My calorie goal?!

seska422 wrote: »

1200 is the minimum given to women. At 126 pounds, you won't be able to create a large deficit. How many pounds per week did you tell MFP you wanted to lose? If you haven't already, try inputting that you want to lose 0.5 pounds per week.

seska422 wrote: »

MFP is set up so that you eat back your exercise calories. Those are generally overestimated so many users eat back 25-75% of their estimated exercise calories.

A good calorie goal is one where you have enough energy to fuel your workouts yet have a calorie deficit so that you lose weight.

Honestly, my suggestion is that you log everything you consume, keep track of your exercise, and experiment to find a calorie goal that works for you. Calculators are all estimates and just a starting point. You can best determine things for yourself through trial and error over a period of months.

WendyLaubach wrote: »

"Deficit" means you're eating a certain number of daily calories less than you need to maintain your weight right where it is, taking into account all your activity. A pound of weight loss is generally considered to result from a cumulative deficit of 3,500 calories, so if you had a 350-calorie deficit every day for a week, you'd (roughly) expect to lose about a pound on the bathroom scale. The smaller you are, and the closer you are to your goal weight, the more slowly you can expect to accumulate a 3,500-calorie deficit safely. You've already seen that a 2-lb.-a-week loss goal puts you at 1,200 calories a day, the minimum this site's program will approve of. A 0.5-lb.-a-week goal shoots you up to 1,800, which is more than you're used to eating, so you might as well ignore that one. Choose 1,200, or something in between, see what happens.

Remember that the program is trying to accommodate 400-lb. young 6'0" men as well as 100-lb. 5'0" middle-aged women, while making the site's lawyers happy by never seeming to recommend anything that could be unsafe for anyone, so it's not getting its pencil very sharp making these calculations for you. I echo the advice above to try logging for a while at a level that doesn't leave you feeling all wasted, see what loss rate you get, and adjust from there. At your size, you probably can't expect to lose very fast, not while being kind to your health. Those 2-lb.-a-month figures are for people in a completely different physical condition from yours. You have a much smaller problem to tackle than a lot of us here! That's good news for you.