Can someone help me calculate how many calories to eat?

jfly2014

I am 5'11" female, and I work out 4-5 days a week for an hour (usually around 500 calories the machines tell me, but I also input my goal weight of 150 instead of my actual weight of 165, so it may be a little more). My fitness pal was telling me to eat 1200 calories, but as I'm doing research, it's tell me that 1200 is far too low and unhealthy. I am also attempting to eat only 50-100 grams of carbs per day, which might help my weight loss. I have been stuck at 165 for a while, and was just at 153 a little over a year ago. Thanks for your help!

Energizer06

Technically, according to fat2fitradio.com/tools you currently at a normal weight for your height. With a BF% around 23%. Now if you want to tone up and trim some excess body fat you could shoot for 18%-20%. Your calories in should be around 2000. My suggestion is take your body measurements and go to the above website. Enter in your info and determine what best suits your needs. But 1200 is really low. Especially if your working out moderately as you are now.

AmyRhubarb

Have a look at this topic: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12

Excellent info there, and links to tools to calculate how much you should be eating, and how to change your settings here at MFP. Best move I ever made was following the advice there, and eating according to that information. Just go through it step by step with the links provided in the topic - it walks you through the whole process.

Just curious, why would you put your goal weight into the machines instead of your actual weight to get your burn? They are dodgy as it is at calculating accurate burns, but with the wrong weight info, I imagine it would be far worse.