I’m trying to lose weight and was told that hwo I eat about 800-1000 calories a day is too low and lowers my metobolism which will prevent weight loss. I’ve looked up some meal plans and can’t really afford stuff like chicken breast, steak, or salmon every week. So that is why I’m wondering how I can eat 1500 calories a day. Are there some alternatives that I can do?
Also I’d like to ask, say I exercise and burn say 500 calories would I have to eat those calories back or no? I ask cuz I’ve been told yes and told no.
My brother.
Do not eat before 11am and do not eat after 7pm.
Drink water.
Weigh yourself daily, in the morning, right after you piss and shit, and then look at yourself in the mirror.
Eat as you please during your open window, don’t lie to yourself about what you are eating. Trash is trash.
Let this truth wash over you as you buy your food. The shame will drive you to make better purchases.
To be successful, you must hate yourself as you are and love yourself as you want to be.
Good luck.
Learn how to make alfredo sauce. Put it on everything. That will solve your lack of calories.
🤌
With practice. A lowered metabolism won’t prevent weight loss. You never need to eat more to lose weight. An alternative is to just keep doing what you’re doing so long as it’s working. No, you never have to eat calories back.
800-1000 calories a day is not “slowing your metabolism”
I’m confused too. OP is trying to lose weight by eating more calories? I feel like I’m missing something.
There is a ton of bullshit out there from the HAAS groups, that say “your body will go into survival mode if you eat a calorie deficit and will make you gain weight”. It’s just bullshit pettled by people who don’t want to get healthy.
OPs relationship with food is clearly problematic and they’re not actually cognizant of the food and calories going into their body.
I bet soda is a culprit here
There’s no way you need to somehow eat more to lose weight. Are you sure you’re counting your calories correctly? Using an app? Tracking everything, especially drinks like sodas and alcohol?
So basically from what I was told, since I’m 240 lbs and 6 foot I should be eating 2000-2500 calories but if I put myself on a calorie deficit 1500 would be where to go
Yeah that sounds about right.
On apple there is an app called mynetdiary. HIGHLY recommended to help answer your questions. It sounds like finances are an issue, but the paid version really helps you dial in nutrition with detailed nutrient info and meal plans. The key feature of this app for me was the predicted weight loss trend line… and then seeing my results line up perfectly. It’s almost like they knew what they were talking about.
DO NOT go below bmr…
If you are going into deficit, stave off the full effect of adaptive thermogenesis (“starvation mode”) with weights and higher levels of protein.
Poor advice, IMO. Going below BMR is ok, starvation mode is largely a myth, and, while nutrition is important, it is not necessary for caloric-deficit weight loss.
No the poor advice is to go below bmr by some rando who says, “No it’s cool. Nutritionists don’t know what they are talking about.” But go for it. Do like everyone else who is in a rush and turn your diet into a roller coaster and put your health at risk.
Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the number of calories your body needs to perform basic functions while at rest. Consuming too few calories, also known as severe caloric restriction, can cause a number of health problems, including:
-Slowed metabolism: Your body slows down your metabolism to conserve energy when you don’t consume enough calories. This can make it harder to meet your daily nutrient needs and cause fatigue.
-Weakened bones: Consuming too few calories can weaken your bones.
-Reduced fertility: Restricting calories too much can negatively affect fertility.
-Muscle loss: Going below your resting metabolic rate (RMR) for an extended period of time can cause you to lose muscle mass, which can lower the number of calories you burn each day.
-Nutrient deficiencies: Eating fewer calories than your body needs can make it harder to meet your daily nutrient needs.
-Other health problems: Other health problems associated with severe caloric restriction include anemia, menstrual disturbances, and decreased mucosal immunity.
As is always the case when people say it’s on Apple/iPhone, it’s also out on Android
Here’s their website with buttons to both stores: https://www.mynetdiary.com
It’s cheaper and easier to release on Android, and almost twice as many people use it, of course every single Apple iTunes app is going to be on the Google Play Store as well
You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.
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There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.
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Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.
For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.
So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.
Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.
That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.
Can you give more detail about your goals?
Basically I have a gut which I want to get rid of (Ik you can’t spot reduce sadly). I don’t want to get super jacked I just want to lose this guy and get muscle. And avoid diabetes since it runs in my family.
I’ve currently been working on muscle more since my job thankfully has a gym I do strength there two days a week and walk/run 3
OK, so good, a clear starting point.
First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.
The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.
So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.
So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.
Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.
Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.
Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.
Suggesting to eat a kilogram of meat every day when they say they can’t afford chicken breast is probably the worst advice you can give.
Eating plant based would help much more since it’s much cheaper.
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Ok, you have been fed some bullshit. Anyone who just gives you a “eat X calories” advice without knowing your age, height, gender, etc… is full of shit. Makes me no end of mad when you see “Contains 25% of your daily…” on food packaging. Because a 19yo male rugby playing bricklayer and a 46yo female accountant have vastly different requirements.
At the core of it, its CICO (Calories in, Calories out)
https://www.calculator.net/macro-calculator.html Tap your details into that, select a REASONABLE weight loss goal a week, underestimate your exercise, and select the high protein option since you are weight training and want to avoid muscle loss.
A few eggs on a couple of pieces of wholemeal or multigrain toast, pot of greek yoghurt and a coffee is a perfectly good breakfast and Protein shakes are a great way to get protein in and keep calories reasonable, my lunch at work is 2 scoops of Casein protein and a protein bar. I eat boring and super low cal during the day because I train in the afternoon and want to enjoy my dinner.
When it comes to adding back in workout calories… both sides are right. “Diet fatigue” is a real thing, and if you want to keep your calorie defecit around a certain number to avoid getting burnt out then yes, you add them back in. Personally I calculated my macros and calories to “mild” weight loss and estimated my exercise as “none” so my training was where I found the larger part of my deficit.
I could write a very short book on this stuff so if tou have any questions feel free to PM me.
It’s hard for most people to eat and drink under 1500 calories a day. Are you saying you’re having issues getting up to 1500 calories a day?
Eggs are the cheapest and most perfect protein you can get. Just eat loads of those (around 80 calories an egg) and do some spinach or kale and bell peppers as well. That will cover your veggies and your protein. Then you can fill the rest out with a bit of rice or oatmeal. All of that listed is pretty super cheap.
To your other quaestion- no, you do not need to eat an extra 500 calories if you burn an extra 500 if weight loss is your goal. Eating too little calories (like less than 1200, depending on sex and height) makes your body try to keep your fat and will start removing your muscle in order to make your body have less upkeep. That’s really bad. However, if your body knows it’s getting more calories than that, and that your having to use a lot of your muscles (burning 500 extra calories per day) it will burn off the fat reserves and try to maintain the muscle you keep using.
Yep. Because it doesn’t seem plausible for me to get to that which is why I eat under.
That’s a good point for the eggs which I’ll eat more of.
Are you overweight? Really, it’s very easy to get to 1500 calories in a day if you throw in some carbs and some calorie dense foods. Heck, right now mcdonalds is selling a $5 meal deal that’s 1200 calories. Eat that and 4 eggs for breakfast and you’re already at your calories for the day. A few slices of pizza can be 1000 calories. Just one small breakfast sausage patty is 150 calories. A big bowl of cereal with milk can be 500 calories.
None of that is really a healthy way to go, but all I’m saying that is people who need to lose weight usually have issues getting down to 1500 calories. Someone overweight but having a hard time getting up to 1500 in a day is pretty strange.
Regardless, if you just aren’t that hungry and need some healthy foods with a lot of calories, pecans and macadamia nuts are 200 calories an ounce. Full fat Greek yogurt is really calorie dense. So are things like peanut butter. Trail mix is also a great and really high calorie snack. Also, avocado. Really, there’s a lot of foods that are super calorie dense if you look for them. These are just some of the high calorie healthier ones.
Beans are another good, cheap food.
Hey my guy, if you just need to increase your calorie count just add healthy fats to your diet. Fat is incredibly calorie dense so a little goes a long way.
Nuts are a good way to add calories to your day.
Can i ask you to describe a couple of typical meals you would make for yourself?
Ill tell you how i would modify it with what i have in my cupboards
Careful with the spinach though. Regular lettuce is safer.
Regular lettuce doesnt belong in eggs.
I loose weight by eating 2 big meals a day. My go too seems to be frozen pizza (1000 cal each) and and curries (500-600 for curry, another 200 for my naan in butter). I eat 1600-1800 calories a day and feel like a glutton while my scale keeps going in the right direction. 50lbs down so far.
Don’t lose weight to get healthy. Get healthy to lose weight.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto
The calorie model of eating isn’t super helpful.
The hormonal model is more effective. Keep your hormones balanced (no sugar, no carbs, no alcohol), let your body do its own self regulation of intake and hunger, and see the direct benefits.
When you eat sugar your blood sugar increases, which your body immediately tries to regulate by producing insulin, insulin is a super hormone that impacts many systems in the body, not just blood sugar. If you keep your insulin levels low the body will function more normally, including much better control of hunger.
There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, one thing to note is that too much change too fast is a recipe for failure. Whatever you do, make sure it’s manageable. For each change, ask yourself whether it can become a permanent habit for you. This is the only way to sustain it enough to achieve your goals. It could help to write down good ideas, and try them one week or month at a time.
What do you mean by that?
Rapid habit/ lifestyle changes aren’t sustainable. You don’t have the discipline to maintain them. (That’s not a dig at you, it’s just literally counter to human nature.) Better to gradually build habits that you can actually keep
Ok so I like analogies which make me understand lol so is this like having to teach yourself to wake up early to go to work, or to train for a sport?
As someone who lost 60lb this year: just stop eating ultra processed garbage. Find real foods that you enjoy, and make meals out of those. Eat as much chicken, vegetables, fruits, unsweetened yogurt, fish, eggs, etc as you want and you will lose weight. Unhealthy stuff is fine to eat on occasion but only if you consider it well worth the calories and you are aware of how much you’re eating. Dont mindlessly eat a family size bag of doritoes that you dont even like that much. Dont drown yourself in vegetable oil. I stopped buying loaves of bread, sweets, cereals (why are entire aisles of grocery stores dedicated to this garbage?) , carb-based snacks, etc.
Also no, working out does not mean you can eat a snicker’s bar for free. The new Kurzgesagt video explains how that works. I dont believe you’re gaining or even maintaining your weight at 800-1000 calories, but im just a random person.
The costco rotisserie chicken is only $5, just dont eat too much skin. Yogurt can be affordable and high in protein. Almond milk too. Nuts & beans are decent. Just look at protein to calorie ratios on cheap stuff so you maintain muscle, im sure you can find plenty of foods that work.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17469900/ just read the abstract if nothing else.
Whelp that’s not helpful on its own though to be honest. “long term lifestyle change” is the key word I am aware which is… Well at least I didn’t manage it so far. “just do X” is like telling an alcoholic to “just stop drinking, oh but you need a sip every other hour”.
Did you not read the abstract?
Have you not read either the abstract (“calorie deficit not helping”) or my comment? (“input on the inefficiency of diets is useless to OP without any impulse on what to do instead”)?
I don’t understand of what you’re aiming for with your oneliners.
Your previous comment didn’t make sense in relation to the abstract (like nothing about long term change was in it). This one is more understandable. I don’t think replacement advice is needed. Don’t diet is pretty clear. If you couldn’t grasp that from the info, I don’t know what to tell you and you’re not really pleasant to engage with, so I’ll be blocking you.
You’re absolutely going to lose weight at 500-1000 kcal a day. It’s not particularly healthy, and you’re going to lose significant muscle mass, but you will absolutely lose weight rapidly. A significant caloric deficit will not prevent weight loss; its thermodynamics. You’ll lose muscle with that much of a deficit, which in turn decreases basal metabolic rate, but you’re not going to violate thermodynamics.
How are you tracking intake? If you’re not losing weight, I don’t believe you’re tracking calories correctly. Are you using a scale and weighing portions, or just eyeballing it?
Your body probably will go full panic mode and store back as much as possible as soon as you starts to eat normally again. I’d advice agains doing anything so violent, and just lower your food intake to a bit under normal.
Store back what? That’s not how physics works. If they continue to eat only what their body needs to maintain a set weight, they’re not magically going to gain weight because their body somehow is able to violate the laws of physics.
So first off, I don’t think you should bring the laws of physics into conversations of how human bodies store fat. I know it’s tempting - I’ve been there before - but it’s just too reductive to be useful in the conversation, and it leads to generally poor conclusions.
While it’s true that energy cannot be ‘conjured from nothing’ - human bodies don’t quite work on a fixed energy in/out model. They can be variably efficient in how much energy is required to perform certain tasks, and secondary systems can be turned off when the need to conserve energy becomes apparent (leptin is the signaling mechanism for this).
The main mechanisms that cause rebound weight gain after sharp dieting is a reduction in passive energy needs stemming from the change in leptin levels, along with leptins very strong effect on appetite.
I suggest to you, and anyone still under the impression that CICO is a useful model for understanding human metabolism, to read the book The Hungry Brain. It’s hugely useful for gaining greater insight into the subject.
So first off, I don’t think you should bring the laws of physics into conversations of how human bodies store fat. I know it’s tempting - I’ve been there before - but it’s just too reductive to be useful in the conversation, and it leads to generally poor conclusions.
Are you suggesting our bodies are more efficient and break thermodynamics?
While it’s true that energy cannot be ‘conjured from nothing’ - human bodies don’t quite work on a fixed energy in/out model. They can be variably efficient in how much energy is required to perform certain tasks, and secondary systems can be turned off when the need to conserve energy becomes apparent (leptin is the signaling mechanism for this).
What secondary systems get turned off? You’re body is going to utilize energy anyway it can if it needs it, if it doesn’t it stores it, usually in the form of fat.
The main mechanisms that cause rebound weight gain after sharp dieting is a reduction in passive energy needs stemming from the change in leptin levels, along with leptins very strong effect on appetite.
No it’s from eating way more calories…this is literally junk science your parroting here. The rebound in weight is because someone decides to stuff themselves again.
I suggest to you, and anyone still under the impression that CICO is a useful model for understanding human metabolism, to read the book The Hungry Brain. It’s hugely useful for gaining greater insight into the subject.
That book is about the psychology of overeating.
Hell here is a quote from his AMA:
There are many ways to lose weight, but they all involve either eating fewer calories or burning more.
It’s callef the yoyo effect (that’s why you should see a nutritionist when you want to lose weight). Also recent research hints at cells becoming more efficient when there is less energy available. There is even a Kurzhesagt video about it if you are interested.
It seems it is not so easy as calories in, calories out.
No…just no. You’re arguing against literal physical laws here. Most people do not accurately count their calories and end up posting antidotal garbage that gets passed off as science.
Dude, cells are not using up 100% of the energy you ingest, if they did you could live off a sugar cube a year. I think it might be you that doesn’t understand how the laws of physics work lol.
You have just argued that they do. You cannot magically create mass from eating less. That’s literally what you’re stating.
I didn’t state something along those lines, ofc you cannot gain 100gram eating only 50grams.
Let me expmain:
If your body gets 100 “energy” out of a burger, that doesn’t mean getting “200” energy out of a burger is against physics.
Did you miss the “when you start eating normally again” bit?
You can rant all you want about the laws of physics, but you might want to practice your reading comprehension.
Then you’re not eating normally… you’re eating more than you need.
Most people don’t count calories. You said it yourself, a few posts below. Are you going to start redefining “normal” now to meet your argument?
Wow…so you think my argument of CICO is bunk… because…most people don’t count calories…the fuck type of logic is this?
You really need to work on that reading comprehension. Valmond stated that people will regain weight when they return to eating normally after dieting.
You claim that’s not how physics work, then move the goal posts stating “if people only eat what they need, they won’t gain the weight back.” Well no shit Sherlock, but they’re not eating normally. They’re gaining the weight back if they go back to eating normally.
Quit being so quick to attack folk and read the fucking post.
