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Discussion on low calorie diets

Jay9201
Jay9201 Posts: 119 Member
in Debate Club
Hi all, I wanted to have a discussion about low calorie diets.

I'm 5'5 female weighing in at 177lbs , I workout 4x a week alternating between HIIT and pilates and my workouts are fasted - just my preference. Now my TDEE is 2083 some calculators will say more and I eat at 1400 calories everyday , I track my calories on a food scale and I will lose 1lb - 1.5lbs a week which is great as my goal is to drop to 130lbs by xmas.

I've been seeing a lot of the 1200 calorie diet trends so I did this for a month again tracking through my food scale. The scale budged slightly but then I wouldn't lose body measurements wise I was losing inches. But I had a bad experience with 1200 cals for me that number is way too low, I was extremely hungry and tired, mood swings. My sleep was affected even working out was affected so I knew this was due to eating too less.

But it is interesting to see why 1200 calories is trending and why people eat so low. surely that can't be sustainable ?

Would like to know your thoughts on this.
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Replies

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,829 Member
    As tinkerbellang83 has said, unless someone is very short, inactive, old and/or under medical supervision, 1200 kcal isn't a good idea, nor very sustainable.

    I see it as a lack of patience (wanting to lose too fast) and lack of thinking long-term ("I will eat like a mouse to lose weight and then I will go back to eating normally"). Perhaps a sign of the times, or simply human nature?
    I feel like a freak here sometimes :wink: I started at a BMI of over 34, and yet I set a weight loss rate of 0.5lbs (0.25kg) per week. Slow? Sure, but after more than 6 months I'm still going strong and feeling good!
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Yes, I think it's easily explainable: lowest normally recommended option and people wanting to lose as fast as possible.

    I also think with medical professionals there's a cynical element of "people will eat more than recommended so if 1500 or 1600 is sensible, 1200 or lower will be a good goal," especially once people have failed at higher goals (and this is why doctors also may casually toss off "try 1000" in a non supervised context.
  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    Pretty much that MFP bottoms out at 1200 calories for women. You won't see many men asking on here asking about 1200 calories, even accounting for the difference in number of posters and users. The other part is that people think there are two speeds they should be losing weight: done tomorrow or done yesterday. No one wants to accept how fortunate they are that what took years to put on can actually come off in months - they want it even faster.
    Not that I'm the patient or realistic goal type myself. I just happen to be familiar with the reality of it enough to separate it from what I'd like.
  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    There's also a moderation pressure that keeps anyone from really seeing much of threads with numbers below 1200. Unless there is a very specific medical context, most of those threads get cleaned up.
    If you had the misfortune of viewing a pro-Anna board, you might be left wondering how so many people can have a 0 calorie or 400 calorie goal. I'm not sure how any of them stay functional besides the fact that there might be a survivorship bias on those boards of people with genes that actually make the conditions worse - it seems some people become more energetic, restless, and actually up TDEE when in a deficit.
  • Jay9201
    Jay9201 Posts: 119 Member
    magnusthenerd wrote: »
    There's also a moderation pressure that keeps anyone from really seeing much of threads with numbers below 1200. Unless there is a very specific medical context, most of those threads get cleaned up.
    If you had the misfortune of viewing a pro-Anna board, you might be left wondering how so many people can have a 0 calorie or 400 calorie goal. I'm not sure how any of them stay functional besides the fact that there might be a survivorship bias on those boards of people with genes that actually make the conditions worse - it seems some people become more energetic, restless, and actually up TDEE when in a deficit.

    Oh that is awful I didnt even know there was such thing as pro ana board! I can't understand how someone would be functional eating so low, surely that can be good for your health.
  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    Jay9201 wrote: »
    magnusthenerd wrote: »
    There's also a moderation pressure that keeps anyone from really seeing much of threads with numbers below 1200. Unless there is a very specific medical context, most of those threads get cleaned up.
    If you had the misfortune of viewing a pro-Anna board, you might be left wondering how so many people can have a 0 calorie or 400 calorie goal. I'm not sure how any of them stay functional besides the fact that there might be a survivorship bias on those boards of people with genes that actually make the conditions worse - it seems some people become more energetic, restless, and actually up TDEE when in a deficit.

    Oh that is awful I didnt even know there was such thing as pro ana board! I can't understand how someone would be functional eating so low, surely that can be good for your health.

    Well no. By definition, anorexia is disordered and therefore not healthy.
    The boards can be mixed. There are ones that aren't really pro, but rather than trying to force anyone to change, try to encourage change and minimizing harm. Other ones are literary encouraging it, and luckily those ones tend to get shut down for a combination of moral and legal reasons.
    Unfortunately, on the internet, there are dark corners for just about anything someone can think of, certainly more ones than I can.
  • SezxyStef
    SezxyStef Posts: 15,267 Member
    1200 calories is the lowest recommended intake for adult women.

    they are bandied about due to lack of education. Most people claiming to eat 1200 really aren't...it's more like 1500-2k if they were to log it accurately.

    Now don't get me wrong I can do 1200 for a day...but then I need to recover. 1400 is my minimum where I can function normally.
  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    magnusthenerd wrote: »
    There's also a moderation pressure that keeps anyone from really seeing much of threads with numbers below 1200. Unless there is a very specific medical context, most of those threads get cleaned up.
    If you had the misfortune of viewing a pro-Anna board, you might be left wondering how so many people can have a 0 calorie or 400 calorie goal. I'm not sure how any of them stay functional besides the fact that there might be a survivorship bias on those boards of people with genes that actually make the conditions worse - it seems some people become more energetic, restless, and actually up TDEE when in a deficit.

    I am someone who feels energized and restless on very low calories (until a few months in, where I eventually hit the wall). It also feels "comforting" to me psychologically. I actively avoid this, as it's terrible for me and doesn't support my long term mental or physical health (and it hurts my running). It's certainly a thing.
    Yeah, it seems there is a lot about some of the disordered eating that can be physiological, not just psychological based on the behaviors bodybuilders get going into and coming out of shows.
    I think being energized on low calories can happen in obese individuals. When I was morbidly obese I would find myself eating nothing or just a PB sandwich for days when I started losing weight - not even intentionally - but I kept feeling my energy being high and indifferent to a bit happy about the weight dropping. I could see keeping that up if I had not become concerned about my protein intake because I wanted to keep lifting.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,416 Member
    yeah, the "fasting euphoria" isn't something we talk about a lot here - for good reasons.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,216 Member
    I think there's also some cultural history involved. I grew up to adulthood (1960s/70s) in an environment where calories were firmly a known thing, and absolutely seen as being behind weight management**, but it wasn't at all practical for the average person to track them arithmetically. No internet, no apps, no spreadsheets or even home computers; just books, pencils, paper.

    At that stage, there were lots of published books (or magazine articles of the sort "just eat these exact things for your meals" with specific rotations of measured widely-available foods, even among reasonably nutritious diets let alone crazy faddy ones. It was, if I recall correctly, pretty common for those to be based on 1200 calories daily, since pretty much anyone will lose weight on 1200 calories. (It wouldn't be all that practical to publish a book with dozens of different detailed prescriptive meal plans for different calorie levels for different activity levels, and - reminder - there weren't apps.)

    So, that 1200 calorie diet idea kind of got fixed in the popular imagination.

    Also, human nature wasn't different then, so things were trendy and people talked among themselves. Women tended to be more "diet as a hobby" than men, I think, and it was kind of seen as on-trend, feminine and charmingly delicate to be on one of those special 1200 calorie diets.

    I don't think the cultural baggage of that has fully died out.

    ** Actually, I think more people may've bought into calories as the key back then, because they were then the magical science-y thing that you couldn't really pin down and harness scientificially in your individual life in a practical, non-obsessive way.
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    I think there's also some cultural history involved. I grew up to adulthood (1960s/70s) in an environment where calories were firmly a known thing, and absolutely seen as being behind weight management**, but it wasn't at all practical for the average person to track them arithmetically. No internet, no apps, no spreadsheets or even home computers; just books, pencils, paper.

    At that stage, there were lots of published books (or magazine articles of the sort "just eat these exact things for your meals" with specific rotations of measured widely-available foods, even among reasonably nutritious diets let alone crazy faddy ones. It was, if I recall correctly, pretty common for those to be based on 1200 calories daily, since pretty much anyone will lose weight on 1200 calories. (It wouldn't be all that practical to publish a book with dozens of different detailed prescriptive meal plans for different calorie levels for different activity levels, and - reminder - there weren't apps.)

    So, that 1200 calorie diet idea kind of got fixed in the popular imagination.

    Also, human nature wasn't different then, so things were trendy and people talked among themselves. Women tended to be more "diet as a hobby" than men, I think, and it was kind of seen as on-trend, feminine and charmingly delicate to be on one of those special 1200 calorie diets.

    I don't think the cultural baggage of that has fully died out.

    ** Actually, I think more people may've bought into calories as the key back then, because they were then the magical science-y thing that you couldn't really pin down and harness scientificially in your individual life in a practical, non-obsessive way.

    The first time I counted calories I was in college. I tracked everything in a little notebook! A lot of my calorie counts were what I now realize were very rough estimates, but it worked for weight loss because my goal was . . . 1,200 a day. I can't even recall how I "learned" that should be my goal, it just felt like I knew that was how much a woman should eat to lose weight. I'm guessing it came from weight loss articles in teenage/women's magazines.

    It wound up not being a sustainable habit for me, partly because it was harder to track. But another factor is that I still had a really rigid conception of good versus bad foods that made any kind of structured eating unnecessarily upsetting.

  • Sylphadora
    Sylphadora Posts: 75 Member
    edited February 2020
    I can't do low-cal. For me 1,200 cals is such a ridiculously small amount of food. I can only sustain such a diet for so long. I can fast for a whole day but not eat 1,200 cals several days in a row :D
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
    I see a lot of "If more is better, most must be best" type thinking here.

    If some weight loss is good for me than doing the most I am allowed to do is the best.

    If more nutrient dense food is good then if I eat nothing but nutrient dense food it is best.

    If more activity is good then taking every class the gym offers is best.

    The reality is that moderation is almost always going to be the right course of action. Lose at a healthy and sustainable rate. Eat your chicken and broccoli and also eat fun food. Take a class at the gym but remember that you need to ramp it up slowly and no one in your life is going to appreciate it if you are gone 5 hours a day working out.

  • magnusthenerd
    magnusthenerd Posts: 1,207 Member
    cmriverside wrote: »
    yeah, the "fasting euphoria" isn't something we talk about a lot here - for good reasons.

    Because we're secretly a cult and using it to get people to obey dear leader? That's one of the other areas fasting euphoria gets abused.
  • SuzySunshine99
    SuzySunshine99 Posts: 2,989 Member
    1200 is not appropriate for most people IF THEY ARE COUNTING ACCURATELY. I think this is an important point. I have a feeling that doctors, nutritionists, and RDs sometimes recommend 1200 because they are assuming a margin of error and people will likely be eating more than that. Most people are not weighing all of their food, so their counts are probably not so accurate.

    In my personal experience, as a short woman, I set my goal at 1200 when I was losing weight. But I estimated my food intake, and I lost really slowly, so I know I was eating more than that.
  • SuzySunshine99
    SuzySunshine99 Posts: 2,989 Member
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    SuzySunshine99 wrote: »
    1200 is not appropriate for most people IF THEY ARE COUNTING ACCURATELY. I think this is an important point. I have a feeling that doctors, nutritionists, and RDs sometimes recommend 1200 because they are assuming a margin of error and people will likely be eating more than that. Most people are not weighing all of their food, so their counts are probably not so accurate.

    In my personal experience, as a short woman, I set my goal at 1200 when I was losing weight. But I estimated my food intake, and I lost really slowly, so I know I was eating more than that.

    I don't know if it's common, but I've specifically seen an RD confirm in an interview that 1,200 is given as a goal (at least to some patients) because she knows people will be eating more than that. (My personal opinion: it would be more useful to help patients understand how to accurately estimate their intake, but whatever).

    I agree...it would definitely be better. Especially if someone really DOES log accurately, then they end up not eating enough. But I guess in reality they figure most people wouldn’t takes the time to weigh and log accurately, even if given instructions.
  • hesn92
    hesn92 Posts: 5,966 Member
    I think there were some excellent points made above. Almost any woman will lose weight on 1200 calories a day, so that's been recommended over the years I guess. Most people who are looking to lose weight want to lose weight NOW so they pick the most extreme method.
  • ceiswyn
    ceiswyn Posts: 2,256 Member
    edited February 2020
    Antiopelle wrote: »
    When I started MFP last year (certainly not for the first time) I entered my stats: 5'7 & 172 lbs - setting to sedentary as I have an office job + 2 trainings a week - wanting to lose 1 pound a week. So I'm not tiny, far from petite, I didn't want to lose quickly (now I know that 1 a week is pretty quick) and I knew that sustainability would be key.
    My recommendation was ... 1.200 kcal. Coming from former WW, I thought I needed to try to avoid adding my exercise cals as little as possible. So, I did for months, feeling frustrated every day I got over the 1.200, which was often.
    It's only when I started to read the boards here that I understood how low that was. Even if I have been on & off dieting for more than 30 years, and I consider myself well educated, I believed that 1.200 kcal was the ideal goal as MFP told me so.
    Now, I know better and I've upped my cals, adding exercise and I hope to maintain around 1.900 - 2.000 a day. Therefore, a very big thanks to all the regular posters here on the boards, who have certainly changed my view on food and health dramatically during the last months.

    MFP 'told you so' because that's how the numbers you gave it worked out.

    The problem is that most people have no idea how to choose a sensible rate of loss, or how the numbers actually work. And MFP doesn't give any guidance on that; it just sits there and lets someone who just wants to lose a few vanity pounds pick a rate of 2lb a week, and doesn't at any point tell them that that's unrealistic and that all it can give them is its minimum calorie goal which won't achieve what they've asked for.

    Then people get frustrated - and if they come on the forums, then they start to learn what's reasonable, after weeks of misery and 'slow' progress.
  • Antiopelle
    Antiopelle Posts: 1,184 Member
    @ceiswyn : yes, indeed, my point exactly. But what I wanted to stress is that I didn't want to lose quickly, and I thought 1 pound/week was certainly a healthy way to go. Therefore, it is not strange that there is the misconception that 1.200 is a good goal when it is even a recommendation here on MFP.
  • ceiswyn
    ceiswyn Posts: 2,256 Member
    Antiopelle wrote: »
    @ceiswyn : yes, indeed, my point exactly. But what I wanted to stress is that I didn't want to lose quickly, and I thought 1 pound/week was certainly a healthy way to go. Therefore, it is not strange that there is the misconception that 1.200 is a good goal when it is even a recommendation here on MFP.

    Yes, as in most things the blanket recommendation that everyone has heard actually... doesn't work at all for a lot of people. A bit like the '2000 calories for a woman' estimate; I'm slightly over average height and I'd gain weight on that!

    MFP really needs to do a better job of helping people choose goals that are actually reasonable for them personally.
  • SezxyStef
    SezxyStef Posts: 15,267 Member
    Antiopelle wrote: »
    When I started MFP last year (certainly not for the first time) I entered my stats: 5'7 & 172 lbs - setting to sedentary as I have an office job + 2 trainings a week - wanting to lose 1 pound a week. So I'm not tiny, far from petite, I didn't want to lose quickly (now I know that 1 a week is pretty quick) and I knew that sustainability would be key.
    My recommendation was ... 1.200 kcal. Coming from former WW, I thought I needed to try to avoid adding my exercise cals as little as possible. So, I did for months, feeling frustrated every day I got over the 1.200, which was often.
    It's only when I started to read the boards here that I understood how low that was. Even if I have been on & off dieting for more than 30 years, and I consider myself well educated, I believed that 1.200 kcal was the ideal goal as MFP told me so.
    Now, I know better and I've upped my cals, adding exercise and I hope to maintain around 1.900 - 2.000 a day. Therefore, a very big thanks to all the regular posters here on the boards, who have certainly changed my view on food and health dramatically during the last months.

    Except MFP is not WW and when doing using MFP it is expected that you would eat back exercise calories...

    If you had read the method in which MFP used you would have known that NEAT vs TDEE etc...

    As well I had similar stats to you...aka 5 ft 6 and 175...the calories it gave me for 1lb a week was 1460...I find it odd you got 1200....
  • MaltedTea
    MaltedTea Posts: 6,286 Member
    Low calorie (with occasional "refeeds") can work - in the short-term - for some people. I'm doing it now, mainly because I'm waiting to get an issue with my knee cleared later this month. In the absence of exercise beyond walking and climbing condo stairs, there's not much reason for me to often go above 1300 or so. Next month will be a different story. Personally, I like having Dexascans, blood work and other quantifiable (bio)metrics along with advice from my GP or healthcare team to know what works for me at any given point in time.
  • estherdragonbat
    estherdragonbat Posts: 5,283 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    I think there's also some cultural history involved. I grew up to adulthood (1960s/70s) in an environment where calories were firmly a known thing, and absolutely seen as being behind weight management**, but it wasn't at all practical for the average person to track them arithmetically. No internet, no apps, no spreadsheets or even home computers; just books, pencils, paper.

    At that stage, there were lots of published books (or magazine articles of the sort "just eat these exact things for your meals" with specific rotations of measured widely-available foods, even among reasonably nutritious diets let alone crazy faddy ones. It was, if I recall correctly, pretty common for those to be based on 1200 calories daily, since pretty much anyone will lose weight on 1200 calories. (It wouldn't be all that practical to publish a book with dozens of different detailed prescriptive meal plans for different calorie levels for different activity levels, and - reminder - there weren't apps.)

    So, that 1200 calorie diet idea kind of got fixed in the popular imagination.

    Also, human nature wasn't different then, so things were trendy and people talked among themselves. Women tended to be more "diet as a hobby" than men, I think, and it was kind of seen as on-trend, feminine and charmingly delicate to be on one of those special 1200 calorie diets.

    I don't think the cultural baggage of that has fully died out.

    ** Actually, I think more people may've bought into calories as the key back then, because they were then the magical science-y thing that you couldn't really pin down and harness scientificially in your individual life in a practical, non-obsessive way.

    Yeah, I did Weight Watchers for the first time in the late 80s. This was before "points" of any kind (smart/plus/flex) when they were doing "exchanges". As in you were allowed so many 'bread exchanges'. Each exchange was 1 slice of bread (I think they said 3/4 oz, not sure) or 1 4oz potato or 1/2 cup cooked pasta etc. Similar for protein, fat, milk, fruit, and vegetables (non-starchy veg were unlimited; you were expected to eat a minimum of 3 exchanges per day).

    And they had 3 plans.

    Plan A was 1,000 - 1,100 calories per day (and they did caution you not to be on it for more than 2 weeks at a time, though I don't recall them ever saying how long a break they recommended taking).

    Plan B was 1,200 - 1,300 and most of us wanted to be there.

    Plan C was 1,500 - 1,600, but it was sort of seen as a concession to vacations, holidays, etc. As in, "Well, if you want to be a wuss about it..." I don't mean that any group leaders ever said anything like that, but it was the feeling I got from the meetings. In general, most of us seemed to be doing A or B at any given time.

    (I do believe that the calories/exchanges were different for men, but I never saw their booklets and the meetings were nearly 100% women)
  • bmeadows380
    bmeadows380 Posts: 2,981 Member
    ceiswyn wrote: »
    Antiopelle wrote: »
    @ceiswyn : yes, indeed, my point exactly. But what I wanted to stress is that I didn't want to lose quickly, and I thought 1 pound/week was certainly a healthy way to go. Therefore, it is not strange that there is the misconception that 1.200 is a good goal when it is even a recommendation here on MFP.

    Yes, as in most things the blanket recommendation that everyone has heard actually... doesn't work at all for a lot of people. A bit like the '2000 calories for a woman' estimate; I'm slightly over average height and I'd gain weight on that!

    MFP really needs to do a better job of helping people choose goals that are actually reasonable for them personally.

    I can't imagine that this would be too difficult to achieve, either: when you run through the guided setup, you have to enter your starting weight and your goal weight, so all MFP would have to do is calculate the difference and then base the recommended weight loss on that number.

    but I'm not a programmer, so what sounds easy to do in theory may be a whole other kettle of fish to actually implement.

    though it might be a very good thing to add to premium users, who are paying for upgraded service anyway.

    At the very least, a paragraph of text added to the guided setup to explain reasonable loss rates may not be too difficult to implement.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    I think more explanation on the exercise thing would be good. It's very easy to assume that the exercise is taken into account in your calories because that's common in other plans and because MFP asks how much you will exercise. When I started I had been unexposed to diet culture and had no idea about 1200 being a common recommendation and expected to get something like 1500. When I got 1200, I reran it with more and more exercise added to see what I would have to do to be able to eat more until I realized it wasn't including the exercise, but many people probably just accept the 1200 as normal.
  • Antiopelle
    Antiopelle Posts: 1,184 Member
    SezxyStef wrote: »
    Antiopelle wrote: »
    When I started MFP last year (certainly not for the first time) I entered my stats: 5'7 & 172 lbs - setting to sedentary as I have an office job + 2 trainings a week - wanting to lose 1 pound a week. So I'm not tiny, far from petite, I didn't want to lose quickly (now I know that 1 a week is pretty quick) and I knew that sustainability would be key.
    My recommendation was ... 1.200 kcal. Coming from former WW, I thought I needed to try to avoid adding my exercise cals as little as possible. So, I did for months, feeling frustrated every day I got over the 1.200, which was often.
    It's only when I started to read the boards here that I understood how low that was. Even if I have been on & off dieting for more than 30 years, and I consider myself well educated, I believed that 1.200 kcal was the ideal goal as MFP told me so.
    Now, I know better and I've upped my cals, adding exercise and I hope to maintain around 1.900 - 2.000 a day. Therefore, a very big thanks to all the regular posters here on the boards, who have certainly changed my view on food and health dramatically during the last months.

    Except MFP is not WW and when doing using MFP it is expected that you would eat back exercise calories...

    If you had read the method in which MFP used you would have known that NEAT vs TDEE etc...

    As well I had similar stats to you...aka 5 ft 6 and 175...the calories it gave me for 1lb a week was 1460...I find it odd you got 1200....

    I just did the calculation again, and the result was 1250 kcals. I enter it using the metric system (171 cm, 78kg, wanting to lose 0,5kg/week), I guess that this may cause the difference (although it shouldn't).
    I agree that after reading the method I now know the concepts of NEAT and TDEE, but that information is available on the forum, nowhere in the app itself. If you are not interested in discussing weightloss on the forum, you will miss this info and I think that is a pity and a missed opportunity.

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