Is this accurate.?

Calculated calories here is based on gender, weight, activity level, and weight change goal. A calorie deficit of 500 per week will drop your weight by one pound per week. You can eat whatever you want and it will be as accurate as the calories you attribute to it. Highest accuracy is achieved by entering the weighing the food in grams and using the calories per gram on the package which you can probably find in the database. When cooking a dish (indian or otherwise) add the calories each ingredient adds to the dish then divide into equal portions or weigh the total in grams calculate calories per gram of the dish. You can save the recipe with its calories to make it easier next time you make it, so long as you measure ingredients the same.

The magic of this place works! It feels a little tedious at first, then you figure out short cuts and habits form. If you stick with it and start seeing the weight change, you become compulsively aware of what is coming in and out of your body. Knowledge is power! Results are rewarding! Welcome to the club!!

There is no such thing as a government declaration that a male must have 2500 calories. If there was, it'd probably be best ignored, since government is where gems like this came from:



Anyway, calorie requirements are based on gender, height, weight and activity level. There's no one size fits all, like "2500 calories". A sedentary 25 year old 5'5" 150 lb male has a different calorie requirement than an active 5'11" 220 lb male (1911 vs 3143 calories).

Suggest you go to tdeecalculator.net and try out some numbers - it'll be enlightening. That site uses credible, well researched formulas for calorie expenditure.

PS The 1990 you're getting from MFP is likely what it's telling you to eat to lose weight. By definition, it's going to be a lower number than what you need to eat to maintain your weight. If you told it you wanted to lose 1 lb per week, it already knocked 500 calories off what it assumed was a break-even caloric level of 2490.

(math: 1 lb of fat = 3500 calories, 7 days in a week, so 500 calorie "deficit" per day to lose 1 lb per week).

I'll hit on the Indian food thing.

Logging food is about knowing what's in the food. If you didn't make it yourself, it's just going to be a wild guess so the accuracy is something you'll have to play around with. I don't eat meals at restaurants very often but when I do I just try to guess. If you eat the same things on a regular basis you can do that and see how it goes. If your weight doesn't do what you expect, you have to adjust somewhere. It's a big ole science experiment you are running on yourself. We all have to do the same thing.