Anyone gotten a physical to figure it out????

I'm 5'5" and my happy weight is 150lbs; my advice is not to follow MFP's guide on your calories and use a TDEE calculator online.

I went out and manually calculated my TDEE based on several different theoretical bases a few years ago and finally, by keeping meticulous track on my own spreadsheets (tracking every bite that goes in my mouth and every second I am out exercising etc.), figured out that my TDEE (that is, how many calories I burn in my daily life), without adding any adjustments for exercise, is about 1458, which is totally wacked from MFP's guesstimate for me.

Additionally, if you are exercising right from the start, wait a few weeks before expecting to see weight loss. We little people with generous figures can retain a LOT of water while our muscles build.

Absolutely weigh your food. You'll be surprised at the number of calories you are actually eating. Also, do stupid exercises: Walk in place while waiting for a doctor appointment, play Cupid Shuffle on youtube, lift weights and do jump rope exercises while watching television! It's amazing how much difference this will make.

Okay - well, about 3 years ago, I guess, I started reading up and found out that we all have a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). Your BMR is what your body would burn if you lay in bed all day. Your TDEE is what you burn when you go about your daily activities. In general, your TDEE is anywhere from 1.1 to 2 times your BMR, depending upon how active you are.

Your BMR is the number of calories your body burns when you are completely at rest. (Here is the best explanation I've got bookmarked. I love Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate.) Your TDEE is your BMR times your activity level.

Okay, so that's all well and good, but there are about 5 or 6 different ways to calculate your BMR and they all vary. Additionally, although you wouldn't know it from some advice I see, we know that your metabolism can slow down ever so slightly (a very, very small amount) as you settle into a diet. (Totally not enough to make you stop losing though!)

So I set up a spreadsheet with some of the various BMR calculations and then started tracking every single bite that went into my mouth every day after I was in a good place, doing around the same exercise on the same basis.

I eventually found one BMR calculation that worked for me (I could not even tell you which one it was! I will look and see if I have that in my notes somewhere.) and then, if I set my TDEE at 1.1 (I am exceedingly sedentary in my current job) and accounted for my calories burned as best I could - MFP's calories come closer for me than FitBit's, go figure - plus my calories eaten (if I chew a stick of gum, I log it!), I could come pretty close to knowing how much weight I would lose. Of course, every time I lose a pound, I adjust my weight. And every few weeks, I measure my body fat %. I plugged that into the calculation on my spreadsheet, so everything auto adjusts.

Now, there are obviously short-term variables to take into account in this. For example, monthly visits from Cousin George. But longer term, it works for me!