How many calories???

1200 is what you should eat if you DON'T exercise... If you burn 400 calories from exercise then you need to add that to your base caloric intake and therefore should eat 1600. If you burn 100 you should eat 1300, etc. So the total calories you eat minus the calories you burn SHOULD NEVER go below 1200!

Simply input your information into MFP and eat what it suggests for your lifestyle, age and height. Eat back most or all of your exercise cals. This is what most people on this site do who are very successful..or at least that is always what I read in the success board anyways.

i am 27

I would think based on your BMR and exercise rate that if you ate 1500 calories a day, you'd lose a solid pound a week.

Probably more if you count water weight.

When my fitness pal asks you the opening questions, its trying to estimate the normal number of calories that you burn in a day without doing anything special. Then you plug in how much weight that you would like to lose in a week and it does simple subtraction. So for example... I chose the option of 1 pounds per week. That comes to 3500 calories... So My Fitness Pal chose a number of calories that it thinks I use up and then subtracted 500 calories per day.. Its assigned me 1740 calories, so it thinks I burn around 2240 calories per day... So even doing nothing but eat what it tells me to should cause me to lose some weight..

If I perform more exercise that the guessed norm my body is going to require more calories to make it go.. So lets assume I burn 600 calories a day working out... Now I'm eating 1740 calories, but burning 2840 calories per day.... This seems awfully nice! I should start losing some serious weight! But hold...There could be a problem..

When your body is doing activities it first uses up glycogen stores which are like small fuel tanks.. Once it has used up that tank it can either burn fat or muscle. Muscle is the richer source of energy and once the body uses it up it doesn't have to spend time and calories maintaining it.. So if you place demands on your body that are too stressful for the calorie intake, or starve yourself too much, your body is going to start eating its own muscle. You will initially lose weight, but because muscles burn more calories, your body's daily usage of calories will shrink. In the end, eating too little just damages your whole system.

I'm a personal believer that the cleaner and more nutrition conscious you eat, the less you need to eat your workout calories...The body just needs to get the proper components to feed and rebuild itself. You still however need to put more nutrition into your body if you are going to make your body do more work. If you are performing a legitimate workout, I wouldn't dream of doing it on 1200 calories a day..

So what to do ? Eat based on how you feel. If you are going into the gym and getting stronger, or walking on the road and feeling stronger, you're probably ok. If you're doing these things and your energy reserves aren't growing or your strength isn't growing... You need to add in a few more calories. You need to be building some muscle.

Far too many people don't have a fat problem. What they really have is a lack of muscle problem. And that turns into a metabolism problem, and then a weight problem. and instead of dealing with the root cause which is lack of muscle... they choose to starve their bodies... making the muscle problem worse...

Definitely log your exercise into MFP and it will re-calculate how many calories you get to eat, that way you'll know for sure. I don't always eat all of my exercise calories, but I've never not lost for a week so I must be doing OK. Good luck to you!