Calorie deficit/no weight loss

[Susan]

You can estimate your recommended daily calorie intake based on activity level and your weight loss goal on the livestrong calorie tracker.
I once read that you shouldn't try to lose more than one pound a week, but I can't come up with any source for this claim at the moment.

I sometimes check my calorie intake for a couple of days just because I am curious, but most of the time I don't. I start to obsess about the numbers after some time, first, I track what I eat, but at some point, I notice that I begin to eat what I want to track. A bit hard to explain.
Also, if you don't know your exact numbers, your bodyfat-level, you exact metabolic rate, if you can metabolize every kind of food you eat, how much you are burning during exercise; and if you don't weight every morsel you put in your mouth exactly, there a high chance that what you track isn't accurate at all.
To achieve a save slow weight loss we are talking about a deficit of some hundred calories a day, so there isn't much room for tracking errors.

[Maye]

Remember that you burn calories with every little activity including while you sleep. I used the body media (BM) armband for 4 months in a row last year and I was amazed to see the approximate amount of calories that I burned while I was just sleeping, doing dishes, working at my desk; it was a WOW. By then I was in a low cal diet of 1200-1300 cals per day and almost very little to none exercise. I lost an approx. of 1.5 to 2 pounds some weeks and other weeks nothing. I was doing a very popular weight loss plan and managed to loose 20 pounds in 6 months doing this. Weight loss is affected by a lot of things (like hormones, water retention) and you are not going to loose at the same rate all the time. By then I was religiously entering all my food intake at the BM website just to know my calorie deficit. My deficit was always around 700-1000 per day and around 3500 per week which is supposed to make me loose one pound, but that wasn't always the case. It was really hard for me to understand that and I was constantly obsessed and frustrated by the numbers. Numbers can be tricky and deceiving!! I was thinking is just pure math why is not working!! The last five ones, hmm, they are the hardest and I gave up on them once I hit 143 since I'm 5-8. I was aiming to 138 but boy, never got there but I was looking GOOD!! You will get there and be sure that those days that you are training you are eating properly in order to avoid the non-avoidable plateau. I'm not an expert but just wanted to share my experience with calorie deficits and how it worked for me

NOW, that I'm training for a 65 mile cycling event I have to be extra careful in the training days with what I eat if I want to loose the extra pounds that I gained during winter and x-mas. Let's see how I will balance these things out without having to give up the bikini. Oh boy!