Eat More to Lose More?

fitwithwhit88

Hi everyone! Just wondering what your experience has been with caloric consumption and associated weight loss. I, as ignorant as it may sound, thought a low calorie intake (regardless of how much I worked out) was best for losing weight. After recent increase in exercise and resulting weight GAIN from trying to maintain a diet of around 1200 cal/day, I knew something must be wrong. I've researched a bit and all signs point to below-appropriate caloric intakes slowing your metabolism and sending your body into starvation mode.

So my question to you all is, have you encountered this same issue? Has increasing your calorie intake actually been beneficial in increasing your weight loss? For those of you trying to lose weight, what are your measurements and exercise habits, and how many calories are you taking in per day?

(Also - I'm new to MFP, so if you're looking for friends to add, I'd love to connect!)

AmyRhubarb

Absolutely - you'll find lots of us here who upped our calories and have lost weight, shed fat, and are doing great.

There's an Eat More to Weigh Less group here: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/forums/show/3834-eat-more-to-weigh-less

And I found this topic to be very helpful in figuring how much I should be eating, and in setting up all my goals: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12
Group for it here: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/forums/show/7965-in-place-of-a-road-map

You're on the right track. Food is fuel - eat too little and you give your body a reason to store fat rather than burn it. My dairy is open - I eat 1800 or more calories a day, and I'm losing fat and inches (weight doesn't change much, but I'm near my goal weight) and buying new jeans yet AGAIN following this plan.

stephreed11

Yes! After years of being hungry, & doing lots of research, I'm now a big fan of eat more to lose more! I'm happy eating a little above my BMR.

fitwithwhit88

Thanks so much for your reply! It's great to have your input as I try to figure whole thing out and even better to know that you and others are losing weight by eating more. I've since recalculated my totals, upping my intake, so hoping to see a difference after a few weeks! Thanks again!

Mokey41

Yes! After years of being hungry, & doing lots of research, I'm now a big fan of eat more to lose more! I'm happy eating a little above my BMR.

How is eating a little more than you need to survive in a coma "eating more"?

uwdawg07

I upped my calories from 1200 to 1600-1700 and started losing weight.

I'm 5'3" and was stuck at 122 pounds for 6 months!! I was exercising a ton and burning a lot of calories. I increased my calories and lost some weight and 4 total inches. I'm still in the process of it right now. But so far so good! And I LOVE getting to eat more!

Annewx

Yes! I'm a nurse and work 12 hour shifts and at one point I only brought in lunch to eat and maybe an apple or toast for breakfast/mid-morning snack (I never used to eat breakfast) and I noticed I was feeling quite bloated and felt disgusting. I then changed my ways and ate breakfast either before I left my house, or before the shift started and I took on loads of food to work and I ate something on every break, having fruit, yoghurt, granola or a croissant or something along the lines of that, I noticed I lost weight and felt so much better!

I have been off work recently and up until a few weeks ago I was only have 3 meals a day, 10am, 2pm and 6pm but I found myself snacking unhealthily particularly late at night. I decided to fix up and I have now been eating 5 meals a day and without exercise in the past 2 or 3 weeks I have lost the weight I put on over Christmas holidays!

lornaloo3

Yes! After years of being hungry, & doing lots of research, I'm now a big fan of eat more to lose more! I'm happy eating a little above my BMR.

How is eating a little more than you need to survive in a coma "eating more"?

I'm guessing she means more compared to the harsher 1200-1300 recommended for a woman to lose weight.

workaholic_nurse

Important to remember that as you add calories you should try to maintain nutritional balance.

vanguardfitness

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-full-diet-break.html

The physiological stuff is the stuff I talk about all the time here on the site, on the forum and elsewhere. When folks diet and lose weight/fat, the body adjusts metabolic rate downwards. While a majority of this is simply due to weighing less (smaller bodies burn fewer calories), there is also an adaptive component, a greater decrease in metabolic rate than would be predicted due to changes in things like leptin, insulin, thyroid hormones, etc.
By moving to roughly maintenance for a couple of weeks, many of those hormones are given time to recover. Thyroid hormones come back up, as does leptin. This is a big part of the reason for the recommendation to raise carbs to 100-150 grams per day as a minimum.
Thyroid hormones are distinctly sensitive to carbohydrate intake as are leptin levels (especially in the short-term). Just raising calories but keeping the diet very low carb doesn’t accomplish everything hormonally I want the full diet break to do.
This is also the rationale behind the duration, thyroid hormones and the effects that they exert aren’t immediate. It may take 7 days of eating at maintenance for thyroid levels to come back to normal, but you need at least another week to get many of their effects to max out. So in answer to the question “Can I make the break shorter?”, the answer is “No.” I know that everyone wants to GET LEAN NOW but unless you are a contest dieting bodybuilder or figure chick and there’s no real-time constraint, what’s the hurry?
There are other effects as well. Hormones like testosterone often go down during dieting and female hormones can be whacked out too. Cortisol generally goes up when you diet and raising calories and carbs helps shut that off for a bit.
I’d note in this regards that many find that, after a period of hard dieting, they often keep leaning out into the first week of a planned break. As I discussed in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat, some of it may simply be dropping water.
But some of it does seem to be true fat loss. People keep bugging me for the mechanism and my current best-answer is “Magic!”. At some point, I might throw out some of my theories on it. Not today.
As well, for leaner individuals, even if they do everything ‘right’, there is often a loss of performance or muscle mass during a diet. The two weeks with raised calories gives them the capacity to train a bit more and recover what they’ve lost before moving into the next stage of dieting.
Finally, the idea has been thrown out there that stabilizing at a given (reduced) body weight or body fat might give the body a better chance of accepting that new weight as ‘normal’ and adjusting setpoint. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything to support that in the literature. It’d be lovely but I tend to doubt that’s how it works. I’m just mentioning it for completeness.

seems legit