Is 1200 calories too little for me?

Scottgriesser

Fitnessgirl0913 wrote: »

Can I ask what may be an ignorant question about walking, forgive me if the answer is obvious. Does speed at which you walk not matter for total calories burned on a walk? For example, say I walk 3 miles at 2.5 miles an hour then the next day walk 3 miles at 4 miles per hour, based on that calculation those walks would burn the same amount of calories, but I would think that walking almost double the pace would burn more calories? Again forgive me if this is a silly question but I am genuinely curious as to why speed does not factor in.

Not as much as you would think. Speed does very slightly increase the burn, but only minimally. Your weight and the length of the trip account for about 95% of the caloric burn.

Things like incline/decline or doing spurts of high intesnity will account for a bit more, but still almost all of it is weight and length.

I was quite surprised when I found this out myself.

Now, obviously the faster you go means the more time you have so if you do timed workouts then moving faster=moving farther=more burn.

rheddmobile

For the OP: strength training doesn’t have to be at a gym or use a lot of expensive equipment. If you’re new to it you can start with bodyweight squats, lunges, pushups (on knees or an elevated surface if you can’t do a toe push-up). Water bottles of different sizes make great dumbbells, and you can even use two gallon jugs full of water and a broom handle to make your own barbell! The main thing is that doing some strength training will encourage your body to retain muscle while you lose weight.

kimny72

There are plenty of great reasons not to undereat, "starvation mode" is not one of them, it's a common fitness industry myth.

There are two true things that when misunderstood and conflated makes the myth seem true.

1. Adaptive thermogenesis is the real "starvation mode" where your metabolism slows to adapt to not enough food. However this happens slowly over the long term of consistent undereating. We are talking months and years of restriction. And even so, it won't stop someone from losing weight, just slow it down, otherwise people wouldn't become emaciated.
2. When someone undereats in the short term, it makes them fatigued and possibly a little moody or unfocused. This makes them subtley move around less - less fidgety, less effort put into workouts, slower walking pace, etc. Nothing they would necessarily notice, but enough to reduce their NEAT/TDEE to possibly slow down weight loss.

It's certainly better to fuel yourself properly, and not doing so can make weight loss more difficult in a number of ways. But it's not starvation mode. And I'd bet far more women aren't losing weight while eating 1200 calories because their logging is off and they're not really eating 1200 cals.

We also see a lot of posters who are under-eating and not losing weight, but what eventually comes out is the under-eating leads to binges they fail to initially report. These binges basically cancel out their deficit from the low cal days, especially when added to the fatigue effects.

Anyway, OP never confirmed or denied how they were measuring their portions or choosing database entries. 99.9% of the time, that's where the issue lies.

OP, if you are still having problems, please temporarily make your diary public and we can help you spot possible issues :drinker: