Calories questions and intro <3

Hello!

The calorie goal MFP gives you already includes the deficit you need to lose weight, so you should eat to MEET that goal every day. If you exercise, you should also eat at least some of those burned calories back.

Hi Anailys!

I'm not sure how many calories you're eating a day, but if your set calorie amount is 1200 a day, you should definitely not eat below the 1200 calories. I've read that eating below 1200 calories a day puts your body into starvation mode which slows your metabolism way down. Obviously the opposite effect of what you want to happen... In fact, the MFP app even tells you that you're eating too few calories if you don't eat at least 1200 calories. For right now I've been eating all my exercise calories back. I figure I'll eat less of them back if I get to a plateau point. Hope that helps!

It's a bad idea to eat too few calories on a regular basis, but it will not throw you into "starvation mode". That's a myth. If you do eat at a large deficit for a prolonged period of time, your metabolism will try and close the gap and will slow down, but this takes a matter of weeks and months, of eating at very low calories, not days, so low calories for a day or two will not do anything.

I'd suggest you consider trying the TDEE method OP. It factors in your bodyweight and composition as well as your activity level to give you your entire calorie expenditure for the day, so you can just take a 15% or 20% deficit from that. That's what I use and it offers steady fat loss