I've been thinking about this group a lot and I want to help those new to this school of thought. There are some basic practices you should put in place before trying to increase the amount of calories you're eating. I'd argue that you should use them no matter what fitness or diet program you're on. My hope is that you have a positive experience and you apply the right strategy for yourself. I made a blog post about it that I'm going to copy/paste here...

"You are a health and fitness scientist"

I'm still relatively new to weight loss and good diet technique. From what I have seen, there are many schools of thought, lots of unfounded information, "conventional" wisdom and other assorted wild notions about how to lose weight. A lot of this information can help you, some of it may not but then even the helpful information may hurt you if you apply it wrong. What you need are tools to protect you and to teach you how to navigate this sea of information.

As a health and fitness scientist, facts are your weapons and you need to arm yourself. Record everything about yourself that you can. Since you're on MFP, the very least you are doing is recording your food. Record your exercise. Record your weight every day of the week in the morning (when you will see the least weight fluctuation). Calculate your TDEE and generate a diet goal based on it. Record your water consumption. Record your measurements once a week (chest, waist, etc.). If you have access to the tools, measure your body fat as well.

Now that you have this information, you are ready to experiment. You are going to test theories and use the facts as you collect them to either prove or disprove these theories. For an example, here is a new theory I may test:

"By eating 200 calories more a day, I am encouraging my metabolism to speed up so that I may have a leaner body mass."

Decide how long you will comfortably like to test this theory. One week or maybe two? You can decide for yourself but I would recommend going over at least a week since your body typically takes a bit of time to adapt to changes.

As your experiment runs, you are collecting information and you are analyzing the results and drawing conclusions. Has the extra 200 calories promoted weight loss? The scale says no but your old jeans or measurements says yes. See how the facts are there to support you? This is why you can't just do this off the cuff. If you were only monitoring your weight, you may run away scared without realizing that you were indeed burning fat, growing muscle and becoming more lean. Those are the very things the majority of us strive for!

On the flip side, you may find your experiment is going wrong. Your weight is up and so are your measurements, you are lethargic, unhappy, hungry, miserable and so on. You take the facts as you have them and either retreat to a theory that has worked before or you create a new one based on what you've learned in this latest experiment. You could adjust your calorie intake to only increase by 100 instead of 200. You could keep the same calorie intake but shift more of your nutrients to protein and carbs and away from fat.

The idea is that you have learned something from each experiment and you have reacted to it based on the facts. Your body is unique and it will not work the same as any other. How much you eat, how much you exercise, how much fat, protein or carbs, they're all your own. Don't be afraid that you aren't following someone else's meal or exercise plan to a T. You can't trust anyone to tell you the right answer to lose weight and look good. Follow advice where you think it will help, beware of weight loss fads and back up your judgements with facts (your own or collected from reputable sources).