Eating Below your BMR?

BMR for those who may not know is your Basal Metabolic Rate, which is an estimate of how many calories you'd burn if you were to do nothing but rest for 24 hours. It represents the minimum amount of energy needed to keep your body functioning, including breathing and keeping your heart beating.

Your BMR does not include the calories you burn from normal daily activities or exercise.

Now here is my question; Why would www.myfitnesspal.com tell me that my daily goal for weight loss should be 1,200 cal/day when my BMR is 1,292 cal/day??

This strikes me as odd, so off to Dr. Google I go, and this is what I find:

1) Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) – the amount of energy your body needs to stay alive, just lying still, without moving. This makes up the bulk of one’s metabolic cost.

2) Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) – this is the amount of energy you expand in staying alive (BMR) and carrying out your daily activities, without any training or exercise.

3) Maintenance – this is the total amount of calories you actually burn in a day, factoring in all activity.

Here’s the deal: eat at or below BMR if you want to lose fat.

To lose fat, eat less than you burn. To gain or maintain muscle, increase your training intensity with each successive session

Interesting ...

My thoughts: This makes sense and is a great way to jump start initial fat loss, however to maintain this you would simply waste away.

Yes, No? Maybe I'm wrong and I'll have to review this again once I get to my target weight.

Regardless, for the foreseeable futures I will be sticking to my 1,200 cal per day eating plan (which really is not that hard at all when I can see it all laid out for me - yay for accountability!), but it does seem to me like something is amiss here for the long term.