I’m trying to lose weight and was told that hwo I eat about 800-1000 calories a day is too low and lowers my metobolism which will prevent weight loss. I’ve looked up some meal plans and can’t really afford stuff like chicken breast, steak, or salmon every week. So that is why I’m wondering how I can eat 1500 calories a day. Are there some alternatives that I can do?
Also I’d like to ask, say I exercise and burn say 500 calories would I have to eat those calories back or no? I ask cuz I’ve been told yes and told no.
The implication of your post is that you’re struggling to get to 1500 calories, but you’re also trying to lose, presumably, a large amount of weight.
If you’re overweight, you clearly know how to eat enough calories. Eat more, like you were doing when you became overweight in the first place.
If you’re not overweight and you’re struggling to eat more than 1,000 calories, you should probably see a therapist about a potential eating disorder.
More broadly, eating 1,000 calories can make losing weight harder because you are likely to lower your basal metabolism and giving yourself less energy to burn calories through activity.
The math of 1,000 calories/day works out theoretically and may seem enticing (“I will lose an entire extra pound a week!”), but in practice it can often make things more challenging than it needs to be.
The simple fact is that losing weight is a long-term process. And, in general, you can gain a lot more weight in a month than you can lose, so weight gain/loss are not symmetrical processes.
In terms of your specific question about “eating back” calories from exercise: in general, you should indeed increase your calorie consumption if you are regularly exercising. Whether you should eat back every calorie you burn is far too nuanced a question related to exercise routine, health goals, basal metabolism, diet, etc. to answer in the abstract.
my approach is to focus on hunger, obviously presuming you don’t have some specific health issue regarding that.
Want to lose weight? Don’t sate your hunger fully, wait until you’re a bit hungrier than normal before you start eating.
Want to keep your weight? Eat when you’re hungry, stop eating when you stop being hungry.
Want to gain weight? You might be able to guess this one: Don’t wait until you’re really hungry to eat, and eat until you don’t want to eat any more.One important thing when doing this is to eat slowly and consider how different foods affect satiation.
It takes a while for your stomach to register how much you’ve eaten, the general rule is to put down your utensils between every bite and making sure to chew it really really well, it should be a homogenous mush.
And something like vegetables will fill more space in the stomach with less calories; complex carbs will keep you sated for longer than sugar, and getting a good amount of protein and fat together with carbs slows down the processing of the carbs even more so you stay satiated for as long as possible.
The talk around weight loss is kinda crazy and a lot of it is dominated by pseudoscience.
However, we are pretty much positive that eating at a calorie deficit will result in weight loss in 99.9% of cases and you aren’t going to be the 0.1%. There’s a lot of anecdotal data about how eating too little will make you stop losing weight or even gain more weight because of your ‘metabolism’, but no controlled studies that show that to be a significant contributor without other causes. It’s not some magical metabolism trick, you’re just cheating on your metrics and doing less because you’re tired and cranky and have no energy because you aren’t eating right.
Saying that, eating at a massive deficit can definitely make you feel like shit and will make it hard to exercise, do not recommend. You will also likely have a part of your brain dedicated to fantasizing about food 24/7 and your libido will likely be in the trash if that matters to you. This will be very hard to maintain, and you have to remember that there’s never going to be a day where you can go back to eating like ‘normal’. Your current normal is why you need to lose weight and your goal is to eventually establish a new baseline.
Lastly, highly recommend against adding calories back due to exercise. We don’t have a lot of good data about there being any reliable indicators of actual calories burned available to the average person and you’ll find a tremendous amount of super variable answers when you find instances where people tried to actually test the estimates you see online. The time you put into exercise isn’t about weight loss, it will help, but it’s a bonus just for you because you deserve to have the body that you want.
800-1000 calories a day is too low and lowers my metobolism which will prevent weight loss.
If you do it for real for a while, nothing can prevent weight loss.
I’ve looked up some meal plans and can’t really afford stuff like chicken breast, steak, or salmon every week.
Eat real vegetables and fruits. Fresh, where ever possible. You wouldn’t believe how cheap you can feed yourself if you do your cooking yourself.
Avoid all processed food. Avoid all sugar.
Frozen fruits and vegetables are also fine. Canned fruits in heavy syrups – not fine.
If Chicken breasts are out of budget then Eggs, Egg Whites, or Beans are probably going to be needed to hit some kind of protein macros.
Yeah I usually go for frozen fruits and veggies since they are “fresher” lol
They unironically might be the freshest fruits and vegetables in the store! So same here
Yeah I usually do my best to eat vegetables and fruits whenever I can at least. And I’m trying my best to cut back on sugar it’s hard lol but I’m getting there.
Liquid sugar is the worst, IMHO.
Things like soda, fruit juices, energy drinks,etc are way too easy to consume without realising just how much.
It’s very easy to consume ¼ of a pound of sugar a day in just a few drinks.
Drink water.
what has worked for me is just trying to skip out on sugary stuff as often as possible and instead eating regular food that i really enjoy, eventually i just stop really craving sweets that much and now the only sweets i tend to want is stuff like cinnamon rolls and chips, which is more savoury than sweet honestly.
cut back on sugar
One type of snack/dessert I do: get a slice of high-fiber bread (toasted, or not), and put a bit of honey or jam on it. Much better than a pastry, bc I can control exactly how much sugar is there.
I feel you, sugar is hard. I find it easier to eat a tiny bit of something sweet like once a week than to cut it altogether. My cravings are too strong when there’s no vision of fulfilling them at least a bit :)
be carefull with rapid weight loss though, my ex got gout because of it
Also gal bladder problems are a real threat when loosing weight quickly.
I’ve long said that the best place to loose weight is at the grocery store. You pretty much only ever go to the outside edge. Buy potatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, squash and zucchini, radishes, carrots and any other vegetables you like. Bulk is what works here. Then go buy what protein you can afford. Skip anything that has been processed beyond meat and milk.
“Avoid all sugar”
Right. Avoid fruits.
But seriously. Fruits have very little benefit for health. They have health benefits vegetables have, but with sugars also in them. Fruits are sugared veggies.
That’s such a dumb take. Fruits are like the second best thing after vegetables in their ration of satiation per calorie.
Added sugar is completely different beast from the sugar in fruits and vegetables.
You would need to eat an ungodly amount of fruits for it to be bad for your health.
They’re still in the “good for you” category, but completely unnecessary for health. Anything you can get from fruit you can get from vegetables and it reduces your sugar intake that way.
At this point, we can boil down everything to a nutrient paste with no flavor to be healthy. But very few people would be able to endure that.
This is a terrible advice to not eat fruits when trying to lose weight. The diet fatigue is real, and eating an apple can at least take off the edge when its getting harder in the later weeks. I know it did for me when I wanted to eat junk food.
And the goal is also to develop healthy habits, and having fruits add to the variety of available food.
I mean, you are technically correct, but it won’t help anyone trying to change their lifestyle.
Have you bothered reading anything OP has posted? They’re having issues getting up to 1500 calories a day and getting enough protein. Fruit won’t help them as much as pecans, veggies, avocado, some carbs, and eggs. Feeling full off fruit isn’t an issue they want.
You are the one with reading skills issue. OP said he doesn’t have money for the meal plans items.
Depending on where you are, eating fruits and veggies in season will be a lot less expensive and somewhat satiating if mixed with inexpensive fats and proteins.
Nuts are expensive as hell, avocado are expansive as well. Even super greens are getting expensive.
Sugared veggies is good. As you say, fruits do have the health benefits vegetables have, which is not “very little”. They’re full of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and above all, fiber. Sugar is not all bad either. Evolutionalrily, we probably like sugar exactly because it is present in fruits and eating fruits is beneficial for us. If you ate only fruits all day, then it would be bad for you, but I’m pretty sure in reasonable amounts fruits are an important part of a healthy diet.
Your mostly correct, except there are no fruits that are an important part of a healthy diet. You can have some as a treat or whatever, but they are not important, and simply do what veggies do, but with a spike of sugar.
Vegetables are just fancy nutrients, that’s why I only eat a flavourless calorie paste that contains all my essential vitamins.
If he’s undereating, maybe some sugar in moderation. Humans need calories, maybe a granola bar or something
Yes maybe, but strictly only the kind that you can see before you eat it (like, two pieces into your coffee)
Is that because you know exactly how much you’re using?
Yes.
And because this rule helps a lot with learning good habits.
Weight loss advice is nearly a religion. You’re going to have a million different people telling you that something absolutely is or isn’t a certain way. They’ll claim science isn’t science, that the body is magical and mystical and you won’t achieve your goals if you don’t do exactly X or y.
The body does some weird things when you start going into starvation mode but it’s not magic.
If you maintain a calorie deficit, eventually you will lose fat. You’ll also lose muscle.
The calculations for how many calories you actually burn doing something are kind of voodoo, they vary wildly per individual.
You create a calorie deficit so that your body will burn the fat. You work out so that your body will put more energy into building the muscle you’ll be losing. The only way you lose weight is through breathing out carbon dioxide. If you sit around sedentary that’s going to take a very long time.
Pick a target for how much weight you want to lose over a month. Pick a calorie deficit that makes sense to you. Weigh yourself every couple of days and calculate a sliding average. Tune the number of calories you’re eating after the first couple weeks to maintain your weight loss target.
You do need to be careful with extremely low calorie diets. You want to be monitored by a doctor and have regular blood tests to make sure stuff isn’t going awry.
If you want to go cheap, use a free intake monitoring app, eat eggs, beans and rice, try to cram some vegetables in there where you can. Don’t go out of your way to avoid fat but don’t guzzle it either. Shy away from processed carbs like bread and noodles. Don’t necessarily go keto, but keep your carbs in check.
Best advice in this thread. OP please read.
See if you can track down Weight Watchers stuff. The plan itself is expensive, but the basic approach is to simplify doing exactly what you describe. They formalize food categories, portion size, and simplified tracking. Alternatively, they have recipes meeting specific calorie goal, while also having good nutrient value
I second this, and they have a digital only plan that is just $10/month. You can use their app, which is actually very good, to track your food. They use a point system to simplify the process.
This helped me: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/what-should-you-eat/
Nice resource. I get good exercise and eat a lot of raw or unprocessed foods, but my portions are whack and there’s not a lot of consistency day to day. I’ve been wanting to clean up my diet for a while and I’m gonna add this to my planning document.
If you 1500 calories, then exercise and burn 500 calories, yes you would need to eat another 500 calories to reach 1500 calories.
Burning 500 calories through exercice is a lot
Man, I gotta be real with you. You aren’t going to be able to crowd source this. There’s just too much outdated information, well meaning but flawed advice, and outright bullshit online. Finding the up to date, good answers among the junk would only be possible if you already knew it.
The only reliable way to get good answers about bariatrics is going to specialists. Seriously, you can’t even totally rely on a general practitioner to be caught up, though you might get lucky with an internist. You can make do with nutritionists if they’re either fairly newly graduated, or you know they keep up on their subject.
Hell, there’s some specialists that lag behind in terms of proper, evidence driven best practices.
And the thing nobody online will likely admit is that there isn’t a single, complete answer because part of how fat loss and gain works is governed by individual circumstances regarding hormones, metabolism, and capabilities, which still ignores external factors in making a prescribed weight loss plan work. If your broke ass lives in a food desert, and you’re limited to the corner store for the majority of your supplies, the task gets much harder, just as one example of what I mean by that.
Any medications you’re on, that’s got to be factored in to an overall plan, even OTC meds, supplements, etc.
Now, there are strategies that are fairly reliable in helping manage calorie intake, like going predominantly plant based. You’ll have to study up and make sure that whatever plan you set up has the whole gamut of nutrients you’ll need, but as long as a food desert isn’t in play, that’s usually easy enough. The good news about that is that the core foods tend to be very affordable, and easy to buy in bulk as long as you have storage space.
Another piece of good news is that if you’re using exercise as part of your overall plan, not only will you give yourself a wider space for intake, but it improves your health no matter what weight you’re at along the way. I mean, losing excess fat is great, but it isn’t going to magically make your cardiovascular system work at its best.
And, again, you can only take this comment with a grain of salt because you have no way of knowing that I’m up to date on the interrelated subjects to a degree high enough to be useful. For all you know, I’m thirty years behind on things. And, truth is that the general subject matter isn’t a high priority for my reading time. I do put a bit of time every week into digging through journals and publications with a focus on medical shit, but bariatrics isn’t something I’m into for my own curiosity. So I have to be at least a little behind as default because I’m always behind even on my favorite subjects because I can’t devote enough time to it all.
Weight management is something you have to take on as a long term project where you adapt along the way. You can’t look at it as weight loss either, because just losing excess fat is only part of the project. You have to keep it off and improve your overall health.
Eating healthier is not nearly as complicated as this post makes it sound, unless you have unusual underlying medical issues or are aiming to sculpt your body in a very specific way.
- To lose weight, eat about 5-10% less than your daily caloric requirement (there are tons of free calculators and counters online). Water helps to feel full. Increasing exercise can help if changing dietary habits is a struggle.
- To eat healthier overall, eat less processed foods, more fresh stuff.
That’s it. This is all the advice most people realistically need to lose weight/eat better. The hard part is being disciplined about it. Now, discipline, on the other hand, that’s a very personal matter.
And that right there is the kind of comment I was talking about. Well meaning, I’m sure, but so damn general and vague as to be useless to anyone that’s asking what the post is asking.
And, the whole “underlying medical issues” part is key there. Obesity is an underlying medical condition that changes how your body works. It messes with insulin, cortisol, serotonin, and after a point resists weight loss.
Dude is over 250 lbs at approximately six feet tall. If he isn’t a fairly regular weight lifter, he’s into at least overweight BMI, which is absolutely in the range where it counts as a medical condition that can be resistant to casual methodology, and that’s something that bariatric specialists deal with regularly. It’s part of the reason that people have so damn much trouble sustaining weight loss, and maintaining it long enough for the underlying changes to shift back to a healthier cycle.
Discipline is not a significant factor when the patient is at the point where OP is. Claims that it is are empty headed, outdated claptrap that does nothing useful for the patient.
Frankly, your comment is the kind the kind of jackassery that I was talking about.
Well CICO is always true, but what modern professionals would help with is the other stuff: mental health, planning, long term, etc.
So in the lab, CICO wins, it’s thermodynamics. In real life, people need more support, and they (rightfully, realistically) can’t maintain CICO.
True.
CICO it’s what is called a bounding condition. It’s true but the CO half is almost impossible to know or predict long term outside of being in a 24 - 7 lab.
Hormones, types of calories, activity, and biology all have a huge effect. And long term even small errors in these numbers can have big impacts on weight.
While being accurate about it is hard outside the lab it is very easy to tell where you are on the balance and how much out you are. Just count the calories you consume and weight yourself regularly. If you are gaining weight then you are eating too much, so lower the number of calories you are consuming, if you are losing weight then you are eating less than you are burning. If you weight remains stable then you are in balance. And the amount you are gaining/losing tells you how much of a surplus or deficit you are in.
Over time you can then change the amount you eat by I few hundred calories at a time and you will see yourself move on that balance point. If anything else changes but your intake remains the same then it is likely your calories out that has changed. But even if technically you are digesting less for some reason it does not really matter - the bigger/easier leaver you have to pull is the number you are eating.
Because you are measuring the final output - your weight - it is fairly accurate over time and helps you track actual progress. There is no need to get super accurate about how much your body adobes, shits out or you burn off at rest or through exercise - those might be important in the lab but in real life the far easier to measure weight and how much you are eating is more important.
Hope my answer doesn’t get buried and I hope you don’t feel too overwhelmed by all the responses you’re getting. But something I found really useful is frozen veg. If you’re struggling to plan healthier meals that are higher calorie, frozen veg is a game changer. It doesn’t go bad, it’s cheaper than the fresh stuff, and the most important thing is you can add it to your existing diet. I have a soft spot for ramen and box mac and cheese for example, and it’s so easy just to throw handfuls of whatever I’ve got in the freezer into a pot of pasta or ramen to make it just a bit healthier. Hell, you can even forget the ramen altogether and just use the soup base (it’s just stock!) to make lazy soup. Add a chopped onion if you’re feeling fancy and that’s that.
You also list a lot of protein sources that you can’t afford to add to your diet. Protein is a necessary nutrient, but it’s not the end all to a healthy diet. I say that as a lifelong athlete. It’s very easy to get an appropriate amount of protein from plant based sources, and they tend to be a lot cheaper. Plus, they tend to be higher in other macros and nutrients. Soy milk, for example, has the same protein content as dairy milk (but might be more expensive depending on your area). Beans and other legumes are fantastic and tasty. Chickpeas are my favourite. If you have a blender or food processor, you can make hummus very easily. Lentils are also amazing if you are able to cook. Cheap as hell if you buy them in bulk and insanely filling. Indian dhaal is a lentil stew that’s fairly easy to make and very tasty. If you can afford it, snack on nuts and seeds. Add peanut butter (look at labels to find some that doesn’t have sugar in it) to your diet. Both those things are higher in calorie while also being high in nutrients. If you eat rice, try getting brown rice instead of white rice. It’s higher in protein and fiber and will likely keep you full for longer. Potatoes and other root vegetables are also awesome. Versatile, cheap, relatively high calorie, easy to cook, and keep for a long time if stored properly. I like to make a huge pot of potato stew with beans and frozen vegetables and keep it in the fridge for easy meals for like a week. If you’re looking for animal protein, check your local grocery for frozen fish. Its usually half the price of the fresh stuff.
I’m not your doctor, but personally, 800-1000 cal/day was terrible for my health. Yeah, it’ll make you lose weight, but for me it made me really lethargic and gave me brain fog. It just wasn’t enough to keep my body going. Maybe try slowly lowering your calorie intake and see how your body feels. I’ve also found that in the past, calorie counting was actually counterproductive to my health because what ended up happening was it became a “game” to eat fewer and fewer calories a day. Luckily I saw that and stopped counting calories before it turned into an eating disorder. My point here is just that it’ll take some work figuring out what works for you and don’t get discouraged if a method doesn’t fit your body or your lifestyle.
In terms of exercise, I know it’s not a satisfying answer, but it’s really going to depend on your body and what type of exercise you’re doing. If you’re exercising, you should definitely be eating more than 800-1000 cal/day unless you’re like, a toddler. It’s dangerous in my non-professional opinion to exercise when you’re under eating by that amount particularly if you’re lifting weights or doing high impact cardio.
I wish you luck on your journey and I hope it all works out for you :)
you’re eating a thousand calories a day and not losing weight? what’s your height, weight, and sex currently?
You’re absolutely going to lose weight at 500-1000 kcal a day. It’s not particularly healthy, and you’re going to lose significant muscle mass, but you will absolutely lose weight rapidly. A significant caloric deficit will not prevent weight loss; its thermodynamics. You’ll lose muscle with that much of a deficit, which in turn decreases basal metabolic rate, but you’re not going to violate thermodynamics.
How are you tracking intake? If you’re not losing weight, I don’t believe you’re tracking calories correctly. Are you using a scale and weighing portions, or just eyeballing it?
Your body probably will go full panic mode and store back as much as possible as soon as you starts to eat normally again. I’d advice agains doing anything so violent, and just lower your food intake to a bit under normal.
Store back what? That’s not how physics works. If they continue to eat only what their body needs to maintain a set weight, they’re not magically going to gain weight because their body somehow is able to violate the laws of physics.
Did you miss the “when you start eating normally again” bit?
You can rant all you want about the laws of physics, but you might want to practice your reading comprehension.
Then you’re not eating normally… you’re eating more than you need.
Most people don’t count calories. You said it yourself, a few posts below. Are you going to start redefining “normal” now to meet your argument?
Wow…so you think my argument of CICO is bunk… because…most people don’t count calories…the fuck type of logic is this?
You really need to work on that reading comprehension. Valmond stated that people will regain weight when they return to eating normally after dieting.
You claim that’s not how physics work, then move the goal posts stating “if people only eat what they need, they won’t gain the weight back.” Well no shit Sherlock, but they’re not eating normally. They’re gaining the weight back if they go back to eating normally.
Quit being so quick to attack folk and read the fucking post.
So first off, I don’t think you should bring the laws of physics into conversations of how human bodies store fat. I know it’s tempting - I’ve been there before - but it’s just too reductive to be useful in the conversation, and it leads to generally poor conclusions.
While it’s true that energy cannot be ‘conjured from nothing’ - human bodies don’t quite work on a fixed energy in/out model. They can be variably efficient in how much energy is required to perform certain tasks, and secondary systems can be turned off when the need to conserve energy becomes apparent (leptin is the signaling mechanism for this).
The main mechanisms that cause rebound weight gain after sharp dieting is a reduction in passive energy needs stemming from the change in leptin levels, along with leptins very strong effect on appetite.
I suggest to you, and anyone still under the impression that CICO is a useful model for understanding human metabolism, to read the book The Hungry Brain. It’s hugely useful for gaining greater insight into the subject.
So first off, I don’t think you should bring the laws of physics into conversations of how human bodies store fat. I know it’s tempting - I’ve been there before - but it’s just too reductive to be useful in the conversation, and it leads to generally poor conclusions.
Are you suggesting our bodies are more efficient and break thermodynamics?
While it’s true that energy cannot be ‘conjured from nothing’ - human bodies don’t quite work on a fixed energy in/out model. They can be variably efficient in how much energy is required to perform certain tasks, and secondary systems can be turned off when the need to conserve energy becomes apparent (leptin is the signaling mechanism for this).
What secondary systems get turned off? You’re body is going to utilize energy anyway it can if it needs it, if it doesn’t it stores it, usually in the form of fat.
The main mechanisms that cause rebound weight gain after sharp dieting is a reduction in passive energy needs stemming from the change in leptin levels, along with leptins very strong effect on appetite.
No it’s from eating way more calories…this is literally junk science your parroting here. The rebound in weight is because someone decides to stuff themselves again.
I suggest to you, and anyone still under the impression that CICO is a useful model for understanding human metabolism, to read the book The Hungry Brain. It’s hugely useful for gaining greater insight into the subject.
That book is about the psychology of overeating.
Hell here is a quote from his AMA:
There are many ways to lose weight, but they all involve either eating fewer calories or burning more.
It’s callef the yoyo effect (that’s why you should see a nutritionist when you want to lose weight). Also recent research hints at cells becoming more efficient when there is less energy available. There is even a Kurzhesagt video about it if you are interested.
It seems it is not so easy as calories in, calories out.
No…just no. You’re arguing against literal physical laws here. Most people do not accurately count their calories and end up posting antidotal garbage that gets passed off as science.
Dude, cells are not using up 100% of the energy you ingest, if they did you could live off a sugar cube a year. I think it might be you that doesn’t understand how the laws of physics work lol.
You have just argued that they do. You cannot magically create mass from eating less. That’s literally what you’re stating.
I didn’t state something along those lines, ofc you cannot gain 100gram eating only 50grams.
Let me expmain:
If your body gets 100 “energy” out of a burger, that doesn’t mean getting “200” energy out of a burger is against physics.
You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.
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There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.
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Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.
For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.
So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.
Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.
That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.
Can you give more detail about your goals?
Basically I have a gut which I want to get rid of (Ik you can’t spot reduce sadly). I don’t want to get super jacked I just want to lose this guy and get muscle. And avoid diabetes since it runs in my family.
I’ve currently been working on muscle more since my job thankfully has a gym I do strength there two days a week and walk/run 3
OK, so good, a clear starting point.
First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.
The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.
So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.
So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.
Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.
Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.
Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.
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I can’t give medical advice, I mean I can but I won’t. Anyway, I was a professional chef who worked in three very different locations before leaving the pirate kitchen life of sodomy.
What’s affordable is going to depend on where you are, so buy in-season fruits and vegetables. Try different recipes using things you know you can afford and when something clicks for you, write it down. Keep a list of the healthy meals and snacks that are easy for you to make because the hungry brain has no past or future. Aggressively mid foods like beans, peas, potatoes, barley and peanut butter are cheap and no one will care if you steal them.
If you’re a shit cook find some videos and follow along or ask a friend to walk you through some recipes if you have one.
Keep heathy, craving satisfying food on hand. Make a batch of nut balls (nut butter mixed with seeds, dried berries and whatever) and keep them in the freezer. Have lots of different tea on hand if that’s your thing, popcorn is filling and low calorie. My go-tos are: hard boiled egg, or a baked potato, or a bowl of peas. Don’t knock a bowl of peas until you try it after a joint, mixed with coconut oil, salt, pepper and cayenne.
Try smoothies. One of my faves is almond milk, spinach, lime juice, cashew or hemp butter, banana, pinch of salt. Blending up greens is a great way to stuff them in and they’re low calorie by volume. What’s great is I can pre-portion all of those ingredients except the almond milk into containers and freeze them. Then making a smoothie is as simple as dumping the frozen brick in a blender with some liquid.
Grocery store prices can vary by day, sales usually go on before they get in a new order and need to clear the shelves. Figure that out and only buy meat in bulk on sale or wait by the dumpster at night. Make a big batch of something like curry, chili or stew with it and freeze in portions anything you won’t eat in the next few days.
There is no shame in using low-income grocery options to get healthy food you can’t otherwise afford. See if there are any in your area. I have friends on disability who get a box of fresh fruit and vegetables every week, food that’s perfectly good but would otherwise be thrown out because of our high beauty standards for crops.
Can you give an example of what you currently eat? I… doubt you aren’t losing weight if you are really eating 900 calories a day.
I do eat some sugar which I’m working on cutting back bgut like my other comment it’s not easy lol.
I usually have a fruit smoothie with two scoops of peanut butter every morning or sometimes an egg and english muffin
a turkey, chicken, or roast beef sandwhich for lunch along with some fruits
And dinner my mom usually cooks so I ahve what she makes which usually ranges from fish, steak, pasta, or chicken
but sadly it isn’t every day some days I end up skipping lunch and dinner and just eat a snack
If you are serious about losing weight, what I would suggest you do is start recording what you are eating in detail to see where the calories are actually coming from. Make a spreadsheet and track it. Also if you aren’t already active, pick up some activity to become less sedentary. Doesn’t need to be working out, could be a sport, could be going for more walks.
I don’t recommend making significant changes to activity levels at the same time as making diet changes. Weight loss comes from changing what you eat. Exercise is absolutely necessary for a healthy lifestyle, but it is not the major factor in weight loss. And increasing exercise behaviors can destabilize eating habits, making it harder to stick to any good changes you do make with either diet or exercise.
Maybe I’ll try getting into my fitness pal again. But my trouble is still getting that 1500 calories.
I exercise 5 days a week.
My work has a gym which I use both days I’m in office and when I’m not I walk or run
You’re eating way more than you think if you’re not losing weight on less than that.
Watch secret eaters on YouTube…tons of people don’t realize how much they actually consume.
I lose probably 1-2 pounds a week which isn’t too bad I just don’t want to eat less if it’s unhealthy.
The whole “starvation is bad for you” is bullshit. No one is saying eat so little that you get headaches. You eat yourself into a calorie deficit and once you get to it, your body gets used to it.
TL:DR: be more hungrier
Hi, I must agree with others that you’re eating more than what you think. I was underweight for over 20 years, so the opposite problem, and I’m one of the few people here who read “I struggle to meet 1500 calories” and nodded. For the vast majority of humans, weight loss is entirely based on energy deficit, so something must be up.
Calories are deceptive. Two days ago I had one sub sandwich (the bread I use, Schär ciabatta, comes in half sized so two of them make up one sub). It was 850 calories, far more than I expected the first time I had one— it’s not even large. That plus an Arizona tea made for 1040 calories in a single pretty volumetrically small meal.
I track the calories of every single thing I eat. I use an accurate to 0.1g scale to measure every ingredient I use in meals and to track serving size for snacks. I pour drinks into a measuring cup. It was some work at first but by now it’s basically second nature. You don’t need to go that far, but I’d highly recommend doing something. Every ingredient must be considered: are you accounting for butter or oils in pasta or even steak? Those add hundreds of calories.
The fruit smoothie sounds almost like bulking food to me. Peanut butter in a smoothie is great for weight gain. How much is two scoops? What’s in the smoothie itself? If you have vague measurements of ingredients and amount, I’d be happy to calculate a caloric estimate. It won’t be exact, but would be a good start.
This furthers my suspicions you’re not tracking properly. That’s over the 500-1000 kcal you’re claiming. You’re well over it if you consume any liquid sugar (even juice) throughout the day that you haven’t listed.
Dry beans, rice, oatmeal, eggs and milk. Buy the plain bulk containers if you want the best unit cost. While eggs and milk have gone up in price, they can still be found cheap enough at the warehouse stores.
Don’t skimp on a variety of greens and fruits!
