650 calories for the day. Since you don't have much to lose, you are going to want a smaller deficit, so ending with a net close to zero is going to be your best bet for good results. You might also want to consider changing your loss goal from 2 lbs/week down to 1 lbs/week of 0.5 lbs/week. Trying to maintain too large a deficit can stall you out and abandon you on a plateau. Dropping my goal from 2 lbs/week to 1 lbs/week helped me break a 6 month plateau a little while back (and the boards are full of similar stories)

If you want to use your BMR and TDEE to get a number to eat every day without having to worry about eating back exercise calories, you'll want the TDEE-15% method. The downside of this is that, since you include your expected exercise in the calculations, you can't skip workouts without adjusting how much you eat. The below link gives a more thorough explanation and will walk you through setting up TDEE if you choose that method. Hope that helps.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/819055-setting-your-calorie-and-macro-targets

jcramer1227

so ending with a net close to zero is going to be your best bet

Your net should NOT be zero. I know what you mean, grimendale, but I think you mean that the total consumption less exercise (net) should be your daily intake goal. Net should never be zero.

ETA an example. If your goal is 1500, your net should be 1500.