Am I Looking at This Correctly?

You want the circled number to be zero or a small number, but not negative. Your deficit is already built into your calorie goal as @TavistockToad said. On MFP, you want to consistently get close to your calorie goal without going over.

If I was only eating back 50% I would probably go in and alter the cals given for a particular workout so my reading would reflect what I was eating.
I would also make a note in the note section of the change I had made for future reference.

You could also make your own exercise ie: running 50%, and use that instead of the original.

Cheers, h.

Remember that the only reason for the “only eat half” advice is to offset potentially inflated calorie burn numbers. For some exercises, we can calculate calorie burn pretty accurately, and in those cases you would eat all the exercise calories. So whether or not this applies to OP’s situation depends on whether they are doing any exercise and, if they’re exercising, how they are calculating calories burned.

OP, just to tell you the same thing as others have but in slightly different terms:

Your (estimated) deficit is the difference in calories between the goal MFP gives you if you set your profile to "maintain weight" vs. the calories it gives you if you set your profile to "lose X lbs/kg per week". Your deficit is already built into the goal calories MFP gives you if you set your profile up to lose weight. Track accurately, eat all of your goal calories, and you can expect to lose at the rate you put in your profile (plus or minus any variation from the fact that MFP can only estimate, not "know" ).

Stick with that for 4-6 weeks (full menstrual cycle plus a bit), also eating back a reasonable portion of your exercise calories, compare your average weekly loss with your target, then adjust calories as needed to maintain a sensibly healthy weight loss rate.

The number you circled is how much you're undereating compared to your target weight loss rate, which is not a good plan. Undereating makes it hard to stick with the process long enough to be effective, and can make us weak/fatigued, resulting in a lethargic daily life (more resting, less moving), and lower than expected weight loss from that reduced daily-life movement.

By eating 1,327 calories fewer than reccommended, you could expect to lose about 1/3 pound more a week than your goal weight loss rate. If your target rate is already aggressive, that's taking a health risk, and a sustainability risk.

To add to the above, when I look at this I typically go back a day. It looks to me like you haven't finished Thursday yet, so it's not really a full week. At the same time, it could just be telling you what you have left for dinner.

Kathryn247 wrote: »

Any suggestions on how to account for only eating back half of your exercise calories in the weekly approach? If MFP gave her 2654 exercise calories over the week, and she is trying to only eat half of those back, wouldn't this be an appropriate calorie intake?
Not trying to derail the thread, it's just that my totals always come in significantly under the recommended amount if I only eat back half of my exercise calories.

I have an extra meal in my diary which I have as my 50% calorie adjustment when I have been playing around with exercise tracking methods and log 50% at end of day as a Quick Add.

So if I logged per MFP or my Garmin 300 calories of Running and 130 Calories of Weights I'd quick add 215 cals to that "Meal"

That’s the weekly figure you are looking for. As other posters have said, if you’ve already set your goal in MFP to lose weight then you should aim for your weekly deficit in that chart to be zero because your daily/weekly target will already take the correct deficit into account depending on your goal.

I actually have my goal set to maintenance, even though I am trying to lose a few pre-holiday vanity pounds. So my deficit figures actually do show true ‘deficit’ and I am looking for that figure to be 1,750 under each week to lose 0.5lbs. Everyone is different so as long as you are doing the maths correctly you’re all good!