[julie14401]

I am 19 years old, 5'1, and I weigh 105 pounds. I would like to weigh about 98-100. According to calculators, my bmr (calories I would need to maintain if I laid in bed all day) is 1300. I am not really sure if my life style is lightly active or moderately active. Lightly would require about 1800 and moderately about 2000 to maintain. I am a college student so I probably walk around campus for about an hour everyday at a moderate pace. I also go to the gym about 4-5 times per week for an hour. I do cardio and weight lifting and burn about 300 calories during each gym session.

For two weeks I ate about 900 calories per day. I lost four pounds initially but then gained two back after a week and a half. For the past week and a half I have been eating 1350 per day and gained back the last two and am still continuing to gain at a rate of about .2 pounds per day. It doesn't really make sense that I am gaining on such a low amount but, I feel like I am eating too much. I would be completely satisfied eating about 150 less calories than I am eating currently. I don't get hungry very often. Is it possible that i just have a slow metabolism and I only need about 1200 to maintain? or is my metabolism still recovering from when I was eating 900 calories per day?

Also, is it possible that the nutrition info on the labels I am reading are inaccurate? Most of the packaged food that I eat are prepared by my school but the nutrition labels come from Sodexo. Sodexo is the company where my school gets their food. I feel like there could definitely be discrepancies depending on who is preparing the food. For example, for lunch today I ate a salad with two small chicken breasts and probably about a cup of noodles in a creamy thai peanut sauce. The label said the meal was 360 calories, which I find very hard to believe. Without reading the label, i would guess the meal had about 525 calories.

[Nadya]

According to this, the labels could be wrong but how could you ever know?

The calculator I use would list you as Moderately Active and use 1.55 as the factor. I'd say that 900 calories is too low, especially when you consider that you aren't going to be living on 900 calories once you reach your target weight. I imagine losing those pounds is gonna be hard just because you are already in such good shape. Maybe you are being too hard on yourself? I thought I ate terribly this past week but I dropped 3 pounds anyways. Maybe that kind of break can be healthy, just ease up a little or change your workout routine.