Fat Secret vs. My Fitness Pal

I just entered the same information in My fitness pal's website & it told me that I should be eating 1570 calories a day. Fat Secret said 1800??? I am really confused that just seems like a big difference. How do I know how many calories I should be eating?

I'm no expert. I would probably figure out how much you burn and subtract 500 - 1000 calories per day depending on your goals.
Keep the fat down to a reasonable percent.

Just a suggestion, but you could start on the higher end and see if you lose weight. Then as you lose weight, you may find that you don't need as many calories and you could bump down to the 1500 range. You could probably lose at either level though, just at different rates.

I wouldn't stick to a number that a calculator figures to tell me how many calories I should consume. You have to do what feels right for your body, and everyone at every weight is not created equal. If you try a hundred different cal/day calculators, you'll get a hundred different numbers - the right weight loss number is like what chrisjea said, the number of calories you normally eat and then subtract an amount of calories from that. On cheat days, I generally eat around 2000-2500 calories - so to lose weight, I found 1500 calories works best to lose 1-2 lbs a week, along with exercise. Remember, 3500 calories is a pound. If you cut 500 calories from your average day, you should lose somewhere around a pound a week. Cut back a thousand (as long as it's still a healthy amount of calories, 1200-1500) and it'll be around 2 lbs a week.

What numbers did you put into Fat Secret that had it come out at 1800 calories? Your weight is listed at 218 and there's no way your sedentary burn rate is that low. My weight this morning was 205.8 and my sedentary number is 2274 calories.

I believe most people do themselves a major dis-service by trying to make assumptions (active, very active, whatever). The best thing to do is enter your actual weight. The program defaults your day into 16 hours of rest and 8 hours of sleep. Go to your exercise calendar and that's the number of calories you would need to eat to maintain that weight.

As was said previously you need to beat that number by 500 calories a day through eating less and/or exercising to lose 1 pound a week. Beat it by 1000 a day to beat it by 2 pounds a week, etc. Use your exercise calendar before entering any exercise for the day as your RDI. As you report lower weights that number will go down.

I just looked at your calendar. Your number for today is 2409. If you click on your diet calendar on the right hand side there is a column Net (kcal). That's where you need to be seeing a green number and a down arrow.

I set mine manually based on other calorie calculators- I keep coming back to the one at freedieting.com and do the advanced option where you enter bodyfat %. I feel like my sedentary RDI on FS is always low and light active is too high. As Fred points out, I also don't like that the daily calories you burn don't seem to be consistent with our RDI. It tells me that I need to eat 1600 calories a day when sedendary to lose 1 pound a week- so where does the 1800 calorie number come from on days when I have no additional exercise? 1600+500 = 2100! Should't there be some kind of alignment betwene some of these numbers???