This is incorrect. Your intake is your intake and is separate from how much you burn. One reason for the idea that one shouldn't eat below 1200 is that you need the nutrients (vitamins, major food groups) in 1200 calories to be healthy, and if you eat less than that, you'll be deficient. It's not just about calories. The 1200 is based solely on what you EAT, not how much you burn off. Also, the body has a basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is what you burn totally at rest. According to some people it's not a good idea to eat lower than your BMR for an extended period of time.

Some folks work on staying with a certain deficit, that is, the difference between what you eat and what your body burns. My FitDay calculator works this way. So, you take your BMR and add to that your activity level plus a few other things (calories burned digesting food, for example). That gives you an estimate of your daily calorie burn. FitDay does this for you, as do other calculators on the internet.

For example, FitDay puts my daily burn at around 1900 calories. If I'm aiming for a 500 calorie deficit per day, that means I would eat 1400 calories.

If I do extra exercise, my burn is increased. Theoretically, then, I could eat more calories and still stay with my 500 calorie deficit. But watch out with this, because estimates of how many calories an exercise burns are often very inaccurate. You could think you're burning 600 with exercise and have it be only half that much in reality.

I found that working with averages did better than worrying about whether any single day was too high or two low. Again, a tool like FitDay can help with this because it does the calculations for you.

Good luck!

Jay

Good catch Jay. Yes, this is absolutely false. All the exercise in the world can't change the fact that you've consumed (eaten) 1500 calories worth of food (& the nutrients in there). The calories taken in number never, ever changes even if you exercise non-stop.

We're SUPPOSED to be burning calories. That's the whole idea. In fact, in order to lose weight we must take in (eat) less calories than we burn. We do this so that our bodies use our STORED FAT as energy, thus using up those fat stores and this is how the pounds come off.

I realized that I was wrong and went over to the Calorie Counting area and asked some questions, so yeah, I was wrong, sorry about that!

I'm pretty skeptical of online calculators as they always WAY over estimate the calories that work for me. But this one is pretty much right on track for me - both for the amount of calories I eat when I'm losing weight, and also for my daily calorie burn. I have a Gowear Fit to help track my burn and it is right in synch with that.

Having said that, I think all of these calculators are just a starting point. Use it to get a baseline number to begin with and then adjust up or down based on how you feel and whether or not you are losing at an acceptable rate.

For comparison's sake, @ 197 pounds / 5'7" / 41 years old, I am currently eating an average of 1800 calories per day and losing around 1.3 pounds per week. I am very active--work out daily for at least 30 minutes and get at least 6 to 8 hours of on-my-feet activity on top of that. But my point for the OP is, it's not necessary to cut calories back as far as humanly possible in order to lose weight.

Thank you everyone for the very sound advice. I'll try testing some of these things out until I find what works for me. I'm starting to feel like I'm coming out of that rut that I was in from making no progress.

I'll update in about two weeks on my progress so you can all check up on how I'm doing :]