Asked my Trainer re eating back calories

Not sure why everyone is so impressed with the trainer's reply, especially since the trainer believes in "starvation mode" which simply DOES NOT exist. Let me say it again - it does not exist - unless you are at a Nazi Concentration Camp and have been ritually denied basic sustenance for months and months on end. Even Weight Watchers acknowledges it doesn't exist.

That being said, "eating back" you calories does not have to be an all or nothing proposition. I work out 7 days a week and 5 of those days I work out twice. What I know is that I - along with 95% of other people - grossly underestimate their calorie intake and grossly overestimate their exercise calories. Which means that MOST people will gain if they try to exactly eat back their calories. For example, does everyone wear a heart rate monitor? I do, and when I ran 5 miles Thursday MFP told me I burned 592 calories. My HRM told me I burned 375 - quite a difference. If I was eating back what MFP told me, I would be consuming at least 200 more calories that day.

There is a simple middle ground. MFP wants me to eat 1200 per day, even with "active lifestyle" checked. I changed it to 1400, and I am to eat 1400-1600 per day, every day, no matter what exercise I do. This is what works for me. You may have to experiment with what works for you. 199 pounds gone forever for me so far.

P.S. Google "starvation mode myth" and "muscle burns more per day then fat myth" and you will find hundreds of pages - with dozens of studies showing why this is not true.

This was helpful but she didn't mention basal and resting metabolic rates which are what change when we eat too little. When we eat too little, our bodies reset the BMR to a lower leveel and all else remaining the same, it stays lower even when the famine is over and we eat "normally" and weight gain ensues. The only way to bring it back up is through exercise, decreasing body fat and increasing muscle mass. There was an article about a month ago in the NYTimes about how even with thosse chages, most formerly overwight and obese people will always need to consume fewer calories than an equal weight/age/gender/body fat person who has never had weight issues. The thinking is that the formerly overweight person becauw of failed past diet attempts has essentially permanently reset his or her basal metabolic rate. Also, there is thinking that our bodies set a desired fat % point in our young adult years below which, the body simply does not want to go (again the survival in the face of famine response).