wt loss has stalled

It's possible you're eating too little. Do you eat 1200 net, or 1200 total? If you don't fuel yourself through your workouts, your body will rebel and hold on to all that weight!

You might also want to consider upping your calories - a lot of people here who stalled out at 1200 bumped up to1300 or 1400 and started losing weight again.

When you start your diet at the bottom, you have no room to move when you need to drop calories. It works at first, but stalling at nearly a thousand calories, that is not good. I agree, reintroduce more calories and maybe more cardio, or whatever you're doing.

No study has ever found a point at which reducing consumption did not increase the deficit. Increasing the deficit causes more weight loss. There are numerous posts and anecdotes claiming this has happened and it has - to rare individuals with a medical cause. Again - no study has EVER found it to be true that adding calories will increase rate of loss for people in general.

"Net" is when you take the estimate of how many calories you burned and subtract it from the estimated number of calories you consumed. One line of thinking is that this rough estimate is what you should be trying to adjust by eating and/or working out to hit the number of calories for the day as your diet goal. It does work for a lot of people, but it is not the only way and the other methods are not doomed to failure.

1200 calories is the minimum amount recommended by dietitians because it is not difficult to get the proper mix of nutrients in a carefully constructed diet at that level. It has nothing to do with "net" calories. What you burn in day minus what you eat is your deficit. Your body fat can provide 31.4 calories per pound per day toward the deficit. Take your weight and your BF% to compute how much you have, multiply by 31.4 and you will get the maximum deficit your fat stores can support. After that it will come from lean body mass and you don't want that. Some will come from LBM even before that, but that can't be helped.

Some people refer to diets at or below 1200 as Very Low Calorie, VLC or VLCD. That is not correct. Dietitians use numbers in the 500-700 range as VLCD and they do sometimes recommend that for short periods for the very obese, but not without medical supervision.

Anyway, whatever is easiest for you to understand and implement to make sure you get a reasonable deficit will cause you to lose weight.

This piqued my interest. When I put in a goal of just over a pound of weight loss a week, MFP puts me at 1200 calories. Since that is really a small amount of food, I have a hard time sticking with it.. and when I do stick to it, I hardly have the energy to work out. SO I am not losing- just maintaining. I believe once you get to a certain weight (140 for me), MFP decides that you are done.

MFP suggests 1200 net calories, assuming one will be eating back excercise calories. Otherwise, you can opt to go with the TDEE and eat at a 20% deficit, and not log your excercise calories. It usually ends up being around the same.