Eating healthily yet struggling to eat 1200 cals a day

Two slices of bread, two tablespoons peanut butter, and two tablespoons jam is somewhere between 400-500 calories.

Are you saying you can't eat 3 peanut butter sandwiches in a day?

Here are a few secrets: with under 25 lbs to lose, your body is probably not going to make weight loss easy for you at 1200 cals. Just guessing, but you probably set your weight loss at 2 lb/week, because everyone does. Faster is better, right? Wrong. There is a limit to how much fat you can lose without also taking lean body mass (muscle) with it, and for someone with under 25 lbs to lose, that limit is around 0.5 lbs/week. If you lose more than that, your LBM will also come off with it, leaving you looking less "toned" when you hit your goal weight. Yes, it will take longer, but you will look and feel better about yourself by taking it more slowly. ETA: and YES, this happens even (or especially) when you exercise so much.

Benefit of this is that you get to up your calories. 1200 calories is a MINIMUM, and if you have not yet calculated your TDEE and BMR, please do so. If you aren't sure how those work or why they are important, let me know and I'll give you a link to check out because they are absolutely crucial to understanding your own body's weight loss.

You said you are only eating when you are hungry. The hormone that regulates hunger in the human body is called Leptin. When we restict our calories, leptin production is suppressed. When we increase our calories, leptin production also increases. This is completely unrelated to how much food we actually NEED. Basically, that means that if you eat less, you'll feel less hungry, even if you are actually starving. Don't go by how hungry you are. Force feed yourself those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches if you must, and soon your hunger will follow.

Finally, exercise less. The key to maintaining weight loss is doing something that you can maintain long-term, and I doubt that every day for the rest of your life, you will burn over 700 cals through exercise. There's a psychological block in a lot of us that says this process has to be painful or it isn't working. Not necessarily true. Up your calories. Enjoy your meals! Educate yourself. Weight loss and gain is a lifelong process for most people. You want to be a person for whom weight loss happens once, and maintenance happens after that. Either way, the process will take forever, so why rush it?

Best of luck!

I wrote out a long explanation of BMR and TDEE here, about 2/3 of the way down the page, and I also linked to the calculator to figure out your own BMR and TDEE in this thread as well.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/829833-calorie-intake-being-under-over-bad

and here is the calculator, to use once you read the post and understand what it is for:
http://scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/

I hope this helps.

ETA: I saw someone say you should not be eating back your exercise calories. FALSE. When you put in how much you want to lose per week, the number of calories you are given to eat is ALREADY a big deficit. If you don't eat back those calories, you are making the deficit even bigger to the point where your metabolism will stop functioning properly. Please, please, please, eat back your exercise calories. Obviously, this will be easier for you if you are exercising less, as I suggested. The main goal here is giving yourself enough energy that your body will lose weight efficiently, and that won't happen without enough calories going into you.

Day Three, already trying to figure out how to fail. true story.

I wrote out a long explanation of BMR and TDEE here, about 2/3 of the way down the page, and I also linked to the calculator to figure out your own BMR and TDEE in this thread as well.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/829833-calorie-intake-being-under-over-bad

and here is the calculator, to use once you read the post and understand what it is for:
http://scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/

I hope this helps.

ETA: I saw someone say you should not be eating back your exercise calories. FALSE. When you put in how much you want to lose per week, the number of calories you are given to eat is ALREADY a big deficit. If you don't eat back those calories, you are making the deficit even bigger to the point where your metabolism will stop functioning properly. Please, please, please, eat back your exercise calories. Obviously, this will be easier for you if you are exercising less, as I suggested. The main goal here is giving yourself enough energy that your body will lose weight efficiently, and that won't happen without enough calories going into you.

Can I just say again: thanks! I had no idea that eating less makes you less hungry. I was told that if you should only eat when you're hungry or you're just eating out of boredom! I think since September I have probably been eating less (with the exception of most of December when I was with my family) since that's when I moved out for the first time and I had to cook for myself for every meal. It certainly makes a lot of sense. I think now I know this, I will be able to get to 1200+ easier as it'll be a matter of getting my body back into a good habit rather than forcing it to do something it doesn't want to, if that makes any sense .

Since posting I've eaten a respectable lunch of 462 calories and I've realised I have a full loaf to eat within the next couple of days before it goes out of date so I'll probably have to take you up on those peanut butter sandwiches!

I've worked out what's 20% of my TDEE now so I'll manually put that into MFP (if I can work out how...)

Absolutely, you're welcome! It's kind of frustrating when so much misinformation gets thrown around everywhere, kind of feels like you are working uphill to get people to hear that it's just math, it's just science, you aren't a special snowflake; we've all been there. So it's super exciting when someone actually listens and gets it. You made my day! You're also really fortunate to find solid info after just a few days here, so congrats on being a sensible human being, haha!

The only thing I would clear up though, is that you should only subtract about 10-15% from your TDEE because 20% will result in the too-fast 2lb/week loss that we already covered. Otherwise, you're good! To manually adjust your MFP settings, go to "settings" at the top of the screen.

One other post that can help you from here, written by an excellent friend here:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/844040-raspberry-ketones-for-the-rest-of-us

Any other questions, feel free to message me

What would you eat the black beans and the lentils with, or would you eat them on their own? I'm not big on nuts so these could be easier for me to eat.

I like lentil soup and they also cook down and turn mushy if you cook them long enough. I use mushy ones as the base for a sauce and use it to make curries or anything with a slightly thicker sauce. I have black beans in all sorts of ways. I'll eat them by themselves with a little bit of the liquid they cooked in, tomatoes, and cilantro (feta cheese is good too and adds a little salt). I'll also have them with scrambled eggs (breakfast burritos are awesome, but even without the tortilla is good), in salads, there's all sorts of things you can do with them. I ate a ton of rice and beans as a grad student (although I didn't lose weight, so be careful of portions).

I love using allrecipies.com. You can search by food type or ingredients you want to use. Then, once you find one you like, you can use the recipe builder through MFP to determine how many calories per serving (and if you end up making it, just use the recipe to log).