Eating less than daily calorie goal?

Listen to your body. If you're not hungry don't worry that you're not eating enough. But if restricting your caloric intake is putting you at risk of losing control (and binging), build more food into your plan.

Then a 1.5 lb weekly goal loss is reasonable for now.

When you get to 30 lbs left - 1 lb more reasonable.

Last 10-15 - 1/2 lb weekly.

That means the deficit in total is 750 cal.

Not 750 cal, and then purposely overestimate food eaten, and purposely underestimate workouts done for correctly eating the calories back - making it closer to 1000.

And I'd suggest don't listen to your body - it speaks a foreign language, and unless you know it, you won't understand correctly what it's saying.
Following that idea is frankly why so many are here to lose weight.

Get some knowledge, and then use your brain.
For instance - many workouts can leave you not hungry, or very thirsty and drinking the water hides the hunger.
But make no mistake - body needs the extra calories to aid in a good recovery - if you want a good workout tomorrow too. Skip eating when it really needs something, hunger or not, and it'll usually just make you more tired.

Several have mentioned the fact that if you consistently undereat too much (without enough protein and resistance training, almost any diet actually) you will lose some muscle mass - that will suck big time later, sometimes sooner too.

That calorie goal sounds reasonable, unless it's because you selected a high activity level thinking it meant with exercise included - it doesn't.

Good goals though and thinking, knowing it may not be right to leave too much on the table.

DanielleGrubaugh2014 wrote: »

The 400 calories was added by MFP which knows my wt, I did however think that was a bit much for 30min of cardio. I use resistance 9 and incline 3 and I go at a moderate pace.. nothing real crazy but not slow either. I do understand its prob just an estimate because like u said, warm up and cool down takes away a little from the 30 min. I guess I will have to see how much I lose at the end of this wk.. if I lose more than 2lbs then I may need to make some changes so I'm not losing too fast. I would be happy to lose 1.5-2lbs a wk steadily.

As a woman, your BMR literally changes through the month, so 1 week isn't enough time to discern anything.
And it won't be steady loss either for that reason.

The Elliptical database entry is equal to walking 5.25 mph flat, or jogging 4.9 mph flat. (fast walk or slow jog)
That's for comparison.

If it felt that hard the entire time - then that's correct.

If you had slower for 5 min start and end - only log 20 min.

What activity level did you pick on MFP?
If you have a kid and normal household chores, shoot, even without a kid - Lightly Active is appropriate.
If desk job, and outside of exercise truly a bump on a log all night and weekends - then Sedentary would be. Most select that, but they really aren't. Increases the deficit.

I've only seen this factor mentioned in passing: it really depends on your logging accuracy. Many people think they are under their calorie allowance, but are not weighing their food, choosing accurate database entries, or like has been touched on, logging inflated calorie burns. It's why we see so many "why am I not losing weight on 1200 calories?" posts. Now, I'm not being critical or judgmental here- logging is just a skill that takes education & practice like any other. You may want to check out the stickied posts at the top of the Getting Started & General Diet & Weight Loss sections if you haven't already. The only *true* indicator of our accuracy is results- do they match our chosen weekly weight loss goal? But if you've just started, those will be skewed for a few weeks with water weight loss. So do your best to be accurate, and after 4-6 weeks see if your results correspond to your goals. If not, make adjustments.