BMR and Exercise - how many calories do I need to eat?!

Find your maintenance, with all of your variables plugged in ( HEIGHT, WEIGHT, ACTIVITY LEVEL) then subtract 500.

Easy as that. You'll lose a lb. a week if you stick to it.

And don't let anyone tell you ( EAT ONLY CARROTS, CHICKEN, BROCCOLI)

Eat what you want, but not trash all day long. All that matters for weight loss is calories in vs. out.

So I'm at a BMR of 1925. Male with a bunch of belly fat to lose)
I ususally hit just at or below 1200 cal per day.
I do light exercise 3X week (easly leve lelliptical for 45 min) I do not eat back my exercise cals. But I am a bit worn out after and sleep well those nights.
I'm on month 3 of doing this.

I am losing a fair amount, but I am afraid of "starvation mode." Overall I feel pretty good right now, but feel like I flirting with disaster.

Should I just keep going or back off to avoid starvation mode?

The short answer is you should probably eat more calories/day, even though it will slow down your weight loss.

The longer answer is the more body fat you're carrying around, the more you can get by with eating a heavy caloric deficit. At some point though, your body will not be able to pull all the calories it needs from your fat stores, and that's when you can run into a problem. Think of it this way - your body can only pull a certain amount of calories per pound of fat per day (let's say 31kcal/lb/day on average). If you're running a 1000 calorie deficit/day and carrying, say, 50 pounds of fat, your body can very likely make up that deficit from its fat stores. On the other hand, if you're running a 1000 calorie deficit/day with only 25 pounds of fat, your body likely cannot pull those 1000 calories it needs from your fat stores - and that's a bad thing, because now your body is looking for other places like your LBM to get those calories. Adding to that, there's not really a good way for you to know when you will cross over this threshold, as you would need to know how many calories YOUR body can pull from its fat stores, exactly how much fat you have on your body, what your true caloric deficit is, and so on. Going a bit further, it's difficult to get sufficient nutrients when eating such a pittance. And if you want another reason, you are likely to see some metabolic slowdown when eating at such a high deficit for a lengthy period of time, meaning you're getting diminishing returns for your effort. Adding all of that up, I would not recommend eating so little, as it's almost certainly not worth it in the long run simply to lose weight more quickly.

I would avoid buzz words like "starvation mode" as that means different things to different people and generally just starts arguments over semantics.

So I'm at a BMR of 1925. Male with a bunch of belly fat to lose
I ususally hit just at or below 1200 cal per day.
I do light exercise 3X week (easy level elliptical for 45 min) I do not eat back my exercise cals. But I am a bit worn out after and sleep well those nights.
I'm on month 3 of doing this.

I am losing a fair amount, but I am afraid of "starvation mode." Overall I feel pretty good right now, but feel like I'm flirting with disaster.

Should I just keep going or back off to avoid starvation mode?

Those calories seem borderline starvation mode to me.

At at 1925 BMR, with a 3x times a week activity level (MFP multiples that by 1.375) you would get 2600 about calories to maintain. Minus 500 off of that to lose a lb a week and you get 2100.

Re-plug in all your NEW info into MFP and double check your new calories, etc.