Help! Eat to weigh less explanation....

Try to eat 500 less cals of your TDEE everyday to lose 1lb a week. You can't eat less than your BMR, because it's the calories your body needs on a resting state, like when you are in a coma.. Since you're not and you workout, your body needs more. So get your TDEE (there's an online calculator for that) then eat 500cals below that everyday.

use the mfp tdee calculator and eat your exercise calories. (most of them, leave a margin for error is what most people will tell you)
the eat more people are mostly saying you can eat more if you exercise more and you get better healthier results.

if you use another calculator it may already include exercise. don't double count your exercise.

ok, so here's the deal with "eat more to lose".

First off, there is a TON of confusion about it and there are a lot of people on here that think they know all and "their body is special" and they can cheat science somehow by creating energy from nothing. You'll hear people talking about starvation mode or that it is myth, etc. The fact is, no one REALLY know how it all works. There are lots of PhD's spending their lives researching human metabolism on a daily basis and they don't know it all. All that said, here's my take on it (not saying it is correct, but this is how I understand it).

This entire concept is about energy in = energy out + accumulation. This is a basic concept in thermodynamics and applies to the entire world. Essentially, the energy that comes out of a system can't be more than the energy that went into the system. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Like your car - you fill it up with 10 gallons of gas, that amount of gas contains a certain amount of energy, depending on how efficient your car is determines how far your get on 10 gallons.

Your body is biological, so it can adapt to an extent. When your body has plenty of food available, it processes the food inefficiently and your activities expend a lot of energy. As you start decreasing calories consumed, your body continues to convert food inefficiently and burn calories inefficiently for a while and you lose weight relatively quickly. However, if you stay at a deficit for long periods of time or restrict your calories by a lot for a decent period of time, your body adapts to not having all that much food and starts getting more efficient. This is your body's survival technique for dealing with periods of time when we were cavemen and plentiful food was seasonal. This SLOWS the weight loss because your body is better at conserving energy. If your calorie deficit is within the range that your body can adapt to, you stop losing weight, but if not, you continue to lose, just at a slower rate.

The concept of eating more to lose weight is basically the goal of eating enough that your body continues to be inefficient so you lose weight quickly, but not eating so much that you stop losing weight. It is essentially targeting the conditions that make your body as inefficient as possible (from an energy standpoint).

Here is where the strong opinions and confusion come in. What happens when your body gets more efficient and goes into "starvation mode"? So now your body can function on less calories and your bmr isn't right anymore. If you decrease your calories more will you lose weight? The answer is yes - eventually. Otherwise, there would not be starving people in the world. If our bodies could create energy from nothing, no one would die from starvation. Think of starvation as running out of energy until your body can't continue to function. Once the food and fat reserves are gone - you die. Period. Your body can make small adaptations to help us through the tough times, but it can't create energy. Obviously, none of us on this site will likely ever get anywhere close to that extreme, but the fact remains that no matter how efficient your body is, if you restrict calories enough, you lose fat.

So, if you get into "starvation mode", should you increase calories? It is a personal preference, and I prefer to do that. I'd rather keep my body inefficient and eat more and feel better than to starve myself even more. So the idea of eating more to lose is to simply to restrict calories enough to lose weight, but keep your body inefficient. It is a pretty narrow window.