Ok, so since the chair breaking incident on Monday at work I've been really doing this thing. I have cut out sweets completely. I'm on day two, but it's a big step for me especially because TOM just arrived.
I have limited my portions, basically eating 1/3 of what I ate before at meals.
no bread, but have decided to eat about a cup of rice per day 1/2 in the morning and 1/2 for lunch.
I'm eating only raw veggies for snacks.
I've limited my meat to fish or chicken
one dairy item 2% or fatfree
no meals after 6 just a couple of veggies if I'm really hungry
and tons of water
I did my calorie intake on fitday and it only showed that I ate 835 calories yesterday. I wasn't overly hungry and felt great no temptation.
Today I'm doing good, just a little more hungry but ate some raw veggies and was good. I know that everywhere I read has said to eat at least 1,500 calories. Is that necessary? I've been eating something every two hours except after 6 pm so I don't think my body is starving.
Is this something that you can keep doing forever? It sounds more like dieting than a permanent change you can maintain. You don't need to cut out EVERYTHING "bad," just eat a lot less of it. Otherwise you will be tempted to binge.
I would suggest adding more fruit, and basically a little more of everything to your diet. If you eat too little, yeah, you won't lose weight - because your body thinks it should be preserving since it is receiving so little calories (aka "starvation mode"). Don't be afraid to eat too much; just focus on listening to your body and consuming everything in moderation!
Yes. You really need to eat that many calories. It is nearly impossible to meet all of your nutritional needs (vitamins, minerals, protein, necessary fat, etc) on under 1200 calories a day. Nutritional deficiencies don't show up at first, but they'll come back to bite you over time.
You need to eat more. You might add some protein to your snacks (like string cheese, or greek yogurt w/ berries...yum), which will help you stay full longer and get some extra protein in. You might also try cooking your vegetables in a healthy fat.
The bottom line - don't be afraid of food! Food is necessary to fuel our bodies, to make us strong...and is fun and delicious! It is NOT your enemy, and you don't need to limit it so strictly. You will feel better, lose more consistently, and ultimately have better benefits for your body if you eat more. ESPECIALLY starting at your size and height, you need to eat more. I'd agree that 1500 a day should be your absolute minimum.
I tired that and it only lead to binge eating down the line because by body was craving food and vitamins.
I agree with Amanda....at the VERY least eat 1.500. I am 5'5" and 238 and I aim for anywhere between 1.200 and 1.500. If I stay between those lines I know I am ok and have had a great day!
And if you aren't apart of the dailyplate.com or some other calorie counter I totally suggest it. It has help me see what I need more of in my diet and less of. I can track my workouts and food in take without writing everything down a piece of paper I loose!! It's a real blessing.
It kinda makes sense that you aren't so hungry, at first. If you were a prehistoric woman and you weren't getting enough to eat, you'd want your body to be cool with it - in the short term. You don't want to be too hungry or weak to get out there and find some food!
In my experience, you just can't keep up that kind of caloric restriction long term. In my case, it led to helpless binging. After binging, I restricted, which led to another terrible cycle.
Your body is your car, it needs fuel. Give it what it needs to run perfectly!
I just wanted to add, when you said "I can do this" it struck a chord with me. In the past, when I would start one of my super restrictive diets, I was generally suffused with a sense of purpose/well being. I always thought I could do it. I wonder if that sense of energy/purpose is biological - extra energy to go find some food to eat?
From my own experience with eating less than 1000 calories a day, that feeling doesn't last very long.
Sorry! It was just an intriguing thought, I always like to wonder WHY my body does what it does, surely it doesn't do things on accident. It's only purpose is to keep me alive, that's why it does everything it does. What purpose would it have to make a starving person feel good (in the short term?) To go chase that mammoth and get food!
The American College of Sports Medicine suggests that a women not go below 1200 calories a day, and 1800 for men. Not eating enough calories for a sustained period of time will cause your body to enter 'starvation mode.' In this state your body cuts lean body mass (which is metabolically active tissue) to lower the amount of calories that you need daily to maintain your body weight.
I have read that for weight loss eat 12-13 calories per pound of body weight, which for me personally equals 2400 a day. I eat 2000 a day now because I have knee conditions holding me back from my usual exercise routine, but before I started my workout hiatus I was eating 2400 a day, as 6 400 calories meals a day.
You may also try the Harris-Benedict formula to determine your Basal Metabolic Rate.
Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X wt in kg) + (5 X ht in cm) - (6.8 X age in years)
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X ht in cm) - (4.7 X age in years)
1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs.
Now to find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure(TDEE) multiply that by one of the below activity factors:
Activity factor
Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Moderately active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extremely Active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or
2 X day training, marathon, football camp,
contest, etc.)
I was running 9-12 miles a week and doing push-up and sit-up routines also, so I chose Moderate Activity level of 1.55 x BMR.
If you purchase a body fat caliper you can get a more accurate result using the Katch-McArdle formula: BMR (men and women) = 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg). And multiply the result by an appropriate activity level.
Thanks for the input, I have another question about this. The reason why I limited myself so much at first, because my friend said that she did this for a month and really jump started the weight loss, after the month she began to eat a little more and was at 1,400 calories. Would my body not do good for a month and then continue eating healthy but with more calories? Just a thought, I mean I don't want to be unhealthy but I almost feel like it's all or nothing, which I know is not right but I've never been good at moderation, hints why I've been big all my life.
I still don't understand that if I'm eating 800-900 calories a day how that would be considered starving myself. I'm so new to all of this, thanks for your patience.
800-900 calories per day will probably cause your body to go into "Starvation Mode", which is what people are referring to when you say you're starving yourself.
The first thing to consider is that, depending on our size, we need more or less fuel (calories) to survive. So, for example, a woman who is 5'0" and 100 lbs might only burn 1200-1300 calories a day going about her daily routine. She has less to carry around, and her body does less work carrying itself through the day. You, at your current weight and height, will burn a lot of calories just living your life...moving throughout the day. Keep that in mind.
The second thing to consider is that our bodies are SMART. They evolved to keep us from dying in times of famine, when food couldn't be readily found around every corner. So our bodies are engineered to respond to famine (read: getting way fewer calories a day than we burn) by slowing down our "engines", burning fewer and fewer calories a day. Your "engine" is your metabolism. When your body feels as though it is entering a famine, based on very low calorie consumption, your metabolism will slow dramatically. This is the body's way of conserving energy so you don't die from starvation, and is a real and measured effect of very low calorie diets.
So by eating 800-900 calories, you're essentially telling your body "there isn't enough food around, so we've got to conserve!" which slows your metabolism down. Once you've done that, you actually burn fewer calories each day, so losing weight gets harder and harder to do.
In addition, you're "starving" yourself of essential nutrients. As I stated earlier, it is almost impossible (outside of medically supervised, carefully formulated plans) to get enough protein, healthy fat, vitamins, and minerals on a very low calorie diet. Without a careful balance of the above things, you can cause yourself all sorts of health problems...gallstones, nutritional deficiencies, etc. A very low calorie diet (defined as a diet with around 800 calories or less a day) should never, ever be undertaken without a doctor's supervision, because of these complications.
Please read this quote from Glory that she wrote earlier today, in another thread:
Quote:
Take a deep breath and listen to me for a second - the kind of desperation that makes people want to "jumpstart" their weight loss doesn't tend to lead to permanent success. I say this from my own personal experience, where I always thought if I can cut some calories and lose some weight, I can cut MORE calories and lose MORE weight.
That's what I did finally. I looked at my 20 year dieting history, where I went from a 140 lb high school sophomore to a 200 lb 35 year old woman and tried to figure out why I could lose weight, but why did I ALWAYS gain the weight back AND MORE.
It was like a lightbulb - I realized I always wanted to "diet" for a short while and then quit dieting and eat "normally." Once I wrapped my brain around that concept, everything became so much easier. I changed life almost exactly 4 years ago - here I am, 70+ lbs lighter, a size 6, healthy and happy with a closet full of adorable clothes - maintaining my weight loss, slender for the rest of my life.
Okay, I typed a lot, but what I was trying to say is please don't think "jump start, quick, fast results" please think "how can I be slender and healthy for the rest of my life." That kind of planning requires healthy, sustainable choices that you can STICK TO long term.
Your jumpstart may work just fine, you can easily lose 15 lbs, quickly. Then what. As hard as may seem, losing the weight really isn't the ultimate problem. Keeping the weight off is the key.
I just wanted to add, when you said "I can do this" it struck a chord with me. In the past, when I would start one of my super restrictive diets, I was generally suffused with a sense of purpose/well being. I always thought I could do it.
And in control/empowered? That was my thing. The more I restricted the food, the more I would get practically euphoric with the feeling of being so In Control - when actually that euphoria was probably my poor body dumping chemicals into my brain to try and keep me from just laying down and dying of starvation. Of course, eventually, the old survival thing would kick in and I would devour that entire mammoth in one sitting - which then sent me into a spiral of depression because "I had no control"
And, what Mandalinn said about long term nutritional deficiencies coming back to bite you is dead on. After too much time on limited caloric intake, you might not only stop losing but actually end up gaining weight on that same meager menu you described - mostly because eventually (but sooner than you expect) little things like your liver and kidneys will just give up and quit trying to get by on what you're giving them and do what ever it takes to survive. If that means turning every drop of toothpaste you accidentally swallow into fat in case they need it later, or canabalizing each other to keep going that's exactly what they will do. Voice of experience here.
Gaaak - sorry that came out sounding like some sort of scared straight lecture or something but I get so peeved with myself for wasting a lot of years doing things the totally wrong way that I just hate to see someone else teetering on the edge of going down that same path.
If you've done the "starvation diet" thing in the past, you might be OK for a very (and I emphasize VERY - no more than a week) short period of time starting out as low as you are - I actually started at 1000 but had the OK from my doctor because I was transitioning from eating 99.9% processed convenience and fast foods to almost all whole foods and felt like I was literally grazing all day long and going to explode trying to eat enough of those super filling veggies to get 1200 calories - And, I should add, that I didn't actually see the scale start to budge until I got myself up around 1250 to 1300 (I'm now up to between 1400 & 1500 and still gradually adding ). If you don't have a nutritionally sympathetic doctor, I don't think you should go any lower than 1200 on your own. You can add almost 100 calories here and there pretty easily with just a few raw almonds or a hard boiled egg - or my fave: a cup of lite chocolate soy milk over ice. And, the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me came from the folks here at 3FC - Direct quote "Plan, plan, plan". I use fitday to plan what I'm going to eat tomorrow - then while dinner is cooking, I pack up everything I need to bring to work with me the next day so I can just grab it out of the fridge on my way out the door. Really saves that end of the day "hunt" to get in those last few calories that so often ends up as a bag of chips in front of the TV .
Last edited by yoyonomoreinvegas; 06-25-2008 at 05:48 PM.
ooooh light chocolate soy milk... haven't had that since I moved out of my mom's house. I should invest in some of that. haha
Anyway everyone has said a lot of stuff about eating more and I totally agree. It is sooooo important... especially since you have such a long way to go. If you are dead set on utilizing your motivation then just do it for a couple days at a time. Plenty of people (I am one of them) benefit more from a fluctuating diet... here is my example--
I got the same motivational natural appetite suppressant when I realized how far off track I had gotten (full time student plus working 60 hours a week just made me forget everything I was working for). So I started eating about 800 cals a day. But I only did it for about 4 days. I hadn't started getting hungry but I knew I would go into starvation mode so I started adding more calories. I ate 1200-1400 for 2 days and then bumped to 1600 for 2 and then 2000 (which is the amount I am supposed to be eating for my height and activity level). And after a few days of that I got the supper motivated feeling back and went a day at 800 cals. and then back up to 1800. I've been doing it for about a month and so far I've lost 8 lbs. So thats the safe steady weight loss you should be looking for in any plan.
If you want to do an "all or nothing" approach (and I am that kind of person too) I would recommend getting a specific plan that fluctuates calories. That way you can follow a very strict diet, but some days you will eat more and others you won't. But you will always be eating healthy and that is the most important thing. I believe Glamour magazine online can map out your daily calories if you are interested in this type of diet. glamour.com You have to create a profile, but its totally free to use, you don't need to subscribe to the magazine or anything.
Again... the stuff that everyone else said is great info. I just thought I'd present you with another option that seems to be working for me. Because for me... every week there are days that I am super motivated and days that I am not. When I am on this plan, I can still have my "cheat days" and end up on top. Just remember cheating doesn't mean eating pizza and fries-- just more healthy calories.
Also, if anyone knows more than I do about this please post a response. I never talked to a doc about it... so there could be some fatal flaw in my logic. THANKS!
Ok, so yesterday when I was reading everyone's comments it made me a little discouraged because I took it personal. Like everyone was saying that I can't lose weight.... which I know that's not what anyone is saying. It's funny how we can pick and choose what we "hear" when people say things. So I started reading some of your weight loss stories. I see now where you are coming from.
So yesterday I added more calories. Today I actually had a healthy good breakfast. I decided that I would take advice and have breakfast be my largest calorie intake and decrease at lunch, and decrease more at supper. In the past it was the opposite. Breakfast my smallest, dinner my largest. I feel great this morning and since I didn't eat after 6:30 last night, I was welcoming my breakfast this morning at 6 am.
I moved out to CA four months ago because I was fleeing an abusive relationship. I got counseling, and dealt with root issues in me. I feel great about who I am so now I just want to be healthy physically. I guess that's why at first I cut my calories so much. But like everyone has said this is a lifestyle change not a quick fix. I'm very excited about being healthier and about my journey.
I do wake up in the morning so thankful and why I say I can do this is because I can do this... whatever this is..... for me it's life and really live. No more being afraid. I was afraid for my life when I moved here, then I was afraid of trusting, and the list goes on.
I'm no longer afraid. I will live my life, get healthy, and help others who have been through some of the same things I have been. I thank each of you for encouraging me and steering me on the right road.
I definitely didn't mean to imply in my post yesterday that you couldn't lose weight!! I just have done the extreme low calorie diet before and ultimately, it left me miserable and in worse shape than when I started. I don't want those feelings for you or for anyone else.
Weight loss is such a personal journey, and I think many of us get so tired of being heavy that we are willing to do anything, anything! to take the weight off. Once we make up our minds to DO IT we want the weight off RIGHT THIS SECOND. I say this, because that was me, I have lived that experience, that feeling.
One summer in college, I decided that I was going to lose weight. I wasn't that big, about 160, I guess (but it was a personal high). Using Dexatrim, all I ate every day was a bowl of Rice Krispies in the morning and an orange at lunch. I was also working two jobs - at Busch Gardens in Fl during the day and a movie theatre at night. I also decided to join a gym and do an aerbics class every morning before work.
I really did feel great at first - what Yoyo said about being "in control" really hits me. I felt euphoric, happy, in control and the weight did fly off. I'm actually a little fuzzy on when I started my big plan, sometime in May, I guess. I know I got down to 138 lbs. I know exactly when my diet ended - July 4. I went to a picnic, decided to have "just a few" O'Boise potato chips and I binged helplessly, out of control for the rest of the day. The day ended with me miserable, crouched next to a toilet, bloated, dizzy and sick, wishing I could throw up all the junk I ate all day.
I gained the weight back so quickly, I have 3 permanent stretch marks on my belly to remind me of this sad incident.
So, that was a miserable experience.
Let me tell you about a happier July, July 2004 when I decided to give up the idea that 1000 calorie days would make me lose weight faster.
If you read my story, you know the long version. The short version is I gave up dieting. Instead of a short term, horrible diet, I embarked on a lifetime love affair with me and healthy eating. It is love - I love me, more than I ever have and I still love food and look forward to eating all my healthy meals.
I read what you wrote about starting over in CA - that sounds great, good for you One of the great things about CA is all the fabu produce - this is a great time of year to start eating well. Is there a farmer's market in your area or a CSA?
You DO have a couple of WONDERFUL CSA options if you want locally grown produce...PM me if you want details. I've used two in the area and cannot speak highly enough of them.
I did go to a farmer's market last weekend in Citrus Heights, it was pretty good and I found a couple of website with the schedule. I keep hearing so many different ways to lose weight.
What's a good resource to eat and cook healthy meals? I see myself starting to fear food and I don't want that especially for the rest of my life since this is a lifestyle change.
Like tonight for instance, I have an hour and half to kill while I'm waiting for a meeting that starts at 6:30 and I have errands that I'm going to do but I was like what I can eat? I have veggies that I packed for the day that I will eat, but I need to have a good healthy meal, I need more calories and I don't know where to eat or what to eat and I will not just eat anything. With my veggies and two boiled egg whites already added in that I will eat I'm at 879 and I'm shooting for 1,200. Any suggestions? I won't be at home so not sure what to eat.
I can do this... but am I starving myself?
). If you don't have a nutritionally sympathetic doctor, I don't think you should go any lower than 1200 on your own. You can add almost 100 calories here and there pretty easily with just a few raw almonds or a hard boiled egg - or my fave: a cup of lite chocolate soy milk over ice. And, the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me came from the folks here at 3FC - Direct quote "Plan, plan, plan". I use fitday to plan what I'm going to eat tomorrow - then while dinner is cooking, I pack up everything I need to bring to work with me the next day so I can just grab it out of the fridge on my way out the door. Really saves that end of the day "hunt" to get in those last few calories that so often ends up as a bag of chips in front of the TV 
.
One of the great things about CA is all the fabu produce - this is a great time of year to start eating well. Is there a farmer's market in your area or a CSA?
