Do you count and link your Fitbit calories to mfp?

You should add exercise calories as MFP is designed this way while other calorie counters have already exercise calories build into their deficit. Thus your chosen loss rate per week and the calories your given are for if you were not exercising. If you exercise those extra calories get added to your food calories so you can eat more and still get the same rate of loss.

Losing weight too quickly is bad. Eating the bare minimum like you do, and not eating exercise calories back is super bad. If you really burned 300 calories on a run then that would be the same as only eating 900 calories. Super super bad idea and a fast road to binging, losing muscles and possibly hair, looking unhealthy. Eat enough!

Thanks that you asked though

How many calories total does your fitbit say you are using? (Not just the exercise, the whole day.)

Then: how much weight do you need to lose to be in a health BMI range?

How tall are you?

I'm asking because 1200 is really really low already - you may have even your basic calories set too low. And definitely eat more on exercise days.

Here, the official explanation of the method Myfitnesspal used to calculate your calories: https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals-

Littleloz34 wrote: »

How many calories total does your fitbit say you are using? (Not just the exercise, the whole day.)

Where do you find this info ?

I'm going to let someone with a current fitbit answer that. I never used a device when I lost my weight.

I was just trying to get more info for someone who does use a fitbit. There are settings and numbers specific to a fitbit with which I'm not that familiar. There is also a huge fitbit Group with all kinds of info in "Groups" - there's like 156,000 members...
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/1290-fitbit-users

yirara wrote: »

One thing to keep in mind is that devices just guess and can be very off. a good idea is to only eat back a part of those.
This calorie calculator for running or walking isn't too bad: https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
Chose duration and speed from your fitbit, and use net calories.

why net? Exercise calories are made up of the calories your body would burn if you did nothing. Your body needs energy to run your organs, your brain, basically to keep you alive. And calories for doing the exercise. The being alive calories are already part of the calories that MFP gives you. The exercise calories not. The net calories are those exercise calories without the staying alive calories. So that's why you want to use this option on the website.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when we're talking about fitness trackers, we're talking about very personalized estimates. They're still estimates, obviously, but my educated guess would be that most good brand/model trackers are less likely to over-estimate than the MFP database.

Also, I know from personal experience that a tracker can also have potential to underestimate calorie needs significantly. I also know that too-fast loss is a bad plan, because I did that by accident and had consequences.

Too-fast loss is probably worse than too-slow loss if a person isn't so severely obese that the obesity itself is a significant health risk. OP is 130 pounds 59 kg), aiming for 124 (56) to be the top of the normal BMI range. That's not severely obese.

She's not sedentary, though; but at her size 1300 may still not be a super-punitive big deficit.

OP: My best advice would be to synch your Fitbit to MFP, enable negative adjustments, and follow the resulting calorie goal for one full menstrual cycle, so you can compare weight loss rate at the same relative point in at least two different cycles.

You can probably afford to lose up to 1 pound a week if your life otherwise isn't very stressful, but 0.5 pound would maybe be a better way to lose while keeping appearance good (i.e., avoid things like hair thinning), health risk in a reasonable range, energy level up.