Hi everyone, I hope this post is taken well. I lost about 35-40 lbs with lifestyle changes. Just started exercising and eating smaller portions and healthier food overall. I never tracked my calories, but I developed a general idea of how many calories were in certain foods and used that as a framework in conjunction with making sure I’m getting proper nutrition (eating protein, fats, veggies, etc).
I feel like I’ve seen a lot of posts on here where people are eating diets of 1500 calories and under, some even weighing over 200 pounds. A lot of the posts about plateauing on here are from said people.
I am posting this to hopefully encourage people to consider upping their calories to a more moderate deficit. What happens when you are eating so few calories (like 1200 or slightly more) is that your biochemistry adapts to reduce the amount of calories you burn. So yes, CICO always holds, but your diet is highly related to calories out, it doesn’t only make up calories in.
Eating at huge deficits, even if you do not experience a plateau, is going to make it really difficult to maintain your weight loss. It is what causes a lot of “yo-yo” dieting, where people gain and lose and gain and lose in a cycle, sometimes even gaining back more than they were initially. Personally, I kept my caloric intake around 2000 calories a day (with exercise) for much of my weight loss. I weigh 130lbs now and lost the weight over a (just under) 2 year period. That was a slow weight loss, yes, but I maintain it effortlessly because of that and have not caused my hormone balance to alter in a way that makes it extremely difficult to keep the weight off.
My metabolism is healthy because I never caused stress to it. You hear the idea that diets don’t work and weight loss is very difficult to maintain, but I have realized that much of that is due to the way people attempt to achieve it. If you are eating 1200 calories but burn 3200 a day, theoretically you should be losing pounds a week. However, this often seizes to be the case due to the way your body adapts. In fact, I’ve seen some posts on here with people seeing MORE weight loss when they increase their calories to no longer be so low and restrictive, and I’ve also seen this with people I know personally. Your body is not a machine. There is more to it than the simple math equations.
If this helps even one person considering using more sustainable methods to lose weight, then this post was worth it. If you want to reply saying everything I’m saying is a “myth” as has happened before, then that’s fine too. But for those willing to look beyond the rigid rules they’ve developed and want to avoid unhealthy yo-yo dieting AKA refeeder syndrome, please consider a more moderate deficit.
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