I am female/ 5'4"/ 168 lbs/ 35% bf

I am sooo confused about calories. I have heard anywhere from 1200-2600. I have been told eat to little and my body goes into starvation mode and I wont lose..But tehn I have been told to lose weight you gotta keep the cals low...
I am sooo confused.
I do cardio 45 minutes a session 4 times a week. RPM 1 time and 3 strength training sessions(still working on getting my routine figured out there)
Please help me know how to figure out my caloric needs..Thanks
Amy

There are sites that can calculate the number of calories you need, but I think the easiest way to do it is to use your body weight x 15 = number of calories per day to maintain weight. So ..... 168 x 15 = 2520. This figure is obviously affected by how active you are in your day to day life (not including working out). If you have a very physical job, it could be a few hundred higher, if you have a sedentary job and don't get much other exercise, it could be a couple of hundred lower. As you can see, this figure is soemthing of an estimate, but it's a useful place to start.

Your maintenance level is also affected by how much you've eaten in the past. If you've spent several weeks/months at below your maintenance level, your body may have adjusted to that and set itself a new, lower maintenance. Only you will know if you've done this.

To lose 1lb requires a deficit of 3500 calories, so if you want to lose 1lb a week, you need a deficit of 3500 calories a week or 500 a day. You can achieve this either by eating 500 calories less than you need for maintenance or by burning 500 calories a day through exercise. Your body doesn't mind.

So, you see that you shouldn't have to go down as low as 1200 to lose weight.

If you want to lose more than 1lb a week, you could cut down the amount you eat and exercise as well, but don't go to extremes with this. To achieve safe, sustainable weight loss, you should lose no more than 1% of your total body weight a week, which in your case would be about 1.7lb. The important thing here is not only to lose the weight, but to lose it safely, and to keep it off.

I hope this helps.

Very helpful.. SO would going for between with 1500-1700 be a good place to be for weight loss with regular exercise?
I have a sedentary job(desk).
Thanks so much!
Amy

That sounds like a good place to start. That's about where I am, and I'm not working at all at the moment, so when I'm not exercising I spend most of my day in front of the PC. And I'm averaging about 1.5lb a week.

The really important thing to remember is to be flexible. Give it a few weeks eating at that level and with the exercise you're doing, and see what happens. If you're not losing weight or if you're losing it too fast, adjust what you're doing to compensate. (For the first week or two you will lose a bit more because you're shedding water weight, but after that you should be aiming to settle at 1 - 2lb a week.)