Am I doing something wrong?

Your diary is locked so I can't tell for sure if you're talking about eating 1200-1700 with exercise or before exercise. I sure hope we're talking before. Either way, I'd recommend upping the calories to the 1500-1700 range (plus exercise cals). 1200 is too low for just about everyone. What has worked best for me is leaving my activity set to sedentary ( I also work a desk job) and following those calorie guidelines.

>>>I've noticed that seems to work better on MFP for larger, heavier people but for smaller women it seems to default them to 1200 way too often. If that's the case for you, manually reset your macros to 1600 or so.<<<<<<<

With regards to the plateau, usually I find that it's not the person that has plateaued but the routine. If you keep doing the same thing time after time your body loses the need to make adjustments. Exercise is best when it's progressive. I'm not familiar with Turbofire so I don't know if it's something you can make more difficult over time. But with your kettlebell routine if you're used to the 30/30 intervals start bumping those up to 40/20, 45/15 and then 60/15. I started with 30/30 too and quickly moved to 45/15 and beyond.

OK- The way MFP sets your calories can be confusing- to use this program the way it's designed, you do not include your exercise in the base calories. I think 1200 is too low, first of all. There are a couple problems with setting your calories that low- First, you're risking hormonal disruptions and resulting stalls in weight loss. Second, You risk muscle loss. Third, it makes it next to impossible to transition to maintenance without gaining weight, since your body has adjusted down to a low calorie amount.

That being said, without knowing your height, I'm going to guess your BMR is in the 1450-1500 range. I'll assume 1450 for the calculations. With a desk job, you are likely lightly active (without workouts included) b/c very few people are ACTUALLY sedentary without an injury or other factor keeping you from moving, so:

Lightly Active: 1450 x 1.375 = 1994 TDEE
20% cut: 0.8 x 1994 = 1595 cal Target (cut), round to 1600.

So, what you would do is set your target at 1600 cals, with at LEAST 100g protein (or equal to LBM, if known) , minimum ~60g fat (0.38 x bodyweight), and then you would add in your exercise calories and eat AT LEAST half of them back. Because this is a fairly high calorie jump from your 1200ish cals, you'll want to avoid your scale for a few weeks after you make the adjustment- it will result in a temporary weight gain. Don't stress out about the weight gain, it's mostly water weight and necessary to get you out of the weight loss stall.

Technically a plateau is 6 weeks or more (I think?) so you're not there yet, but because of the low calories, I think you are headed in that direction if you don't make a fairly drastic change soon.

If you would prefer to eat a static number of calories every day and not "eat back" your exercise calories, figure out your total workout calories for a week, so for example if you burn roughly 300 calories 6x per week, that would be 1800 calories per week. Add that to your total weekly calories (1600 x 7 = 11,200) so 11,200 + 1,800 = 13,000
then divide by 7, do 13,000/7 = 1857 cals, round to 1850. so 1850 would be your daily target, and you don't add exercise calories. With this method, you just need to be careful to not skip workouts during the week, as they're already figured in to your total.

Hope that helps!

OK- The way MFP sets your calories can be confusing- to use this program the way it's designed, you do not include your exercise in the base calories. I think 1200 is too low, first of all. There are a couple problems with setting your calories that low- First, you're risking hormonal disruptions and resulting stalls in weight loss. Second, You risk muscle loss. Third, it makes it next to impossible to transition to maintenance without gaining weight, since your body has adjusted down to a low calorie amount.

That being said, without knowing your height, I'm going to guess your BMR is in the 1450-1500 range. I'll assume 1450 for the calculations. With a desk job, you are likely lightly active (without workouts included) b/c very few people are ACTUALLY sedentary without an injury or other factor keeping you from moving, so:

Lightly Active: 1450 x 1.375 = 1994 TDEE
20% cut: 0.8 x 1994 = 1595 cal Target (cut), round to 1600.

So, what you would do is set your target at 1600 cals, with at LEAST 100g protein (or equal to LBM, if known) , minimum ~60g fat (0.38 x bodyweight), and then you would add in your exercise calories and eat AT LEAST half of them back. Because this is a fairly high calorie jump from your 1200ish cals, you'll want to avoid your scale for a few weeks after you make the adjustment- it will result in a temporary weight gain. Don't stress out about the weight gain, it's mostly water weight and necessary to get you out of the weight loss stall.

Technically a plateau is 6 weeks or more (I think?) so you're not there yet, but because of the low calories, I think you are headed in that direction if you don't make a fairly drastic change soon.

If you would prefer to eat a static number of calories every day and not "eat back" your exercise calories, figure out your total workout calories for a week, so for example if you burn roughly 300 calories 6x per week, that would be 1800 calories per week. Add that to your total weekly calories (1600 x 7 = 11,200) so 11,200 + 1,800 = 13,000
then divide by 7, do 13,000/7 = 1857 cals, round to 1850. so 1850 would be your daily target, and you don't add exercise calories. With this method, you just need to be careful to not skip workouts during the week, as they're already figured in to your total.

Hope that helps!

Thank you so much for this info!