Help?

A lot of people don't go by what MFP says. I eat as much as 300 cals or even more sometimes over and still lose weight with little to no exercise. go to fitnessfrog.com and use their calculators to try to find a calorie count to aim for and then adjust according to how your body reacts.

You don't seem to have much weight to lose, so you might to best weight training to lose inches and ignore "dieting" and the scale. But if you do just aim to lose weight, try to be realistic and patient. With that little to lose, it probably won't come off very fast at all.

And eat back at least part of your exercise calories.

Best piece of advice: Find out what your BMR is. That's Basic Metabolic Rate, which comes down to how many calories your burn naturally (no exercise). You can guesstimate with a lot of different tools easily found on Google, but the best way to do it is to get an armband or another device that can measure it. They typically cost around $200, so if that's out of your price range or interest go with the free Google apps, but remember you're guessing so you won't get perfect results.

Once you know what yours is (mine is around 2,600 calories) you can use that to calculate how much weight you want to lose vs. how much food you want to eat. That'll give you a timeline. There are 3,500 calories in a pound. If you're eating at a 500 calorie deficit everyday you'll lose 1 pound a week. Higher deficits make for faster loss, lower deficits make for slower loss.

As for "starvation mode," I've never really experienced this, and I've lost over 100 pounds. Over a single week or a single month there may be some fluctuation between my calorie deficit and weight loss, but over the series of a few months it just about matches, give or take 5%. In my opinion, weight loss really is that simple. Others will disagree, and I'm sure they will below, but that's what my advice is.