Calorie intake

mpd6852

So I'm new here - just joined, I'm curious just too make sure I'm reading things correctly. Where it shows my daily calories goal, this is the number of calories I want to be eating per day or less to lose weight

goal06082021

Right, you want to be eating that many calories per day in order to lose weight at the rate you chose when you went through the guided setup. Some important points:

* The way MFP calculates your calorie budget assumes that you do not do any purposeful exercise; the "activity level" you select in the guided setup is meant to be how active you are throughout a normal day. For most adults, what kind of job you have will determine your activity level; if you don't work outside the home, how much time during the day you spend sitting down is a good heuristic for estimating your activity level. More time sitting = less active.
* This also means that when you do purposeful exercise, you should log that in your diary, and eat back the calories you burned exercising so that your net intake is whatever MFP sets for you. The trick is getting an accurate figure for that calorie burn; MFP and gym machines tend to overestimate, so it can be easy to accidentally eat a little too much. Trial and error is the way to go here.
* If you've been given a calorie budget of 1200 and you are NOT female, under 5'4" tall, over 50 years old, and under 120 lbs currently, you have set your goals too aggressively and should redo the guided setup. Choose 1lb or 0.5lb per week loss; you can almost certainly eat more than 1200 calories per day and still lose weight, unless you are all four of those things. If you're a man, you shouldn't eat fewer than 1500 calories per day, and similar parameters apply for the people for whom that is an appropriate calorie budget (shorter and older, with little to lose).