I cannot find anything about what I should be taking in calorie wise... help! I've just been trying to make good choices but it'd be good to have a number.

Thanks!

Emmy, have you checked out fitday.com? There's probably some sort of calculator on there that will help you come up with a number. Generally, for women, the numbers are between 1200 and 1600 calories a day for weight loss. Obviously that's just a general guideline and is probably not even helpful for you.

I've been using the home version of Fitday and find it very helpful.

There is one big problem, though, with its metabolism calculator, which is the same on every single one I've ever tried. Generally, these calculators take your current weight and activity level and based on that tell you how many calories a day will let you maintain your weight and how many fewer you should consume to lose weight. Well, unfortunately the current-weight number includes a whole lot of fat, which is metabolically inactive, and that skews the number upward considerably.

But using an ideal weight for the same calculation results in a lower number than would be accurate. So what I do is take both numbers and split the difference, which gives me a better estimation of my daily calorie expenditure.

How precise a number are you looking for? You must have heard the 1200-1600 range bandied about. Is that what you wanted to know?