750-1000 calorie deficit?

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  • dancoon7469
    dancoon7469 Posts: 20 Member
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    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    dancoon7469 wrote: »
    xxzenabxx wrote: »
    dancoon7469 wrote: »
    I've been doing a 1000 calorie deficit for a few months now, I've not found it that hard tbh. I do go over at weekends sometimes because of doing things with friends and family but not by a lot. On the whole I can't say I'm often hungry.
    Combined with going to the gym 5 or 6 days a week I have lost 2 stone in just over 2 months.

    How much did you weigh to begin with? And how many calories did you eat?

    I weighed 14 stone in June and am now down to 12 stone. I'm eating around 1300 calories a day and about 1600 sometimes at weekends (I'm short as hell for a man at 5'5" which leaves me right on the border of being able to do a 1000 calorie deficit without going under 1200 the MFP recommends). It is working for me, I've never felt healthier, I can run further and faster, lift heavier and my mood has improved massively. I do think it won't be right for everyone but for me it's working well.

    If I do the arithmetic right - and I often don't ;) - that would be a loss of 28 pounds from around 196 pounds to 168 pounds in - what? - maybe 8-10 weeks, so over 2.5 pounds a week? If so, that's well more than a thousand calorie deficit, on average.

    I wouldn't recommend that to someone as a conservative, low-risk strategy.

    IMO, feeling fine isn't a great guide to safe calorie level. I unintentionally ate too few calories for a while at first, because MFP substantially underestimates my NEAT. I felt fine for a time . . . until I didn't, and wasn't.

    Maybe just a little under but I'm allowing for miscalculating as I sometimes eat with family and friends and don't know exactly what they put in it. It's more likely the cardio I do most days that drops the extra .5 pound and tbh it's never that consistent, one week I lost 4 pounds, the next nothing at all.
    Out of interest what happened?
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,178 Member
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    dancoon7469 wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    dancoon7469 wrote: »
    xxzenabxx wrote: »
    dancoon7469 wrote: »
    I've been doing a 1000 calorie deficit for a few months now, I've not found it that hard tbh. I do go over at weekends sometimes because of doing things with friends and family but not by a lot. On the whole I can't say I'm often hungry.
    Combined with going to the gym 5 or 6 days a week I have lost 2 stone in just over 2 months.

    How much did you weigh to begin with? And how many calories did you eat?

    I weighed 14 stone in June and am now down to 12 stone. I'm eating around 1300 calories a day and about 1600 sometimes at weekends (I'm short as hell for a man at 5'5" which leaves me right on the border of being able to do a 1000 calorie deficit without going under 1200 the MFP recommends). It is working for me, I've never felt healthier, I can run further and faster, lift heavier and my mood has improved massively. I do think it won't be right for everyone but for me it's working well.

    If I do the arithmetic right - and I often don't ;) - that would be a loss of 28 pounds from around 196 pounds to 168 pounds in - what? - maybe 8-10 weeks, so over 2.5 pounds a week? If so, that's well more than a thousand calorie deficit, on average.

    I wouldn't recommend that to someone as a conservative, low-risk strategy.

    IMO, feeling fine isn't a great guide to safe calorie level. I unintentionally ate too few calories for a while at first, because MFP substantially underestimates my NEAT. I felt fine for a time . . . until I didn't, and wasn't.

    Maybe just a little under but I'm allowing for miscalculating as I sometimes eat with family and friends and don't know exactly what they put in it. It's more likely the cardio I do most days that drops the extra .5 pound and tbh it's never that consistent, one week I lost 4 pounds, the next nothing at all.
    Out of interest what happened?

    Eventually, I got noticeably weak and fatigued. By the time it caught up with me, I'd already observed that my actual loss rate was too fast, and had already adjusted to eat more. It still took sometime (small number of weeks, IIRC) to recover. I've had some problems with nails (paronychia) that I suspect may've started around then, too, but that takes months to show up, and I'm not certain.

    Muscle gain is difficult and slow for anyone, and more so for women my age. It's better to keep what one already has, and a sensible, moderate loss rate is part of that. I never intended to lose that fast (just over 2 pounds a week when I weighed in the 150s), but as I mentioned, MFP substantially underestimated my NEAT, and I didn't have any way to know that until I saw the actual losses.

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