should I eat more, and why

CharlieBeansmomTracey

why do you need such a big deficit? take time to lose the weight,the slower the better.

lexylondon

I concur with prior recommendations but would just like to say.. wow I don't k ow how anyone could NOT feel hungry on that diet! The mind boggles...

emmycantbemeeko

I'm a 5'4 female with a normal BMI and *I* lose weight steadily at 1450 net, and many days are higher than that. As a male, 1500 net should be your bare, bare minimum and if you're tall and obese or overweight, it should be much higher.

You say you're convinced but you don't seem to understand what everyone is telling you, which is that there is an upper physiologic limit on how much fat your body can oxidize for energy in one day (the general consensus is "a maximum of around 1 gram/minute, and that only with intense exercise- so for most of the day, much less). Above this limit, any energy that your body requires that can't be obtained from food must necessarily come from your lean tissue- muscle, organs, bones. Likewise micronutrients- if not eaten, they must be either taken from your tissues or you will suffer from deficiencies with all their attendant symptoms.

So no, LBM loss is not necessarily linear with fat loss. Depending on the size of your deficit, it can greatly exceed the rate of fat loss, and the higher your deficit goes, the greater this disparity.

To achieve those massive drops on the scale that make you feel good about your progress, you aren't actually achieving twice the healthy rate of *fat* loss, you're losing a bit of fat with a lot of lean tissue, more than you would at a lower rate of loss. That lean tissue loss, while it's lowering your scale number quickly, is not improving your health or appearance, and it can have serious short and long term consequences. Losing muscle lowers your basal metabolism, weakens your ability to do the kind of activities that are needed for living and also for creating additional calorie burn, and makes you look and feel soft and flabby. Losing organ muscle, like your heart, can permanently damage your health. Losing bone density (if you're not eating enough calcium, where do you think your body is getting it from?) can permanently increase your risk of fractures and degenerative bone problems like arthritis. You'll also see problems like skin and hair damage- rashes, hair loss, weak nails, trouble healing small cuts and bruises. You can wind up with anemia and other blood problems.

Those big drops on the scale, way over the recommended amount, are not representative of some kind of shortcut you've discovered to fat loss. They're exactly what people are warning you about- evidence that you're cannibalizing your healthy tissues to create the illusion of losing fat.

You say you would "never do this" if it took years to get down to a healthy weight, but sit with that claim for a second. You would "never try" to lose weight if it took three years? You'd rather still be fat in three years, and just as fat for the next three years, than be gradually less fat for three years and then not fat at all three years from now?

What kind of sense does that make?

Everyone is spot-on about this needing to be a gradual transition that you can live with forever. The view you're taking- "I'm going to do this as brutally and as quickly as possible, because I can't live like this forever, and I need to get back to living 'normally' as soon as possible once I'm thin" tells you right away that you won't succeed this way. Because even if you do somehow manage to live on starvation rations for the next four months, and you lose all the weight you want to, when you stop, it will all come back- and more, because you'll have lost muscle mass, so eating the same amount you did before you started will lead to faster weight gain with your new, permanently lower BMR.

You need to find a gradual reduction in intake and increase in movement that you can live with as long as it takes, and that you'll be able to transition to a maintenance plan with just a small increase in calories, that you can also live with forever. If you're viewing this as a diet that you're going to go all-out on for a few months and then quit cold turkey, you're honestly better off not doing it at all. At least you'll preserve your LBM and heart, and the end result will be the same.