MyFitnessPal newbie - advice please!

[SaltySeaBird]

Just starting using MFP today inspired by the positive stories. I've dabbled in the past, long time ago, but they have improved it a lot by the look of things.

I'm aiming for 1200 calories a day at their suggestion but hopefully some pros will be able to help on a few things.

Firstly how do you estimate calories in a meal? So tonight we are having a prawn stir fry, how do I work it out - just add up the component parts and enter it as a new food?

Secondly, if you exercise and say burn off 300 calories, do you add that to your 1200 allowance? It's not unusual for me to burn 1000 on a long run at the weekend so surely I don't eat 2200 calories, but equally a net calorie calculation of 200 for the day seems very low?

Any other tips welcome!

I scan/search and enter the foods in individually as I go. try to weigh everything so you get an accurate amount of calories. if you guess too much, you might be having more than you think.

You can then save that as a meal on there if it's something you have often. Then next time you won't hab e to enter everything individually.

If you exercise, enter it in and it automatically adds the calories to your daily allowance. you just search for the type of exercise and enter how long you have done it for.

Do you have the app on your phone? As a pp said it's so easy to scan what your eating but you must weigh things too. I was surprised at what a "normal" portion of stuff looks like! EG a bowl of bran flakes should be about 30g, I was easily eating double that

I'm doing it by gradually decreasingly calories, if I went too low I think I'd feel deprived and snap back to my old ways! This is my second time round (post baby) and I lost 4 stone the first time so I'm hoping I can get back into the swing of it

For exercising I think it depends on what you put down for your activity levels? I put lightly active as I work on my feet so do burn some calories (but I don't do any extra exercise) So if I do do anything I wouldn't normally then I'd log it and have those calories earnt as a buffer in case I go over. Although saying that apparently the calories burnt on MFP are very generous so I'm not sure how much I trust them!

Love the barcode scanner, that is genius! I still find the exercise a bit confusing as it looks like I have lots of extra calories available to eat but I'll try and ignore them!

I don't add my exercise. I just don't panic if I go slightly over my calories. Like pp, I think they are too generous with the calories burned for exercise.