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I put my info in one of them calorie burner deals and it states that I burn about 1900 per day just being alive. If I want to be down to 140 by Jan 15th what should my daily calorie intake be? Lets not consider exercise for this number. That gives me exactly 15 weeks from today. 25 pounds to loose. So I want to strive for loosing 1.5 to 2 pounds per week which is a good weight loss goal, right?
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Ok, so to lose the weight you want in the timeline you want, you have to lose 1.66 lbs per week. That means you have to have a calorie deficit of 5810 a week, or 830 a day.
You could, conceivably eat 1070 calories per day and achieve that goal. But there are a few of problems with that.
1 - Eating below 1200 calories a day, it will be very hard for you to get all the nutrition you need to properly fuel your body. Even if you don't go into a stall because of a decreased metabolism, you might suffer from other health related issues due to not getting enough nutrition - everything from fatigue to an increased susceptibility to things like colds and flu, to bad skin and hair and nails from not enough fat in your diet.
2 - If you reduce your nutrition that much, you will be burning muscle as well as fat. Burning muscle is bad for two reasons: One is obviously you're losing lean muscle which is simply not a good thing. The other is that when you lose muscle you further slow your metabolism, because muscle burns calories and fat doesn't. Even resting muscle burns more calories than an equal weight of fat does. So it's a vicious cycle - you burn muscle, which reduces your metabolism, which causes you to burn more muscle, which ... etc., etc.
3 - If you burn muscle and reduce your metabolism, when you begin eating normally again, you will put on fat really quickly. Eating doesn't rebuild lost muscle. Only working out builds lost muscle. So even if your metabolism re-stabilizes when you begin eating normally again, you'll have gained back fat where you had muscle before. You may still be within your weight guidelines, but you'll be "skinny fat" - in other words, within your weight range, but out of shape and jiggly.
4 - Continually eating below a reasonable level for proper nutrition can, eventually, permanently damage your metabolism, as many people here will tell you. You can read all the studies and so forth, but the truth is that the medical community (and everyone else for that matter) is WOEFULLY undereducated on nutrition. There is so little funding for nutritional studies and most doctors can only tell you the basics - and sometimes not even that.
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Now, if you consider exercise for your number you can lower your calories by 500 day, which means you'd eat 1400 calories a day, which is a reasonable number. And you'd plan to exercise off 300 calories a day, which can be done fairly easily with 30-40 mins of med to high intensity cardio or a combination of weight lifting and cardio.
The advantage to doing it this way is:
1 - You are eating enough to maintain proper nutrition. At 1400 calories, you have room to get all the protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals that you need to be healthy.
2 - You are building or at least maintaining your muscle volume when you exercise, which means you'll burn more fat than muscle, which means you won't be "skinny fat" when you lose the weight you want to lose.
3 - You're building or maintaining muscle volume by exercising which means you'll be maintaining or even increasing your metabolism. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism, which means the more calories you burn when you're not exercising, which makes weight loss and maintenance easier.
Make sense?
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