The thing is, you just can't go lower than about 800-1000 calories a day for more than a few days for 2 reasons-
It will put your body in "starvation mode". Yes, you will lose weight, but your metabolism will be slower because your body attempts to hang on to anything it gets nutritionally to protect itself from starvation. And when you start eating normally again, the weight will come back.
If you keep your calories too low, when your weight loss plateaus, like it is doing now, you won't be able to drop your calorie level down to get it going again.
The 1350 calories a day is your basal metabolic rate. It's the number of calories your body will burn in a day just to function, like be awake, breathe, etc. The more active you are, the more calories you will burn. For instance-if you spend the day watching tv, taking care of kids, and doing some housework, you will probably burn about 200 or so more calories. Exercise will also increase it.
You CAN lose weight eating around 1500 calories a day if you create a calorie deficit with lots of exercise. If you are not exercising consistently, I would suggest keeping it more around the 1100-1200 range. If you don't exercise regularly, that's ok, but you will lose faster the more active you are.
Another thing you can try that has been working really well for me lately is called calorie cycling or zig-zagging. It works like this-
If your average calorie goal is 1200 per day, you increase or decrease every other day to come out with an average.
Day 1-1400 calories
Day 2-1000 calories
Day 3-1300 calories
Day 4-1100 calories
And so on. In other words, you do a higher calorie day and then a lower calorie day, to where when you add up all the calories and divide by the number of days, you get the original goal you had. For the above days, that's 4800 divided by 4=1200. It's alot to keep up with, but it's well worth it because it revs your metabolism by keeping your body guessing and giving it a boost in calories every other day.
I was losing alot slower before I tried the cycling.
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