Calories

misszoielouise

I've consumed 1,006 calories today. Do I need to burn more than 1,006 calories to lose weight?

kangaroux92

no you need to create a deficit though-out the week. a pound is roughly 3500 cal so if you create a deficit of 500 cal a day that's 1 pound a week mfp tells you how many calories you should consume to loose your targeted amount per week. for example if your bmr is 1800 cal witch is what you calories burned at resting rate then you should eat 1300 . if you exercise you can eat the calories back or leave it and you can loose faster.

what you described would be pure death/starving

MinnieInMaine

The above isn't quite right - you don't take a deficit from your BMR, you take it from your TDEE.

OP, when people say you have to burn more than you eat, that's not just exercise calories. Our bodies need a number of calories each day just to cover basic functions like breathing, digestion, cell reparis, etc - this is called your basal metabolic rate or BMR. On top of that you have average day to day activity like whether you work a desk job and are sedentary or if you are a waitress and are lightly to moderately active. That is NEAT calories (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis). Then you have exercise calories on top of that which would be included in your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expediture).

For example, my BMR is 1500 calories. I'm sedentary so my NEAT is 1.2x that # or 1800. Plus I walked for an hour so that's another 350 calories making my TDEE 2150. Then I take a calorie deficit of 500 to lose 1 pound per week and that makes my daily goal 1650.

As long as you set your profile up right, you can trust the MFP daily goal. When I say that, I mean make sure you set your goal reasonably - you have about 50 pounds to lose so 1 pound per week is reasonalbe, 2 pounds per week is too agressive. The daily calorie goal is the number of calories per day you should try to eat, plus at least half of any exercise calorie earned.

I hope that helped!