Eating enough vs. not eating enough???

designerdiscounts

It's been discussed to death, I know but I'm still a little confused about the whole eating enough vs. not eating enough conversation.

A little about me: I will be 40 on Saturday. I have a small frame and am 5'4". I have comfortably weighed about 120 for most of my adult life except the last 3 years, I put on about 20 lbs and hit an all time high of 143 lbs. I've been physically active on and off my whole life. I started logging about 4 weeks ago on MFP, doing Focus T25 work out DVDs 6 days a week and an hour of hard core yoga 3 days a week. I am seeing changes, my strength is improving, my stomach is flatter, my butt is smaller. It's been almost 4 weeks and I've lost 3 lbs. Not awful, of course I'd like faster results but I'm trying to be patient.

I've had a few people say I'm not eating enough. So I did a calorie calculator and it says I should be eating about 1600 calories a day. That seems like a lot. Sometimes, I notice if I eat a little bit more, the scale seems to move down. Maybe it's just a fluke. I want to maximize my fat loss so should I stick with MFP's recommendation of 1200 calories a day and eating back my exercise calories or up it a little to 1600 calories a day?

Looking forward to the replies, thanks for reading :-).