ban guzzi

Another thing to remember, you can't gain more in weight than you take in. Read somewhere that a pound of fat is equal to 11 pounds of potatoes. Of course, a cookie/mocha/large fatty meal will get closer giving to you (aren't they generous?!) all they have, weight wise.

With that said, I've dared myself to do a Century a week for the duration of summer. Today I took in A luna bar, a handful of dried and salted fruit and went thru about 2 gallons of water. I'm currently eating some pizza to make up for it, too. According to MapMyRide, I burnt about 6500K/cals. And I know that isn't right! Over time you'll figure it out.
I'm not perfect, trust me! I'm also still about 270 (another reason to dare myself) after about a year and a half. I started at about 335+. My legs and core have made up the weight difference. Friends and some "friends" have guessed my weight to be 205 or thereabouts. Worry not about scale weight, worry about fat! You'll get there....

Sorry I was so long winded....

Have fun and keep your head up!
Be proud of what your doing for yourself. It is worth more than you can even imagine right now.

Wogster

2000 seems a little low, you need to discover your ballpark Basal Metabolic Rate, this is how much you burn simply being alive, the actual number is different for everyone, two men the same height, weight, age can have different BMRs, but not vastly different. One might be 2100 the other 2150 for example.

Now add on your exercise burn, so if your burning 900 - 1100 a day you would add say 1000, giving you the total burn.

1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories, so if you want to lose the recommended 2lbs per week that would be 7000 calories per week, or 1000 per day. So subtract 1000, and you are left with a number. This is the number you want to aim for, you should be ready to increase your calories in about 10-15 weeks to balance out your intake and your burn to maintain.

Alathea

I generally use dailyplate.com and physicsdiet.com. One to track my food and excercise calories (it has a ticker that keeps track of caloric expenditure and intake so you have a number always to shoot for) based on my 2lb a day profile. Physicsdiet is based on an online book called the Hacker's Diet, ginned up by a programmer in the 90s that had weight issues and a crushing schedule as the owner of a company-its all basic geekery and some light math. He is NOT a doctor-he just wanted to take an engineering perspective to the problem of his personal weight loss and fleshed it out into an online book.

The main tool of the site if you don't read his online stuff is the charting. Put in your weight, it uses the Mifflin calc for BMR, and then just start adding in your weights daily. Most places say DONT track daily, but the neat of this is that it smooths out the averages so the spikes when we fall off, in the big picture, really are shown to not be that bad. Here is my profile from the site to see sort of what it looks like: https://www.physicsdiet.com/Public.aspx?u=alethia

velostring

My mistake in fast typing. 7,000 deficit = 2 lbs of fat. Sorry for the confusion!