Help needed- calorie adjustment

riagalgate

Can anyone help me with my question please.
Myfitnesspal tells me I need to eat 1200 calories to lose upto 2lb a week, but with all my exercises my calorie adjustment keeps giving me a lot more calories to use each day - my question is, in order to lose weight should I ignore those adjustments and only have a max of 1200 calories or should I be allowing myself to use some of those adjustments? It's my first time counting calories as I've only done slimming world before. Thanks in advance

Duck_Puddle

Mfp sets your goal based on the assumption that you’ll never actually do any exercise. So when you do exercise, it adds those calories to what you should be eating (that’s why your calories remaining increases).

Whether or not it’s even realistic for you to try to lose 2 pounds a week is a whole different discussion. You want to be aiming for .5% to a very absolute maximum of 1% of your body weight per week. Don’t round up. And aim for the .5% unless you are very large.

That may or may not put you at a 1200 NET calorie goal (that’s about 3 pounds/month for me).

But you should always be eating at least some of your exercise calories back. If you’re confident that you’re estimating them accurately, then you should eat all of them. If you’re maybe not entirely sure if they are accurate, you can eat a portion and see how things look in 4-6 weeks.

The goal is never to eat as little as humanly possible, workout 16 hours a day and hope you lose 35 pounds in a month so you can go back to normal.

The goal is to find a reasonable level of calorie intake that allows you to lose weight, but still include some yummy treat foods, have enough energy to get through your workouts and your day (without being crabby) and learn how to eat so when you get to goal-it’s already “normal”.