Permission to be nosy!

LovesGG

It seems like it's working because your metabolism is in the process of freaking out. Don't forget that the human body is built to adapt to environmental changes. If you eat that little, you convince your body that there's no food around you. In order to survive, your body will store every ounce of fat that enters your body. And it sounds like maybe part of your weight loss is actually muscle mass that you're losing and the fat cells are generally still there.

If you try to eat like a normal person when it's too late, your body will laugh at you and you will gain back every single pound you thought you lost. But instead, it'll just be more fat and even less muscle mass than you originally started with. I wouldn't do that if I were you.
-Nutrition major

XXXMinnieXXX

800 is way too low and you wont loose 2lbs for long, as your metabolism will crash. bad, bad method! you must have set that yourself because mfp will never give less than 1200! x

girl_afraid82

The point is, if it's working at the moment... it won't for long. We all get that initial big weight loss at the beginning... but the body can't sustain that, especially not on so few calories.
I've already seen some of your other posts, where you are heartily agreeing with people who say 'eating under 1200 is fine if you are tiny' but you're not tiny... you're 5"7! You seem to have your mind pretty made up on this issue, so I doubt we will change your mind until you hit the plateau that is coming your way!

gaelyngaelyn

Copied from the Forum Posts, Love what this guy has to say!
"There was a thread that was deleted yesterday where the original poster was asking if it was okay to consume something like 800 calories per day. I'm not sure exactly why it was removed, but it likely had something to do with person after person telling the OP that she was being stupid. I don't like personal attacks at all... but what drove me even more crazy was the fact that almost every single person felt the need to chime in about a topic they obviously haven't studied very much. We heard things like your muscles are going to fall off, you're going to kill your metabolism, you're going to wind up in the hospital with nutrition deficit, you're being anorexic, etc. I'm not posting this thread to restart all the flaming and trolling. I want this to shine a bit of objectivity on the subject of very low calorie diets and metabolism. I spent a decent amount of time explaining things in the thread that was deleted, so it was disheartening to see the information deleted. I think we can all agree that among other important goals, this community is about education. As this thread in question is being discussed on my profile page, someone asked me to re-explain what I discussed in the removed thread. I'm simply going to copy and paste my response here: Yes, very low calorie diets (VLCD) can reduce RMR and disrupt various components of the endocrine system. But correlation is not causation. Meaning... is it the VLCD or is it the effect of the VLCD that leads to the slowdown? Put differently, VLCD cause high rates of fat loss due to the massive energy deficits. Fat happens to be the home of the master hormone responsible for metabolic regulation - Leptin. Leptin lets out bodies know that it's fed. So if we have less fat, we have less Leptin. If we have less Leptin, we have less of a "fed" signal to the brain. If we have less of a fed signal, the body responds accordingly with the slowdown in RMR (and some other adaptations). But the logical question you should be asking is, "Won't smaller or normal deficits also cause a loss in fat? And won't that loss in fat lead to the same sort of negative adaptations?" And the answer is yes. It's just that the VLCD will cause these adaptations to happen faster... but you'll also lose fat faster. Follow me? This isn't an argument for people to start following VLCD as most will fail miserably. Once you factor in the psychology aspects of them, they're just not right for most long term fat loss plans. In addition, the lower your energy intake is, the more careful you have to be about nutritional adequacy. Meaning it becomes very easy to shortchange yourself of particular facets of nutrition, which can ultimately tap into "health." For example, back in the day when the medical community was busy trying to fix obesity, they used VLCDs and weren't mindful of protein quality or quantity. Protein happens to support muscle mass. Sure, around here we're interested in preserving skeletal muscle, as that's what helps us get "toned," "lean," "athletic looking," "ripped," or whatever the cool buzzword is nowadays. But these experiments on the obese patients led to losses in other types of muscle... namely cardiac muscle, which plays an important role in being alive, obviously. Point is, the more food you eat, the easier it is to cover all of your nutritional bases. You can still screw things up, but it's just harder. In the thread that was deleted last night, I spoke of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment ran by Ancel Keys, which took already relatively lean men and locked them down in the lab where they were given 50% of their calorie needs for half of a year. They also had supervised exercise ever day if memory serves me correct. We know that lean people will react faster (in terms of metabolic slowdown) to big energy deficits than fat people will. Which makes sense.... fat bodies don't "think" they're starving as quickly since they have all of this excess energy in storage, right? But even with the test subjects in this experiment being lean to start, after the 6 month period, they only experienced a slowdown in RMR of 15% or so. I mean total energy expenditure dropped by 40% or so, but the remaining 25% (above the 15%) was due to the loss in weight (tissue costs something to maintain and a bigger body is more expensive to move around). Everyone knows that as weight is lost, calorie needs go down. The "starvation mode" totaled 15% after half a year of low calorie dieting. And that's the primary point... life requires energy expenditure. And metabolism can be thought of as our total energy expenditure in this case. Even if there is negative adaptation to low calorie dieting, metabolism can only drop so far... there's a minimum threshold that's required to keep your heart beating, to fuel respiration, power the brain, transport nutrients, digest food, etc, etc. I also posted a few links to more current research.... one paper compared a 25% deficit to a 890 calorie intake. The low calorie intake lost more weight than the 25% group. Yes, they had a metabolic slowdown... but so did the 25% group, which corresponds to what I said above about big and small deficits. There's a lot more that I could say on the topic. The bottom line is this... VLCDs are not as destructive as people around here are making them out to be. People see VLCD and immediately think of anorexia. Anorexics lose weight past the point of healthy thresholds. They also aren't mindful of nutrition quality, more often than not. Not on low calorie diets are "unhealthy." There's a time and a place where they may even make sense for some. I've used them. I've used them with some of my clients. It's just that those times and places don't match beginners who obviously need to learn nutrition fundamentals before they go experimenting with advanced dieting techniques. If they jump right into very strict and limiting diets, there's a good chance they're going to wind up gaining weight, not because of some crazy adaptation that winds up creating stored energy (fat) out of thin air... but because they're not going to stick with it, and when they fall off the wagon, they fall hard and typically eat their faces off. I'm not out there advocating VLCDs. Not at all... heck, I wrote the Nutrition 101 article, which everyone should have read by now, and nowhere in it did I advocate VLCD. I'm simply trying to maintain the integrity of information while steering people in an optimal direction. It seems like too many people around here are stuck on absolutes. They believe there is 100% right ways of doing things and 100% wrong ways of doing things. There's no in between. In reality, there are very few absolutes in the game of fat loss. "

girl_afraid82

Then why start a new thread asking for critique and opinions on what we think you could improve?
It seems like you have already formed a very closed opinion on this and won't take any suggestions on board if they differ to what you want to hear.
We shall agree to disagree.

gaelyngaelyn

Anyway what I am trying to say is, I know there is going to be a lot of people freaking out about very low calorie diets, but I think they CAN be used healthily. Like I mentioned before it's all about putting in the extra effort and consideration to use those calories wisely and pack as many nutrients in there and balance it as much as possible.
I AM loosing right what the math says I should be. If I hit a plateau, I will up the workouts and the calories. It all comes down to the deficit right? I will be sure to post that up here for further discussion if it happens. I appreciate all the comments and I'm glad to see people can post their opinions without being nasty (at least not yet!). I hope whatever each of you are doing is WORKING GREAT for YOU!

gaelyngaelyn

I guess i should have clarified with my intentions on posting. I should have stated "I am on a low calorie intake. I know a lot of you are going to disagree with that. However what I am looking for is help MAKING SURE I am getting the most out of those calories as I can. (As obviously it is harder to fill all of ones nutritional needs on less cals than if you had more cals to work with.) Any comments on how I can get more bang for my buck (foods that I haven't tried that pack a lot of good in em ect... or , like a friend of mine pointed out, that I hadn't even noticed, my calcium needs upping) would be greatly appreciated."

Better? Kisses y'all.

DiannaMoorer

Your food choices are good. I agree that fat is not your enemy. I am losing like crazy and I eat a lot! Including bacon and sausage and lots of eggs. Whole eggs. (My cholesterol is fine) I have to say I don't eat bacon and sausage every day. I try to get a lot of protein. I reset my protein to be a little higher and I'm trying to find ways to meet that goal. If you think you need more calcium you should try Greek yogurt. It has a lot more protein and the calcium you need. I get plain and add a banana and strawberries and sometimes protein powder. My calories are set at 1200. On exercise days I eat an extra 300-400. I run for my cardio most of the time. And strength train. It look like you go over 800 calories anyway, so why not reset it to 1200. It's much healthier and on non exercise days you wont starve. :flowerforyou:

gaelyngaelyn

Thanks Dianna! Yeah, I think I am officially giving myself permission to ignore when my fat intake is "in the red" as it's coming from nuts and olive oil and avacados mostly. Protein powder might be a GREAT idea! I completely forgot about protein powder lol. I used to have a great soy one I kept around the house to add to fruit in a blender.... and yeah... I ALWAYS go over 800... but that's I because I earn it and eat back what I earn... setting it at 800 was just my own way of reminding myself to make sure I get in that half hour work out... I feel SO much BETTER WITH even just that little amount of daily exercise in my life! I wanted to NET 800. What's funny is a lot of these people freaking out about the 800 probably wouldn't be all up in arms if my thing were set to 1200 but I worked out like crazy and netted less than the 800 I am now. I think it's what you NET in comparison to your BMR that's important right?? Anyway ENOUGH about calories. Thanks for the protein powder idea!