New to this sight and loving it.

Hi Karri - I'm new here too. I ALSO was wondering about eating the calories that I burn working out (as you may have noticed from my recent post). One would think that we'd lose wt faster if we didn't eat those exercise cals, but, perhaps thats why MFP gives us such a low calorie limit. I was playing around with sparkpeople and mynetdiary and both of those sites gave me a much higher calorie limit. Just a thought...really I'm not sure. Hoping a long timer will come in and help us out.

HI! I'm new here too, as you know! I think the idea is that you put in your weight, how much you want to lose and how quickly you want to lose it. Then they calculate your daily calories. So to lose the amount of weight you want in the time frame you want to lose it you need to eat those calories which get modified based upon the amount of exercise you did that day. I'm guessing that is you don't eat those calories you'll be messing with your metabolism and instead of losing weight begin going into starvation mode and holding onto that weight. What I'm learning is that you need to eat the RIGHT foods with the RIGHT calories and add some moderate exercise to it every day. I ate a yogurt today that had higher calories but was good and good for me, it had 10grams of protein! That however put me at almost 500 calories for breakfast so I kinda panicked cause after lunch I think it came down to just under 500 calories left for my snack and dinner. I was worried I'd go over that so I exercised and now I can eat up to 800 calories for my snack and dinner! Whew! Making sense to you yet?? Hopefully if I'm wrong on this someone will correct me. Good for all of us taking this important step to gain our health and self confidence back. I don't know about you guys but it's been long and coming for me!