Another calorie intake question.

sassiebritches

i really try to not eat after 7pm

Did you know they've shown in recent studies that eating in the evening doesn't make you gain more weight than eating at other times?

Skipping meals during the day and then gorging at night is associated with overweight, though. But the advice to not eat after a certain hour is outdated. It's the total calories consumed over a 24 hour period that count.

That said, I agree with SHBoss that, if you constantly find yourself in a deficit at the end of the day, that you need to plan better. Forcing yourself to eat tons of calories right before bed can be unpleasant in other ways. :happy:

Also, if you are guessing, then how do you know those calories are extra? That would worry me and that's why I track my food

I learned this also from my nutritionist, he said mainly not to eat after 8pm cause of heartburn and indigestion, nothing about gaining weight......

sassiebritches

contrary to the previous post, so-called "starvation mode" aka "depressed metabolism" IS real, and will slow your progress if you eat too little.

That's not what clinical data shows. It shows that, even when on a starvation diet, people continue to lose weight. Yes, their metabolism slows down. In the famous Minnesota study on starvation done in the 40s, by the time the guys were on their starvation diet for months and had 5% body fat, their metabolism had slowed down 40%!

BUT they were still losing weight. If you maintain a calorie deficit, you will lose weight because you are expending more energy than you are taking in. There is a point of diminishing returns and there are other risks to starving yourself, but not losing weight is not one of them.

Btw, a starvation diet is defined as eating 50% of your energy expenditure or less. It's not defined as not eating your exercise calories.

You're confusing a starvation diet with starvation mode or the technical term of "famine response" they are two different things.

You are correct in your statement of a starvation diet being defined as 50% of your maintenance calories, But the famine response can start at far higher then that. When the body perceives there to be few calories coming in then it needs to sustain healthy metabolic activity, the body starts the systemic slow down of enzyme production, hormone release (except for a couple of fat storage hormones like cortisol), and organ function. This lowers the amount of fuel we need, and it also increases the storage of fat. The body will normally start seeing this type of deficiency at around 75% of maintenance calories (which, ironically, is around where your BMR is).

You are also correct in the statement that there's no point where the body will STOP losing weight when we are at caloric deficit, even in famine mode. The problem is, when we are in a high deficit mode, our body looks for ways to trim off excess calorie burn, the first thing to go in this situation is muscle and lean tissue, as they are both active calorie users (as opposed to fat, which really doesn't burn any calories, like 1 per day per lb). Losing weight by extreme malnutrition just makes us lose muscle, which gives us a higher body fat %, which makes it harder to lose weight, which lowers our metabolic rate, which adds more fat...etc. vicious cycle.

Side note (added after), you MUST realize that this is true for people who ARE NOT in the obese and morbidly obese category, its a whole different set of calorie rules for them. People who have lots and lots of fat stores, don't have the same body responses to extreme calorie deficits as others. Which is why someone who has a BMI of say ...35 can eat 1100 calories a day NET (after exercise) and still lose 2 to 4 lbs a week without significant muscle loss. But eventually, once they drop enough fat, these rules WILL start to apply for them. You need to be concious of this, and know that as you approach the "overweight" range, you need to decrease your deficit and start adding in muscle building activity to your cardio workouts (best to have them in there from the start as it will make the transition less dramatic for the body).

This was a good read........makes sense.

MacMadame

just the facts, no attack.

"drastic" and "invasive" are opinions, not facts. Your response also had absolutely NOTHING to do with the science that I posted about metabolism and calorie reduction. It's just a big red herring.

LuckyLeprechaun

I just find it interesting that you are giving advice on how to lose weight through diet and exercise, when you chose a drastic, invasive surgery to accomplish your losses.

Surgery is invasive. Removing part of your digestive system is drastic.

Intrinsic to all message boards is the expression of opinions. These are mine. I didn't attack you, I'm happy for you that you lost so much weight. I'm sure it has benefited your health dramatically.

However.
Your advice is contrary to what members who have lost 100plus pounds have proven through their own experiences. When you post advice to newbie members that is contrary to it, I will voice my dissent.

renee22

I don't skip meals during the day...just have a tendency to eat low calorie foods since I am a vegetarian...

I don't measure everything precisely but I learned to cook at a very young age & can eyeball pretty exactly most amounts of food. being a full time student w/ 2 jobs & daily workouts doesn't leave much time to weigh & measure every morsel of food I eat....

On days that I fit in 2 workouts, I'm always down on calories but not that much hungrier......how do I eat more calorie dense foods w/o eating junk since meat & most dairy products are not options....

MacMadame

I just find it interesting that you are giving advice on how to lose weight through diet and exercise, when you chose a drastic, invasive surgery to accomplish your losses.

You appear to be ignorant about weight loss surgery. Apparently you think it's some sort of magic wand that you wave and the weight falls off your body with no work on the part of the patient. In actuality, losing weight through weight loss surgery involves creating a calorie deficit which means eating less and/or moving more.

The bottom line is: I lost my weight by diet and exercise, the same as everyone here. I exercised my butt off, in fact. Both figuratively and literally. I logged all my food and I was ruthlessly honest about what I put in my mouth. I kept myself to a very strict limit of carbs, fat and calories, and made sure to drink my water every day.

What WLS does for me (and others) is to allow us to be satisfied on much smaller quantities of food. So now, when I'm easing into maintenance mode, I don't have that horrible, gnawing hunger that I have had every other time I was dieting and tried to maintain. This will (hopefully) allow me to be one of the successful 75-90% of weight loss surgery patients rather than the unsuccessful 95-99% of morbidly obese dieters.

It may seem drastic to you, but after 37 years of yo-yo dieting and knowing that, given the path I was on, I wouldn't be alive to see my youngest have kids of her own if I didn't do something that actually worked, it didn't seem drastic to me at all. My stomach didn't work -- it lied to me and told me I was hungry all the time -- so I had it fixed. If anything, starving myself for months on Nutri/system eating out of those little tins every day so I could look good at my wedding was a lot more drastic and was much less healthy since I lost my gallbladder doing it.

I didn't attack you,

You used a logical fallacy known as the "ad hominem attack" where instead of addressing a person's arguments, you address the person in an attempt to discredit them. Then, when challenged on it, you claimed to be stating facts and not opinions.

Your advice

I'm not actually posting any "advice" in this particular thread. I was addressing the science of weight loss. But when I do give advice, feel free to disagree with it... using logic or science or even just "that didn't work for me." But don't feel free to say "don't listen to her; she had weight loss surgery" ... because that's just lame.