My goals:

• Lose weight
• Stay in deficit and lose weight
• Really, just stay in deficit and lose any amount of weight
• Should probably exercise more too

I have decided to try a new approach this month. I'll see how it works and readjust if needed. My biggest problem lately is staying in any deficit much less within my calorie goal. I have also been really bad for the last couple years of getting into a habit of regular intentional exercise.

I have always had my activity level set to sedentary. I know I am naturally a very sedentary person at home and on the weekends, and I now work an almost exclusively desk job. But I also know that the calorie goal MFP sets is a little low for me and I will lose more weight than projected when I actually stay within goal even if I have one day a week of eating at maintenance.

So, this month I changed my activity setting to lightly active. Instead of trying to make myself exercise X times per week, right now I will focus on getting a minimum of 5000 steps per day to "earn" that lightly active designation. I previously had my calorie goal manually set to lose 0.75lb/week, but changed it to 1lb/week when I changed my activity level. This still gave me an extra 120 calories per day within goal. At this time, I'm assuming a maintenance range of 2010-2230. I made the change last Monday and have so far stayed in a deficit every day, even the two days I didn't hit my step goal.