Please help

Nothing to do with a metabolic rate.

The equation you need to know is very simple; there's nothing complicated about it. Calories in must be less than calories out. MFP will tell you what your calorie intake needs to be.

And that's it.

As for feeling hungry, try eating more filling foods that are rich in protein. Keep your eye on your macronutrients to make sure this happens. If your calorie limit is 1200 than you are going to have to plan ahead.

Make some friends with people who are the same measurements as you, and go and stalk their diaries.

Edit to say: well done on giving up smoking. That's the best thing you could possibly have done for your health.

First off, hooray for stopping smoking!!!!

Secondly, I checked it out and MFP does say 1200 for someone your height & weight. If you are feeling tired/dizzy/etc. at this intake, increasing your protein is probably good advice and also try to eat at least 80% whole foods. After you've been tracking for week or so, check your "recents" tab for "all meals" in your diary. It will tell you the top 10 things you are eating and when I looked today, mine were not at that target, so it's something I'm going to be working on this week.

Good luck on your journey and feel free to add me as a friend if you like.

Unfortunately being short, female and older kind of dooms you to a low calorie budget unless you do some kick *kitten* workouts to burn extra calories to eat. I'm 5'2", 56 and 115 lbs and my BMR is 1194. It sucks! You have to make the best of your calorie intake to get food that keeps you feeling satiated yet provides the nutrition you need. You'll also find with time that you get more used to less food and don't feel as hungry. The first few weeks suck, I won't lie, but after that it does get easier.

Sorry to be a pain but the calories you get from exercise do you eat those, if so do you still manage to lose weight ? or is it better to just leave them in the hope you will lose more weight as the calories you have burned are a bonus to weight loss. Hope this make sense.

The generally accepted philosophy is that you eat back your exercise calories. However, the difficulty lies in accurately determining what those calories are. When you get a machine to tell you how many calories you burned or you look it up on a web site, those calories are merely estimates and they are based on the average of a lot of people. As a result, if you actually burned fewer calories than the average, but ate them all back then you may not lose weight. And therein lies the conundrum. As a result, my personal approach when I started was to eat back half the calories that I burned so that I could "experiment" and determine whether or not I was above or below average and what affect the exercise really did have.

So, my personal recommendation, and please feel free to completely ignore it, would be to eat back half the calories and see whether you are losing weight faster or slower than expected. And for those calories that you are eating back, make sure to pack in a lot of protein. It makes you feel full and it will be necessary for your muscles to continue to function and grow. (As we get older we tend to lose 1% of our muscle mass per year, so you need to bring in more protein to slow that loss or even turn it around.)

Sorry to be a pain but the calories you get from exercise do you eat those, if so do you still manage to lose weight ? or is it better to just leave them in the hope you will lose more weight as the calories you have burned are a bonus to weight loss. Hope this make sense.

I'm *super* active (training for a half marathon, strength training twice a week, yoga, walking/cycling everywhere) and frequently take off for 14 mile hikes. Yes, I'm trying to lose weight: but I absolutely need to eat back my calories or I don't have enough to fuel all the crazy **** I do.

I know this seems counter intuitive: but you do not want to lose weight too fast. You want to slowly make a lifestyle change that you can maintain for years after your initial weight loss, and functioning on too little calories will only trip you up.

Less than 5 feet tall? Yeah, 1200 isn't too low, not by a long shot. But that won't stop legions of tall, muscular young men from coming in here and making the sweeping statement that no one should ever eat 1200 or fewer calories a day. There is no one-size-fits-all axiom when it comes to calorie limits—it depends on your age, height, and current weight. I'm taller than you, and in my forties, and I've been doing 1200-1350 for two months. Not a single problem, and 13 pounds lost so far. :drinker: