Hi,

I'm re-entering the calorie counting world. I find it much easier to stay within my calorie goal by skipping lunch. I usually eat a 250 cal breakfast at 7am then eat a large dinner by 4 pm with a couple 100 calorie snacks at night. Since I just started counting, I haven't seen any results yet. My question is, if a calorie is a calorie, this should work just fine for me, right? The only hard part is restricting the binge eating at dinner time. By then I'm really hungry...

One more question...fitday suggests that I restrict my calories to 930 a day. Is that too little? I don't think I can get into a regular exercise schedule and have a very sedentary lifestyle because of school. Is 930 calories/day too little to maintain?

You should NEVER eat below 1200 calories a day or your body will go into starvation mode. The reason you are so hungry i because you aren't eating often enough. You should be eating 4-6 small meals a day. You should never feel hungry when you eat throughout the day. try eating when - and I know this sounds weird- you aren't really hungry. You will probably nee dto retrain your body to eat every 2-3 hours. This keeps your metabolism going faster as well. Example: 300 for breakfast-150 for snack- 300 for lunch- 150 for snack - 300 for dinner. You should only drink water unless you have a cup of something else but count it into your total...BEWARE SUGARS IN JUICE. If you are drinking your 8 cups of water a day, that will also make your hunger curb. Water is one of the most powerful appetite suppressants.Most of the time your body seems to be saying it's hungry, it's really saying it is thirsty and dehydrated. Oh, and no snacking after dinner.
Take it from someone who knows and doesn't always take her own advice. Whenever I ignore the things I know, I don't lose anything. My weight may go down a couple pounds and rebound up again... but it doesn't actually go down. I've lost 119 lbs. It took a little over a year. I started eating 400 calories in the last bit of October through November, December, and January and went down only 5 lbs in those months.. I had lost 106 before I did that in less than 12 months so I don't know what possessed me to do what I did. It really slowed down my metabolism. I guess I did it because I thought I needed to do something drastic as I wasn't really overweight any more and I wanted to rush to the finish line quicker... but it failed.
Ideally, you should eat between 1200-1500 calories a day and make sure to exercise.

Good luck!

By the way- exercise, even if it is a quick walk, bike ride, or swim, is soo important. You may think you don't have time but there is always time for something. You just have to want it and get into the routine. I'm not suggesting 8 hours a day or anything crazy. Sure, 1 or 2 hours is great but if you only have 20 minutes, that is good enough. Everything contributes.

Think of your metabolism like a campfire. It keeps your body heated up and moving (through burning calories). Every time you eat, you're throwing a log on the fire, stoking it. When you skip meals, the campfire dies out. Then, if you dump a huge bunch of logs on it right before you go to sleep for the night, it's wasted and stored because you don't need it. I lost 70lbs concentrating as much on WHEN I ate as WHAT I ate. The weight dropped off (of course, I watched my calories like a hawk).

Trust me when I say that eating at least 3 squares a day will take some getting used to, especially if your sort of using dinner as a comfort with higher cals. But you will feel so much better and lose faster if you don't skip meals. Remember this quote, "breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper."

If there's anything I've learned from this site is...1 eating below 1200 can be harmful and 2 eating breakfast, lunch and dinner are vital. I never use to eat breakfast, which made me scarf down food by lunch time. Now I listen to my body and eat when it says to, which is three meals and two snacks per day. Plus my 9 cups of water. Water TRULY makes a HUGE difference.

Good Luck!!

I really like the way this is described ~ very visual, and it clicked with me.

To the OP: I agree with the others that anything under 1,000 is just not good daily. If you are skipping meals and you are starving by the end of the day, then this is not a lifestyle that is healthy for your body. It's ok to eat calories to keep your body going!

A calorie is not just a calorie. It matters a lot what that calorie comes from and when it is consumed, like the other posters here have said. If you restrict calories you will most likely lose weight, but that doesn't mean that you're getting healthier or that you're losing at an optimal rate.

I know this isn't exactly your question, but I've been reading a lot recently about how our bodies respond to glucose and how diabetes develops, for instance. (Someone please correct me if I get any of this wrong.) When you eat a meal with lots of carbohydrates (like your dinner, probably), your body produces a bunch of insulin to get that glucose into your cells. But if there is unused insulin left around after all the glucose is gone, it will make you hungry for more carbohydrates. Excess insulin in your blood can also cause damage to your cells so resisting your hunger is not a solution either. So you can't just think about your total calories in a day but rather how your body is going to respond to and use those calories depending on what they are from and when they are eaten.

I agree with the other commenters that I have been more successful in weight loss and controlling hunger by eating 5-6 small meals per day. And yes, sometimes I eat when I'm not hungry because I know I need food at that time or that if I wait I'll be ravenous later.

I eat 8 times/day....basically every 2 hours!

It has more to do with refined carbohydrates and different people's bodies react differently. So if you eat a piece of white bread which is a high glucose load (GL), the sugars from the bread is released into your system quickly and thus your body responds with a spike of insulin. There can be insulin left over which can make you feel sluggish and get cravings. On the other hand, something with a lower GL such as a sweet potato, the sugars from the sweet potato are released slower into the body, therefore your body releases insulin in a more controlled manner rather than a huge spike. The end result is there isn't a bunch of insulin leftover.

There is nothing wrong with skipping meals. I've been using intermittent fasting for over a year now and it has helped me reduce my overall calorie intake very easily and effectively. Your body will not go into starvation mode if you don't eat every 2-3 hours. In fact, the body was never meant to constantly be in a fed state. Low calorie days (<1,000) are ok, but I would space them out and not do more than one consecutively.

I intermittently fast too, eating frequently increases my hunger and I find it hard to eat 100-200 calorie snacks.
I have very little to no appetite until early afternoon so I mostly don't eat breakfast, I am not then starving by lunch. If you are not hungry for lunch and you feel like skipping it suits your lifestyle and also if you don't find yourself ravenous by dinner then I would say go for it.
Having said all of this I don't believe you should eat so few calories, you can make a bigger deficit by adding exercise if you aren't already, then you can a a bit more calories. I hope you find something that works for you

With dieting the thing you are going to find is that people swear by what has worked for them. That is because whatever system they have discovered that they have been able to maintain is going to be the one that has been successful when other have failed them.


I have friends that swear by eating 5-6 times a day, not letting your body go into starvation mode, etc. Truth is, scientifically that is not really accurate BUT the point is, it has worked for them because it's a system they have adapted and been able to stick to. They would fail on intermittent fasting because it's would cause them to binge and they wouldn't have the confidence in it.

I have just as many friends, however, that have lost weight on intermittent fasting. I know several that pick 6 to 8 hour windows where they simply don't eat. Say they get up at 7am, they may not allow themselves to eat until 2pm or 3pm. Your body gets used to whatever schedule you put it on.

Think about the old farmers and laborers. Do you think they were able to eat every 2 to 3 hours? No, they ate a big breakfast, small lunch, and the biggest meal was dinner.

The point is, find something that is do-able for you! Do you need the structure of pre-planning and knowing what you are going to eat, and making sure to eat it at certain times? Is it easier for you to wait and then eat within a window of time? Also, you need to make sure you aren't using intermittent fasting as an excuse to binge on bad foods when you do eat.

Good luck!

I must respectfully DISAGREE with this statement. A calorie is ENERGY or HEAT...if we want our internal furnace to keep BURNING...we must regularly supply it with ENERGY to form this heat (if that makes any sense...lol!)

In any event...MY BODY absolutely needs to be fed every couple of hours (sometimes every hour)...I also notice that my body temperature has gone up since eating this way. My fat loss has been linear for the past 5+ months and I don't retain unnecessary bloat/water weight.

Again...you must find what works for you as we are all different. I, for one, could never do any diet that requries me to be hungry like a fasting diet...I MUST EAT...I LOVE FOOD...this is how I got here..granted..but I truly would rather be fat than to starve!

I don't like eating 5-6 meals a day. I actually find that if I eat too much for breakfast (eating like a queen) I end up continuing to eat more throughout the day. I have found that 3-4 meals per day are the best for me but I haven't quite hit my stride yet. It is a work in progress.

As for what FitDay said, I had another person remind me that when you are exercising you are also reducing your calories during the day. For awhile, when I was keeping my food log (which I still do) after I would exercise and knew how many calories I burned, usually by some electronic apparatus that was measuring it at the time, then I would cross off the calorie equivalent on my food log. For example, if I burned 198 calories by walking on the treadmill for 1 hour then I would cross off a food item that was equal to that. It then starts to make sense. By really seeing the "ying and yang" of calories in and calories out, I actually understand the biochemistry behind weight lose. I saw consistent weight lose as a result. Livestrong.com has an extensive directory of calories burned during all kinds of activities. Once you start counting all of them, 50 calories burned while at a computer for an hour, for example, you start realizing that none of this is a static entity; we are constantly renewing our life source. Use the knowledge to your advantage. Make it work for you!

I don't like skipping meals because it can create a desire to binge when you do get in front of food. I may "shift" my meals a bit on a non work day, though. Breakfast at 10:30, lunch at 3:00, dinner at 8:00. Space them out a bit, with a little more hunger time just beforehand.

So far I find that eliminating between-meal snacks is important. The "5 or 6 feeds a day" technique would be risky since it creates more opportunities to fall off plan. 3 meals a day is enough to stay fed and also lose some. It's working, and I'm content with that.