Quote:
Originally Posted by LilaCotton
MyJourney, I just looked at a few of your FitDay entries, and unless you missed a bunch of food you're consuming way too few calories. You should be eating at least 10x your bodyweight, which would put you at around 1700 calories a day.
You are basically setting your body up for starvation mode, where it will check out what you're eating and go into self-preservation and stop losing weight.
At your age, you should have a fairly decent metabolism, and while you may not lose real quickly, long-term weight loss doesn't happen overnight.
And having said that, nuts add a ton of minerals and phytonutrients to your diet that often times the only other significant source is a vitamin supplement.
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Oh come on
I just checked out her fitday, it looks to me as if she is getting 1250 on average... that might be fine for her. The 10xs your weight forumula is based on
non-science, much like the 8 glasses of water "rule" and many other stupid diet rules.
People should eat only as much as their body asks for, and stop eating when it doesn't want any more. Your body knows what it needs. A lot of people are probably reading this and thinking "yea right, that will make me fat". No it wont. In an otherwise healthy person, feeding mouth-hunger makes you fat, feeding body hunger makes you thin.
The tricky part is determining between mouth hunger and actual body hunger... your mouth will say "eat a huge portion of brownies & potato chips" even if your body is saying "feed me a small piece of steak and a green salad w/ asparagus". Mouth hunger, or "cravings" should be "satisfied" so it doesn't become excessive, but not fed to its full desire. Body hunger should always be fed to full satiety.
Eating more when you really don't
want to eat more isn't going to do anything but make you fatter or stall you out.
I lost most of my weight eating as much as my body said it needed. Sometimes I ate a lot, sometimes I ate very little. Now that I am close to maintenance I eat more calories & carbs (I finish meals feeling stuffed now), and loses
have slowed because of it, but during the weight loss phase I was much more mindful of portions.
I think a big part of the misconception that you need to eat a lot to lose a lot comes fromt he fact that many, many people binge right before a woosh.
Here's what actually happens. Right before your body lets go of water-weight that it was holding on to because of previous calorie/carb restriction, your body does this thing where it makes you really hungry (you just want to eat and eat even if you've just eaten, it's strange). This sometimes leads to over-eating and binging. Then, the next day, you get on the scale and notice you are down two pounds. Conclusion? Eating all that stuff made you lose weight. In reality, what actually happened is
not eating all that stuff for the past few days made you lose weight. In other words,
the weight loss caused the binge, not the other way around.
So, binging and over eating to lose weight won't get you anywhere because the over eating is caused by the weight loss, not the other way around.
This doesn't mean I am saying starve yourself if your body is asking for a lot of food. I do think people should always listen to their bodies hunger, even when it is asking you to over eat in response to weight loss. This is crucial to maintaining metabolic integrity and avoiding leptin depletion, plus, we are making a lifestyle change here. If you deny your body food, you
will eventually cave in. The point when you cave in will make you feel really really guilty, which will lead to emotional binging in a big cycle. Plus, counting calories excessively totally disconnects you with body hunger which over a long term pattern results in over eating.
Assuming you are feeding your body food that it thrives on, just going with your body's signals will always lead you in the correct path. Your body wants to be a healthy weight, it doesn't want to be fat and it doesn't want to be underweight. This is why atkins didn't advocate counting calories, he wanted people to listen to their body and its needs.
However, I do advocate calorie counting if for no other reason than to have a picture of what you are eating, and to see if mouth hunger is getting excessive. When you are eating LC fun foods it is very easy to eat too much because of the mouth-hunger factor. For example lets say your fitday for the past month shows you've increased calorie consumption by 100, and then 200, etc. By reviewing your food journal and keeping track of portions/calories, you can see where ethos calories are coming from. If this trend correlates with the addition of LC brownies and cookies, I think it is pretty obvious that your body doesn't need or want those calories, and unchecked mouth hunger is causing the eating.