Not Healthy

The problem is that there is no really hard-fast rules applicable to everyone. 1200 is their absolute lowest they will recommend, male or female. I'm a short guy (just under 5' 4"), so even though I'm a guy it recommends just under 1300 calories/day for me...I also have a pretty sedentary lifestyle (I set it at sedentary for MFP).

The calorie recommendation takes into account gender, height, weight, and activity level - if you think you should be eating more, perhaps you set it at sedentary and need to bump it up to one of the higher activity levels if you're more active on a daily basis.

You should note - the MFP program assumes you are going to eat ALL of your exercise calories, which will leave you with whatever deficit you picked when you setup your account. So, if you said you want to lose 2 lbs/week, then the 1200 calories it gave you a day included a 1,000 calorie deficit needed to lose the 2 pounds. Any exercise earns you additional calories which should be eaten to maintain that same 1,000 calorie deficit. Eating exercise calories is a big controversy on here - some do, some don't, some eat half, but the MFP program assume you will, which is why it adds any exercise calories burned to your calorie consumption goal for the day.

Perhaps there's been a slight misunderstanding about how this site works... This site does set some calories allotments to be only 1200 daily (but never less as they know it's dangerous below that limit). However, it does tell you to increase your intake if you exercise. Based on your second post, you exercised about 600 cals off a day. If you enter in that information into the site it will increase your target calories for the day to 1800. The calories this site starts you at each day are without any extra calorie burning thrown it.

Also, this isn't run by a company - just a regular guy who started it as a small web tool and has helped it grow to be much more powerful. Obviously there are likely to be mistakes on this site, but trained nutritionist's that I've spoken to say that limiting to 1200 a day is not dangerous if done properly.

I can't help but wonder what information you entered! I'm a very short woman (5'1") and it doesn't have me eating that little. Obviously you need to use some common sense here. This is a website that uses height, weight, and desire to lose information to run a simple mathematical calculation. I've played with changing info and I know that it is just a straight addition, subtraction kind of thing. The site is WONDERFUL for keeping track of what you do and for peer support, but it is a tool and it behooves each of us to know what is good for our bodies.

So here is a post that someone on this site (who is very knowledgable) posted about MFP's calorie goal calculator:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/103155-the-mfp-goals-wizard-and-you-yes-you?hl=dumb+calculator

Basically, MFP let's you create a calorie deficit at an unhealthy level if that is what you need according to your chosen pounds/week (only limited by a 1200-calorie floor). Basically, in order to ensure that you are getting a healthy number of calories per day you should:

1) correctly input you activity level (when considering you activity level - do not include exercise - that is taken into consideration later).

2) go to "tools" and then "bmr calculator" to calculate your basal metabolic rate. these are the calories that you should be eating at a minimum (again, exclusive of exercise). this may cause you to lose weight slower, but that is okay, because this is the healthy way.

3) eat your exercise calories!

Good luck!