Newbie confused about deficit / exercise deductions

Yes. If you're already down to 1200 calories before exercise, I would recommend eating enough of your exercise calories back that you go back up to at least 1200 calories. That being said, exercise calories are usually overestimated. And ut's not necessary to include exercise calories in your diary.

sollyn23l2 wrote: »

spiriteagle99 wrote: »

If you are aiming for 1200 calories and run an hour, burning 600 or so calories, if you didn't eat them back you would only end up with 600 calories to fuel your body. That can have really bad health consequences and would make it much more difficult to do any exercise the next day.

1200 is a minimum for women and isn't at all appropriate for a lot of people. It can also be very hard to sustain over the long term, especially when you are active. It is best to find a calorie level that will allow you to lose weight slowly but steadily, without leaving you starved and feeling deprived. When you eat too few calories, most people end up binging and undoing all the hard work that went before.

Almost nobody is going to burn 600 calories in an hour. The general rule is 100 calories per mile. If you're running 6 miles in an hour, that's great, but most people aren't.

I think it was being used as an example not as if they were burning 600. Just easy math.

You probably want to eat back some of the exercise calories, but not all as they are probably overestimated. A lot depends on the device you are using to measure calorie burn and the exercise you are doing - for example the most recent research I have come across suggests that a Fitbit will fairly accurately measure calorie burn from running, but overestimate it from walking.
I dropped my weight from 99 kg (218 pounds) down to about 65kg (143 pounds, which was probably a bit low; I am a 57 year old male, 172 cm - about 5foot 8 inches). In doing so I got really pretty fit and was doing heaps of cardio (and weights for a time). Fitbit told me I was averaging around 3,000 calories burned a day, so I put up my calorie intake to around 2,700 or 2,800 and ended up back at 76 kilos (168 pounds) - still much less than my original goal weight, but more than I wanted and with a bit of fat appearing. As well as Fitbit overestimating (a lot of my calorie burn was from walking), it seems that fairly rapid weight loss can also lower your general metabolism, so I was burning even less than suggested and also not eating clean enough.
So... I have gone back to eating 2,000 calories a day, doing a three-day-a week weights routine alongside a few hours of tennis, an hour or two of squash, a bit of cycling and still plenty of walking a day. My Fitbit-indicated calorie burn is still averaging over 3,000 a day. But I am feeling good and back down to just over 72 kilos (159 pounds). I plan on sticking with this until 70 kilos (154 pounds) and then gradually increasing my intake to a stable 2,300 (then monitoring it from there).
That's probably more info than you need - the TLDR version is "I reckon you should eat back half the exercise calories and see how that goes. Watch it for a few weeks and go up or down as needed".

1. 1200 calories a day (assuming that's at a deficit from your maintenance) might be totally appropriate for you....however, I do want to note that if you don't have much to lose, then shooting to lose 2lbs/week can be too much for many ppl. Math-wise, that's taking your maintenance calories (which MFP calculates based on your stats) and then subtracting 1,000 calories from that. If that number would go below 1200...MFP just defaults to 1200 calories.

But that could still be too few calories for you to have sustained success and it can also lead to you not eating enough -- many ppl report the experience of eating even less than 1200 and not being hungry enough to eat the remainder of their calories for the day. ***This may not be the case for you, but there are many times where users report their calorie goal is 1200 and it's definitely not appropriate for them.

But yes, what you've said and others have suggested is correct...MFP is set up so that you are supposed to eat your exercise calories back -- and mostly I suggest that people eat 50-100% of them back depending on how hungry you are and how your rate of weight loss goes over time. I, personally, ate back like 80-100% of my exercise calories and still lost weight consistently.

So, ideally you would figure out estimates of your maintenance calories/TDEE (theoretically, how many calories could you eat in a day and stay the same weight) and your BMR....and your daily calorie goal should be some number in between there -- more than your BMR but less than your maintenance/TDEE.