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.
800-1000 calories a day is too low and lowers my metobolism which will prevent weight loss.
If you do it for real for a while, nothing can prevent weight loss.
I’ve looked up some meal plans and can’t really afford stuff like chicken breast, steak, or salmon every week.
Eat real vegetables and fruits. Fresh, where ever possible. You wouldn’t believe how cheap you can feed yourself if you do your cooking yourself.
Avoid all processed food. Avoid all sugar.
Frozen fruits and vegetables are also fine. Canned fruits in heavy syrups – not fine.
If Chicken breasts are out of budget then Eggs, Egg Whites, or Beans are probably going to be needed to hit some kind of protein macros.
Yeah I usually go for frozen fruits and veggies since they are “fresher” lol
Yeah I usually do my best to eat vegetables and fruits whenever I can at least. And I’m trying my best to cut back on sugar it’s hard lol but I’m getting there.
Liquid sugar is the worst, IMHO.
Things like soda, fruit juices, energy drinks,etc are way too easy to consume without realising just how much.
It’s very easy to consume ¼ of a pound of sugar a day in just a few drinks.
Drink water.
what has worked for me is just trying to skip out on sugary stuff as often as possible and instead eating regular food that i really enjoy, eventually i just stop really craving sweets that much and now the only sweets i tend to want is stuff like cinnamon rolls and chips, which is more savoury than sweet honestly.
I’ve long said that the best place to loose weight is at the grocery store. You pretty much only ever go to the outside edge. Buy potatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, squash and zucchini, radishes, carrots and any other vegetables you like. Bulk is what works here. Then go buy what protein you can afford. Skip anything that has been processed beyond meat and milk.
If he’s undereating, maybe some sugar in moderation. Humans need calories, maybe a granola bar or something
Yes maybe, but strictly only the kind that you can see before you eat it (like, two pieces into your coffee)
“Avoid all sugar”
Right. Avoid fruits.
But seriously. Fruits have very little benefit for health. They have health benefits vegetables have, but with sugars also in them. Fruits are sugared veggies.
That’s such a dumb take. Fruits are like the second best thing after vegetables in their ration of satiation per calorie.
Added sugar is completely different beast from the sugar in fruits and vegetables.
You would need to eat an ungodly amount of fruits for it to be bad for your health.
They’re still in the “good for you” category, but completely unnecessary for health. Anything you can get from fruit you can get from vegetables and it reduces your sugar intake that way.
Sugared veggies is good. As you say, fruits do have the health benefits vegetables have, which is not “very little”. They’re full of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and above all, fiber. Sugar is not all bad either. Evolutionalrily, we probably like sugar exactly because it is present in fruits and eating fruits is beneficial for us. If you ate only fruits all day, then it would be bad for you, but I’m pretty sure in reasonable amounts fruits are an important part of a healthy diet.
Your mostly correct, except there are no fruits that are an important part of a healthy diet. You can have some as a treat or whatever, but they are not important, and simply do what veggies do, but with a spike of sugar.
Measuring and establishing some boundaries by plant, rather than type, could be useful to op.
Peppers and carrots can be higher in sugar than expected. Relative to their positive flavor impact on a salad, a cutup strawberry or two adds only a small amount.
Grouping plants into fruit or veg might not be effective for calorie monitoring. Would need to know what they want to eat, and search for nutrition info. Thus a plan.
Man, I gotta be real with you. You aren’t going to be able to crowd source this. There’s just too much outdated information, well meaning but flawed advice, and outright bullshit online. Finding the up to date, good answers among the junk would only be possible if you already knew it.
The only reliable way to get good answers about bariatrics is going to specialists. Seriously, you can’t even totally rely on a general practitioner to be caught up, though you might get lucky with an internist. You can make do with nutritionists if they’re either fairly newly graduated, or you know they keep up on their subject.
Hell, there’s some specialists that lag behind in terms of proper, evidence driven best practices.
And the thing nobody online will likely admit is that there isn’t a single, complete answer because part of how fat loss and gain works is governed by individual circumstances regarding hormones, metabolism, and capabilities, which still ignores external factors in making a prescribed weight loss plan work. If your broke ass lives in a food desert, and you’re limited to the corner store for the majority of your supplies, the task gets much harder, just as one example of what I mean by that.
Any medications you’re on, that’s got to be factored in to an overall plan, even OTC meds, supplements, etc.
Now, there are strategies that are fairly reliable in helping manage calorie intake, like going predominantly plant based. You’ll have to study up and make sure that whatever plan you set up has the whole gamut of nutrients you’ll need, but as long as a food desert isn’t in play, that’s usually easy enough. The good news about that is that the core foods tend to be very affordable, and easy to buy in bulk as long as you have storage space.
Another piece of good news is that if you’re using exercise as part of your overall plan, not only will you give yourself a wider space for intake, but it improves your health no matter what weight you’re at along the way. I mean, losing excess fat is great, but it isn’t going to magically make your cardiovascular system work at its best.
And, again, you can only take this comment with a grain of salt because you have no way of knowing that I’m up to date on the interrelated subjects to a degree high enough to be useful. For all you know, I’m thirty years behind on things. And, truth is that the general subject matter isn’t a high priority for my reading time. I do put a bit of time every week into digging through journals and publications with a focus on medical shit, but bariatrics isn’t something I’m into for my own curiosity. So I have to be at least a little behind as default because I’m always behind even on my favorite subjects because I can’t devote enough time to it all.
Weight management is something you have to take on as a long term project where you adapt along the way. You can’t look at it as weight loss either, because just losing excess fat is only part of the project. You have to keep it off and improve your overall health.
Eating healthier is not nearly as complicated as this post makes it sound, unless you have unusual underlying medical issues or are aiming to sculpt your body in a very specific way.
- To lose weight, eat about 5-10% less than your daily caloric requirement (there are tons of free calculators and counters online). Water helps to feel full. Increasing exercise can help if changing dietary habits is a struggle.
- To eat healthier overall, eat less processed foods, more fresh stuff.
That’s it. This is all the advice most people realistically need to lose weight/eat better. The hard part is being disciplined about it. Now, discipline, on the other hand, that’s a very personal matter.
And that right there is the kind of comment I was talking about. Well meaning, I’m sure, but so damn general and vague as to be useless to anyone that’s asking what the post is asking.
And, the whole “underlying medical issues” part is key there. Obesity is an underlying medical condition that changes how your body works. It messes with insulin, cortisol, serotonin, and after a point resists weight loss.
Dude is over 250 lbs at approximately six feet tall. If he isn’t a fairly regular weight lifter, he’s into at least overweight BMI, which is absolutely in the range where it counts as a medical condition that can be resistant to casual methodology, and that’s something that bariatric specialists deal with regularly. It’s part of the reason that people have so damn much trouble sustaining weight loss, and maintaining it long enough for the underlying changes to shift back to a healthier cycle.
Discipline is not a significant factor when the patient is at the point where OP is. Claims that it is are empty headed, outdated claptrap that does nothing useful for the patient.
Frankly, your comment is the kind the kind of jackassery that I was talking about.
Well CICO is always true, but what modern professionals would help with is the other stuff: mental health, planning, long term, etc.
So in the lab, CICO wins, it’s thermodynamics. In real life, people need more support, and they (rightfully, realistically) can’t maintain CICO.
True.
CICO it’s what is called a bounding condition. It’s true but the CO half is almost impossible to know or predict long term outside of being in a 24 - 7 lab.
Hormones, types of calories, activity, and biology all have a huge effect. And long term even small errors in these numbers can have big impacts on weight.
While being accurate about it is hard outside the lab it is very easy to tell where you are on the balance and how much out you are. Just count the calories you consume and weight yourself regularly. If you are gaining weight then you are eating too much, so lower the number of calories you are consuming, if you are losing weight then you are eating less than you are burning. If you weight remains stable then you are in balance. And the amount you are gaining/losing tells you how much of a surplus or deficit you are in.
Over time you can then change the amount you eat by I few hundred calories at a time and you will see yourself move on that balance point. If anything else changes but your intake remains the same then it is likely your calories out that has changed. But even if technically you are digesting less for some reason it does not really matter - the bigger/easier leaver you have to pull is the number you are eating.
Because you are measuring the final output - your weight - it is fairly accurate over time and helps you track actual progress. There is no need to get super accurate about how much your body adobes, shits out or you burn off at rest or through exercise - those might be important in the lab but in real life the far easier to measure weight and how much you are eating is more important.
I can attest from a personal anecdote that eating plant-based makes it enormously easier to cut calories. Provided you don’t decide to take the costliest, least healthy route of basically living off heavily processed plant-based substitutes or the cheapest, second-least healthy route of living off pasta, ramen, and cereal, you’re likely on a diet with plenty of healthy mono- and polyunsaturated fats (and pretty minimal saturated), a high amount of proteins from nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes, a moderate amount of carbs in the form of cereal and simple sugars from fruits, and an absolute abundance of fiber (of which 95% Americans don’t get enough).
Even just incorporating something like tofu into your diet helps a bunch, because it’s basically all protein and good fats while having just a small amount of carbs. Per calorie, it does the best job I’ve ever seen of making you feel full for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The talk around weight loss is kinda crazy and a lot of it is dominated by pseudoscience.
However, we are pretty much positive that eating at a calorie deficit will result in weight loss in 99.9% of cases and you aren’t going to be the 0.1%. There’s a lot of anecdotal data about how eating too little will make you stop losing weight or even gain more weight because of your ‘metabolism’, but no controlled studies that show that to be a significant contributor without other causes. It’s not some magical metabolism trick, you’re just cheating on your metrics and doing less because you’re tired and cranky and have no energy because you aren’t eating right.
Saying that, eating at a massive deficit can definitely make you feel like shit and will make it hard to exercise, do not recommend. You will also likely have a part of your brain dedicated to fantasizing about food 24/7 and your libido will likely be in the trash if that matters to you. This will be very hard to maintain, and you have to remember that there’s never going to be a day where you can go back to eating like ‘normal’. Your current normal is why you need to lose weight and your goal is to eventually establish a new baseline.
Lastly, highly recommend against adding calories back due to exercise. We don’t have a lot of good data about there being any reliable indicators of actual calories burned available to the average person and you’ll find a tremendous amount of super variable answers when you find instances where people tried to actually test the estimates you see online. The time you put into exercise isn’t about weight loss, it will help, but it’s a bonus just for you because you deserve to have the body that you want.
The implication of your post is that you’re struggling to get to 1500 calories, but you’re also trying to lose, presumably, a large amount of weight.
If you’re overweight, you clearly know how to eat enough calories. Eat more, like you were doing when you became overweight in the first place.
If you’re not overweight and you’re struggling to eat more than 1,000 calories, you should probably see a therapist about a potential eating disorder.
More broadly, eating 1,000 calories can make losing weight harder because you are likely to lower your basal metabolism and giving yourself less energy to burn calories through activity.
The math of 1,000 calories/day works out theoretically and may seem enticing (“I will lose an entire extra pound a week!”), but in practice it can often make things more challenging than it needs to be.
The simple fact is that losing weight is a long-term process. And, in general, you can gain a lot more weight in a month than you can lose, so weight gain/loss are not symmetrical processes.
In terms of your specific question about “eating back” calories from exercise: in general, you should indeed increase your calorie consumption if you are regularly exercising. Whether you should eat back every calorie you burn is far too nuanced a question related to exercise routine, health goals, basal metabolism, diet, etc. to answer in the abstract.
my approach is to focus on hunger, obviously presuming you don’t have some specific health issue regarding that.
Want to lose weight? Don’t sate your hunger fully, wait until you’re a bit hungrier than normal before you start eating.
Want to keep your weight? Eat when you’re hungry, stop eating when you stop being hungry.
Want to gain weight? You might be able to guess this one: Don’t wait until you’re really hungry to eat, and eat until you don’t want to eat any more.
One important thing when doing this is to eat slowly and consider how different foods affect satiation.
It takes a while for your stomach to register how much you’ve eaten, the general rule is to put down your utensils between every bite and making sure to chew it really really well, it should be a homogenous mush.
And something like vegetables will fill more space in the stomach with less calories; complex carbs will keep you sated for longer than sugar, and getting a good amount of protein and fat together with carbs slows down the processing of the carbs even more so you stay satiated for as long as possible.
