For your calories, go here http://www.fitnessfrog.com/calculators/tdee-calculator.html If you sit on your butt all day (sit at work, watch TV at home, eat microwave meals on paper plates) and will ONLY be doing stronglifts, I'd recommend using the "Lightly Active" and maybe subtracting a few cals. If you are slightly more active than that (like you cook and clean your house, do laundry, etc), somewhere between lightly and moderately (run both, take the average, based on where you think you fall pick a number). If you do all that and a fair bit of walking/standing besides throughout the day, moderately active. Beyond that, keep adding.

Hi! I am not a small-ish girl, but I noticed nobody had gotten around to replying yet.

I do have a few thoughts, however. Why do you think your BF is 30%? I don't know if that is actually possible at your height and weight.

I would recommend that you focus on maintaining or possibly gaining weight. You don't need to lose any more weight, but if you do have a slightly higher body fat percentage than you would like, the solution is to lift weights...which may mean that you would gain muscle, and therefore weight. I think you would probably benefit from getting to know your body at this weight, learning how many calories is maintenance for you, and focus on improving your fitness, rather than worrying about what the scale number says.

Have you been eating 1500 calories a day for a long time? Have you ever eaten less for an extended period of time? How active are you generally (do you sit for most of the day, walk everywhere you go, fidget a lot.) Do you do cardio right now, and do you intend to keep doing it while you do stronglifts? Also, you say you are either maintaining or slowly gaining...how long have you been tracking your weight? If you're not sure whether you're maintaining or gaining, then I'm guessing you've only seen small changes, in which case they could just be fluctuations.

There are some TDEE calculators you can use to help estimate what you should need to eat in order to maintain your weight. I think they're on the group stickies. I can get them for you in a minute, if you like. That would be a good place to start in figuring out what you should be eating.

Thanks for the detailed responses! I've been eating around this much for the last 2-3 months, and before that I was eating ~1300 calories in attempt to lose weight. I ditched the latter plan because I don't think I want to lose weight anymore. Before then, I ate nearly 2000 calories a day. For most of the day, I sit around. My only exercise is walking to and from class/to the dining hall (which are ~0.3 miles away, so really not much at all). Other than that, I lift every other day, and rarely (RARELY) do cardio.

I've been in this range of weight (103-108lbs) for the past month or so. I'm currently on my period, so I weigh 106 right now (bloating?); also, I haven't been very active throughout my life, so that is why I assume I probably don't have much lean body mass. I think that my tummy looks like that of someone with ~25% bf (looks flat to everyone, but no ab definition unless the room is somewhat dark... waist itself is really small) but I believe I have quite a bit of padding on my butt. ==> 30%? Not sure at all.

Tameko, I'm right now in college, which makes it a little cumbersome to keep EXACT measurements when I get food from the dining hall. Any suggestions? I tend to do guesstimates, but I'd like to think they're fairly accurate (perhaps with margin of error under +/-50 calories).

Jay, yep, I'll eat at that amount for about a month to see if I maintain with that many calories.

I also suspect you're right about my BF%; according to a few calculators online (which I understand aren't THAT accurate), it is 19%... somehow I doubt this is true, since people with that little BF have nice abs and all.