Can someone confirm please?!

nooooo a
if MFP said 1200 then you net 1200 .. they already have a deficit built in ..
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from the help section on this site

We set your nutritional target in Net Calories which we define as:

Calories Consumed (Food) - Calories Burned (Exercise) = Net Calories

What that means is that if you exercise, you will be able to eat more for that day. For example, if your Net Calorie goal is 2000 calories, one way to meet that goal is to eat 2,500 calories of food, but then burn 500 calories through exercise.

Think of your Net Calories like a daily budget of calories to spend. You spend them by eating, and you earn more calories to eat by exercising.

Don't worry about deficit. If you eat 1200 calories or less per day, you will lose 1.6 lb/week.

no, forget the exercise cals and just eat 1200, then if you add your exercise cals of lets say 400 for the day you would be eating those back too. So you would be eating 1600 for that day.

let me pick numbers that may not be yours, but that may be typical....


Let's say "Bob" is an average male and his normal daily calorie burn in his sedentary/moderately active lifestyle is 2000 calories a day...

So if he eats 2000 calories a day he will not gain or lose...

To generate a loss of about a pound a week, you need to accumulate a shortage of about 3500 calories in a week - this would be 500 a day.

So he would target 1500 calories to eat in a day and slowly lose his weight.


His target calories is 1500 a day.


We also know that there is a point where Bob will not be achieving a maintainable or healthy weight loss if he tries to lose too quickly.... say he "wanted" to lose 4 Lbs a week... so that would be 4x3500... or being short 2000 calories a day... so if he just didn't eat anything, he'd have the shortage needed to lose 4 Lbs a week.... ***Obviously not.*** The body will not let this happen this way even if Bob sustained it.

The way MFP works, if you take it at it's basic set up, is that it determines an estimate for you based on what you told it and what you want to lose. (I'm intentionally avoiding the discussion if 2 Lbs is ok to set it to, (1.6) or if it should be 1 pound a week, but I'm in the 1Lb a week opinion for most people except those who have a lot of weight to lose... 1/2 Lb if people are very close to their goal weight.... but you can read up on this and determine it for yourself.)

This target includes the reduction of calories based on your intended weight loss... go ahead and set it for maintain and you will see what it gives for your number excluding creating a shortfall for weight loss.

So what about exercise.... Exercising would cause Bob to burn more calories in a day than his 2000... and will also provide multiple health benefits that are not weight related (cardiac health, etc, etc). The challenge here is that his body still cannot handle too much of a shortfall. Just like it couldn't handle him not eating. This is where the idea of "net" comes in.

If Bob worked out aggressively (I know these are extreme examples) and burned 2000 calories one day... he obviously will still burn his daily calories because he is still living the rest of the day... so let's say that day he will burn 4000 calories... Just as he couldn't eat 0 calories for a day when not working out, he can't let his daily shortfall be too much even with his exercise. So he needs to eat 3500 calories that day to have his 500 shortfall... to get to his one pound loss for the week. This is the idea that he "nets" 1500 calories a day intake - if he works out, he needs to eat that back to avoid having too much of a shortfall.

So... you are eating 1200 calories a day. (That may be aggressive, but read around a bunch and see if you feel you are ok with this target loss in a week - it may be fine as well depending on your particulars.) You should eat whatever you burn in a workout because you already have a shortfall for your body built in to this 1200 target. Here is where the real benefit of working our comes in - not so you build a bigger deficit, but so you can have more food options when you have a few more calories you can eat. But you can workout, or not... MFP doesn't particularly care because it is setting aside a deficit for you based on you not working out. Yes, there are many health benefits of working out that make it something that is great to do (The most significant is that as you lose weight - you want that weight to be fat and not muscle - working out can help you retain the muscle and help to ensure as much of your loss as possible is from fat stores.) However, MFP isn't dictating what you need to do for workouts...

hope this helped. Good Luck!