New to MyFitnessPal & have a couple of questions

[Poppysball]

I would like to lose up to a stone but more importantly I want to eat healthier and stop comfort eating.
I’ve signed up to MFP so that I can track exactly what I’m eating and the calories involved.

Couple of questions if anyone can help please:
How does it know what total amount of calories to set you for the day? I heard someone say they were allowed 1200 but I didn’t think that was very much. I’m worried I’ll be hungry all the time if it’s too restricted.

Is this considered to be a diet? I don’t really want to go on a diet as such as I want to be able to maintain this way of eating and make it a lifestyle change.

How does the exercise impact on it? At the moment I’m not doing nearly enough.

Is it hard to keep a track of everything or is it quite easy to use?

Thanks for any tips. I need to do something so am hoping this might work for me.

Hi

When i outmy details.in it asked how long i wanted to loose weight over and how much in total.i wanted to loose, and then gave me a suggested calorie intake per day to achieve this. You can easily alter it though if you feel it's not realistic. For me, 1200 is actually quite a bit of food if i make sensible choices.

You can add exercise eg walking and it will adjust your intake although for me i think mfp is quite generous about how many calories are burnt. I really.like it and find it easier to use. I love the weight loas graph and weigh in twice per week

Hi Lois thank you. Good to hear you’re finding it good, just hope i can stick to it, self-discipline not my strong point! So fed up of eating crap though and now I’m in my 40’s feel like I can’t get away with it anymore!

I’m doing this at the moment and MyFitnessPal gave me 1260 calories a day.

But this is based on doing no excercise. The App syncs with my Fitbit so the more excercise I do the more calories my MyFitnessPal gives me each day. I try not to use those extra calories because then you get faster weight loss but it’s really helpful if you are going out to know you can go for a long walk earlier in the way and limit the damage.

So far, I have found it great and by eating lean meat, fish, chicken and Quorn with lots of vegetables you hardly use that much of your days allowance so can treat yourself most days.

I just weigh in once a week on my Fitbit App and it is reflected in MyFitnessPal.

Maybe, that's really good to hear about it syncing with your fitbit. Mine is supposrd to sync with the step counter on my phone but that's the only part of the mfp app that doesn't work for me.