My Progress and requesting Constructive Criticism

Thanks everyone who has replied so far, lots of good advice.

Eating more will not help you lose more. With the numbers you're saying, you should be losing around .7 pounds per week. That means in the past 51 days you should have lost 5.1 pounds. You have actually lost 8.3 pounds. I'd say that's pretty good! You've made a larger caloric deficit than you've recorded, so you must be getting more exercise than you realize! Keep up the good work.

From that angle yes I guess I have been doing well losing about 1.14 lbs per week for the last 51 days.

As for the food scale idea that many of you mentioned, great idea and it is now one of my next steps I will take. However, I log absolutely everything (I only drink water / water+mio, or diet tea / diet soft drinks, with the occasion beer / wine but I always log everything that has any calories no matter how few). Additionally, I don't have lots of time for cooking, and since I live with 2 other people, we tend to eat out a lot together, so I get my carefully measured portions still in this way and don't have to do my own thing every time it's time to eat, which is quite important to me.

One of the questions I find has a lot of conflicting information on is, does my caloric intake or my net calories matter more for maintaining a healthy caloric intake and avoiding "starvation mode" or anything that would otherwise lower my metabolism sabotaging my efforts and causing lean muscle catabolism (and no disrespect intended, but I think there is enough convincing scientific evidence that starvation mode is very real, just not applicable for missing 1-2 days caloric intake, but low calorie diets that continue beyond 2 days can result in your body entering starvation mode and resulting in very real and negative side effects).

To give an example of where I am confused, say I eat 1200 calories daily to avoid losing lean muscle mass and bone density, but then do 4 hours of walking 35 mph (4 hours of walking at this pace is no where near unreasonable for me, which is why I chose it as an example), and considering my height age and weight I should be burning around 1876 calories from this daily exercise, with 2215 BMR rest calories burned, daily I would have a deficit of 2891 calories, and weekly I would lose 5.8 lbs, right? But this is the type of weight loss that is unhealthy, or at least from a good deal of sources it's advised against right?

I'm assuming then that this is advised against is that at that high of a deficit you would enter into starvation mode and lean muscle catabolism?

So net calories are really what matter more for staying healthy, and you want to ideally keep net calories above 1200 as I understand it, right? I am beginning to run into this area where as I want to start working out harder and more, my net calories are getting lower and I'm wondering where I should have them ideally to stave off ill-effects, while still burning as much fat as possible.