Weight loss not working

Here's the response from MFP:

We have designed a program to help with healthy and sustainable weight loss. We do not recommend trying to achieve more than a 2 pound a week weight loss, nor do we recommend that women consume fewer than 1200 calories per day, or men fewer than 1500 calories. For beginning users, we do recommend eating back your calories burned via exercise.

When you set up your profile, we ask you for your age, height, weight, gender, normal daily activity level and how much weight you would like to lose/gain per week. We then use all this information and calculate it against the scientific calculation to give you your daily recommended goals. These initial goals already include a deficit to lose weight, even if you did no additional exercise. If you do exercise, then your daily totals will go up to replenish what you have burned via exercise.

Your normal average daily burn is already taken into consideration when we set up your profile. However, we do not actually take into consideration any extra exercise you do outside your normal day, until you add them to your diary under the "cardiovascular" section.

We set your nutritional target in Net Calories which we define as:

Calories Consumed (Food) - Calories Burned (Exercise) = Net Calories

What that means is that if you exercise, you will be able to eat more for that day. For example, if your Net Calorie goal is 2000 calories, one way to meet that goal is to eat 2,500 calories of food, but then burn 500 calories through exercise. When your exercise calories increase, your other nutritional goals will also fluctuate to match.

Think of your Net Calories like a daily budget of calories to spend. You spend them by eating, and you earn more calories to eat by exercising. To help avoid setting your body into starvation mode, we do not recommend for any member to consume under 1200 net calories.

If you are following a guided plan from your doctor or nutritionist, we also allow an option for you to customize your own nutritional goals. You can set your own nutritional goals by following these instructions (https://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/12035-can-i-customize-my-nutritional-goals-).

Our program currently only calculates calories burned via our "cardiovascular" section. Estimating the calories burned from strength training is very difficult because it depends on a variety of factors: how much weight you lifted per repetition, how vigorously you performed that exercise, how much rest you took between sets, etc. Because of this, we do not automatically calculate how many calories you burned from strength training exercises.

Again, since our program does already account for the deficit and allows exercise to award more calories for the day, we would recommend trying the program as designed and see how it works for you. If you need to customize your goals beyond the options available in our standard program, please consider upgrading to MyFitnessPal Premium! http://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1935024