Calorie deficit vs. nutrients

Will a calorie deficit alone make me lose weight, or should I be more worried about the nutrients? Today I was under on my calorie intake, but I exceeded the recommended fat and sugar recommendations. Will this have a negative effect on my weight loss?

Also, should I be eating back all of the calories I burned off? MFP is recommending i eat 1,390 calories a day plus what I burn off running. This seems to be pretty high.

Thank!

The only thing that affects weight loss is calories in calories out. What affects your general health is both your body composition (how fat or lean you are) AND the nutrients you take in.

For the purpose of fat loss having a lot of "X" but still coming under on your calories won't affect your weight loss at all. If you ate a fully balanced diet of 1500 calories one day then the next day ate nothing but 1500 calories of cheese both days are equal in terms of fat loss. That said if you lived off nothing but cheese you would run into nutritional and health issues.

In my opinion having a healthy nutritious balanced diet that is higher in protein is a good way to eat at a calorie deficit AND feel satisfied but all that matters for weight loss is calorie deficit.

Thank you so much for the responses! I was weight lifting 5-6 days a week until about two weeks ago (I am getting married in 2 months, tried on my dress and it barely fit because my back had become more muscular) so now I'm just running until after the wedding. I will definitely keep a calorie deficit, then also try and eat well-balanced.

When you lift your muscle tends to replenish with more glycogen. With the glycogen comes a lot of water. The effect of this is your muscles swell almost like a water balloon. They become firm with the water pressure, they feel much harder and they look much larger. Give it a week of not working out and drink plenty of water and that will go down. Its not that you have developed tons of muscle most likely its just water weight in your muscle due to the weight lifting. Honestly it takes years of training to pack on significant amounts of actual muscle tissue.

If you stop lifting you might also find that you drop a few pounds pretty quickly. This again is due to losing that added water weight.