Calories is a calorie?

Question
I am confused about how to determine one's daily caloric intake.  I've been to different web sites that calculate it out for you, and each one seems to give you a different value.  Can you please give me a standard formula to follow to figure this out.  I am mostly confused when incorporating exercise into the equation.  After you find your BMR and calculate your daily expenditure w/o exercise then how is it that you figure your exercise expenditure out and figure it into the daily intake.  My results on those web sites to lose 2 lbs a week put me at 1200 calories a day, but my BMR was 1400.  I thought you weren't supposed to eat below that value, and isn't 1200 kcals/day below the starvation/storage mode.  Is that too little for caloric intakes?  I'm 5' 7 1/2", 154lbs, with moderate levels of exercise.  Please help me clear this confusion.  Thanks in advance.

Answer
Kim,

Here's the formula in use by fitness professionals, it doesn't matter. however, that it all is that simple.

Men: RMR = 66.473 + 13.751*BW + 5.0033*HT - 6.755*Age
Women: RMR = 655.0955 + 9.463*BW + 1.8496*HT - 4.6756*Age

Where BW = body weight in kilograms, HT = height in cm, Age in years

Please keep in mind that Calories are called many names. To start with, the 'calorie' in recipes and even on some nutritional fact labels is in fact a kilo-calorie, which means that it signifies 1000 times more energy than a simple calorie. To avoid too complicated spelling and too long pronunciation, they are called 'big calories' or Calories (with capital C).

A calorie is a simple idea in physics: it's the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F).

Incredibly, but this approach is used in nutrition, too: 1 calorie is the amount of heat that is supposedly released by 1 gram of food when it's burnt. Yes, not 'burnt' as in 'fat burning' but burnt literally, on fire. Have you read in popular articles that energy (calories) in a Big Mac could drive a car for 40 miles?

So what can mean 'free calories' from this standpoint? The answer is, nothing! The term "free calories" has no precise meaning. However, it's not meaningless.

Many weight loss diets let you eat certain foods freely like without counting calories in the case of low carbohydrate diets.

On the Negative Calorie diet, you can eat any amounts of low 'calorie density' plant foods on the list.

On the Carbohydrate Addict diet, you can eat any amounts of any food at all - but only once a day, for only one hour.

On the BantaDiet.com, you can eat any amounts of any food or meal as along as you stay within Banta's food lists and use Banta's recipes, which are pre-calculated to insure proper ratio of fats:carb+protein.

You can also earn yourself some 'free' calories to eat by exercising or even create a negative calorie balance by burning more calories than you consume.

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