Need help with Net Calories Consumed

I am also interested in the answer to your question. Most days I eat 1200+ but with daily exercise walking I usually net below the 1200. I am hoping for a simple answer ie: eat until you daily goal is reached, which is 1200 + exercise calories earned or eat up to the 1200 cal mark and the exercise calories earned are just a bonus. Help!

My trainer explained this to me a few weeks ago. She has me on a 1200 calorie or less diet. If I exercise and burn 400 calories, I do not need to consume those calories. That would be 1600 calories for a day. Instead, look at it like this. You consume 1200 calories and exercise 400 calories so 1200-400=600 calories plus the original deficit. My body burns 2200 calories a day just being awake so you take 2200-1200=1000 and then 1000+600=1600 calorie deficit in one day. If you do this 6 times a week 1600*6=9600 calories or 2.74 pounds lost. IF you consume the calories from exercise 1200+400= 1600 then 2200-1600=600 calories burned in a day would be 600*6=3600 calories or slightly over one pound for a week.

What should I do?

Personally, I'd try to eat more. If you can't, at least try to make sure you are eating fats, carbohydrates, and proteins in a decent balance so you're feeding your whole body as much of what it needs as possible. You might find your energy levels and appetite come up as a result.

If I'm under 1200 calories as my net calories consumed, will this hinder my weight lost?

Short term? Probably not. A larger calorie deficit means faster weight loss. Change in Weight = 3,500 * ( (calories eaten) - (calories burned) ). A larger deficit might also lead to hunger meaning it's harder to maintain, and lowered energy levels which lowers "calories burned".

Technically, the vast majority of otherwise-healthy individuals can lose some weight via fasting or severely restricted caloric intake, and if they handle transition to maintenance properly they can mostly keep it off. This is technically what a lot of "fad" diets are - severe caloric restriction with something to mask the hunger (sugary item or appetite suppressant to or both - they mask the signs of hunger, sometimes mixed with a stimulant to artificially increase metabolism and because stimulants are great appetite suppressants).

Longer term? Possibly, but not for everyone. If you can successfully re-introduce calories for maintenance when you are done, and you maintain good workouts to sustain your overall health throughout the process, then you'll probably do fine. You might also find that MFP has miscalculated your BMR and you're actually eating fine.

Under-eating is a real problem for people who see this as a short-term "diet" that ends when they reach their goal, mostly because they go back to their old eating habits and their old exercise habits and, as a result, their own weight. If you've been eating a severely-restricted diet for a long time and your metabolism is low, and you start eating "normally" again, your body will take some time to bring your metabolism back up and it won't be able to burn all the calories you're eating. You can mitigate this by bringing calories up very slowly.

Of course, this all assumes you're getting the essential nutrients you need in decent quantities. If you aren't, then you may be causing some issues. Many proponents of a very calorie-restricted diet recommend vitamin supplements, for example, to make sure you aren't depriving your body of something it needs. Supplements are a poor substitute for getting nutrients from food, but they're far better than not getting them at all.

How do I determine my TDEE?

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) + Exercise Calories = TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

TDEE - Deficit = Recommended calories

Deficit = 500 calories per day for each pound of weight you want to lose a week.

The problem is that BMR is an estimate, and so are exercise calories. And you can affect your BMR with your diet (eating decent amounts of quality foods will raise your BMR, depriving it of food or eating out of balance can lower it).

If 1200 is your target, then ideally, you would be at or very close to 1200 net at the end of the day. As long as you don't go more than 100-200 calories under target, it's not likely to cause you any problems.

Don't listen to people who tell you not to "net" under a certain number (even if that number is your BMR), because net calories change based on whatever your original target was. If your target for the day is only 1200, then netting under 1200 (but not by very much) is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. When you exercise and eat the calories back, your total calories consumed for the day will likely be over your BMR.

Whether 1200 is the correct target for you is a different matter entirely; that's where figuring out your TDEE helps. Do you know what your BMR is? If not, clcik the Tools tab on the MyFitnessPal website, and use the BMR calculator there (you enter your age, height, weight and gender to get an estimated BMR). Please list that number in a reply, and also let us know how active you are in an average day, not counting any workouts (ie, do you have a desk job, or are you on your feet / walking around a lot?).

OK, if your BMR is 1475, then you are almost certainly picking too low of a target with 1200. Even if your lifestyle before workouts is sedentary, you'd still be starting with a TDEE estimate of over 1800 calories. Did you tell MFP you wanted to target 2 pounds per week of weight loss, by chance? It would probably be better to set that to "1 pound per week"; at your height and weight, 2lbs is hard to sustain due to the low number of calories involved.

At 1 pound per week, it would increase your target to around 1300 calories (assuming you chose "Sedentary" as your activity level), and you would still want to log and eat back the calories from your workouts to keep your net calories for the day somewhere between 1200-1300.

That said, your last comment is spot-on as well. If you see your measurements improving while the scale doesn't move, that's still a great result. Working out causes you to retain a lot of extra water weight, but the fat still comes off, and you can see that in your measurements.

My trainer explained this to me a few weeks ago. She has me on a 1200 calorie or less diet. If I exercise and burn 400 calories, I do not need to consume those calories. That would be 1600 calories for a day. Instead, look at it like this. You consume 1200 calories and exercise 400 calories so 1200-400=600 calories plus the original deficit. My body burns 2200 calories a day just being awake so you take 2200-1200=1000 and then 1000+600=1600 calorie deficit in one day. If you do this 6 times a week 1600*6=9600 calories or 2.74 pounds lost. IF you consume the calories from exercise 1200+400= 1600 then 2200-1600=600 calories burned in a day would be 600*6=3600 calories or slightly over one pound for a week.

You might want to find a better trainer. 600 cals a day is an *extremely* low amount, and unless you are doing it for a very short period of time and/or are severely overweight, could cause substantial damage to your body. This is the sort of calorie consumption that eating disorders are made of.

FWIW, except for the severely overweight, a 1-2 pound loss per week is a very good, healthy way to lose weight.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/290204-net-calories-after-exercise-to-lose-weight/

Excerpt: Net Calories Used

To calculate calories burnt during a specific activity, use a free calculator such as the Calories Burned Estimator on the Health Status Website. This calculator tells you how many calories you burned based on the activity you did, the time spent and your weight. To determine net calories, subtract the calories you burned from the calories you took in. If you get a negative number, you burned more calories than you took in and you will lose weight.