1200 calorie girls
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Way to Go!!!0
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Yep for nearly 2 years...it isn`t so bad
You can eat a real lot of food for 1200 cals and if you exercise you can eat a lot more too!
I eat a good varied diet, but mainly protein/ low carb and it works for me0 -
Here is the thing....both groups in this argument have a point. I think the Eat More police is being a bit childish however.
I agree with eating more, but that is because I find a body type that is muscular is more sexy then one that is very soft and squishy...it is a personal preference. I know many girls...my girlfriend included who prefer their body to be soft and think any sight of muscles on a girl to be gross and manly.....again while I dont agree and think girls with abs and slight definition is sexy...it is still her and their opinion.
By eating more and losing slower, you retain more lean body mass while working out to still have muscles when you get lean.
By eating less and losing faster, you lose more lean body mass while working out because your body has to go to muscles and break them down for food you are not putting into you body by way of calories.
Again, the 2nd option there could be perfectly acceptable to anyone who cares very little about muscles....however this 2nd option would be devestating to the Eat More crowd and they preach the 1st option. To each their own.
I think both of you need to calm down and have people make their own decisions.
But then how will they troll and tell everybody they dont eat enough and they are doing it wrong and all they will do is shrivel up and die bc they are in starvation mode?!?! PLUS THEY ARE SKINNY FAT! lol they have to puff their chest out somehow and tell everybody how much better they are!
Fanaticism at its finest is what it is. They believe so hard that it becomes the absolute truth, to them anyone who doesnt want a muscular body is wrong so why do things wrong? I've learned (the hard way by upseting my girlfriend) that there are different camps of thought and that some honestly find muscles unattractive....so took me a bit to wrap my head around this but I can understand her hesitation to eat more and exercise more because shes afraid she will get "bulky".
Sorry, but eating more doesn't really have much to do with getting/having a muscular body. Retaining lean body mass is important, for health reasons.
This has to do with health. With girls and grown women eating so little so they can get skinny. So they can see a specific number on the scale. What young women are doing is messing with their hormones. You simply don't get enough nutrition on 1200 calories or less per day. I don't care if you eat chicken and vegetables all day. It is a nutritionally deficient diet because you are not eating enough calories.
It's about sustainability. Most people will not and can not maintain a diet of 1200 calories or less per day for several years. This is exactly why so many people, so many women, "yo-yo diet." They usually gain the weight back, starve again, and go through a cycle of constant dieting. If you can teach girls and women to love their health more than the idea of being skinny (something that will likely never happen, because a lot of women are still dissatisfied with their bodies even when they see their "ideal weight" on the scale), they will be better off maintaining weight loss, enjoying exercise, and learning how to eat and not obsess over food all the time. You want to know the number one thing young women are fearful of? It's not death. It's being fat. That is freaking sad as hell.
So, for me, it's not about trolling because I think I know better than these women. I do know better, and I want to help them. Sometimes I am an arrogant @sshole about it, but most times, I want to help. The problem is that most women don't want to hear it, they are way too fearful about gaining a few pounds. They would rather go to the extreme than think about their long-term health.
Men are different, in general, so I would not expect you to understand, but I encourage you to think more about this, because most of the people in these threads are young women. That is a problem.0 -
I am, now - i started higher...i forget what it was when i was at my original weight... and as I lost weight, MFP gave me the option to auto adjust so i let it and now i am at 1200. It seems to be working out for me , so i let it at 1200.
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we are all VERY different in how we function
no, we really, really aren't
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/you-are-not-different.html
You Are Not Different
All over the internet, on forums dedicated to everything from weight loss to muscle gain, people will loudly argue that they are different. “My metabolism is different.”, “My nervous system is different”, “My muscles are different”, things of that sort. Everyone is a unique and delicate flower, just like their mom told them.
This usually follows them explaining why the good advice that others have used can’t possibly work for them. They are also usually the ones making no progress who won’t even consider trying something else. THEY. ARE. DIFFERENT.
Individuals who have a lot of fat to lose either think that they can magically gain weight eating only a few hundred calories per day, or that they can lose weight just by rearranging their food in some special way. Because their metabolism is different.
Diets play on this of course, hiding the simple fact that they are causing you to eat less in a complicated pseudoscience of macronutrient ratios and such. But there is never any magic to be had when you look at these books critically: it all comes down to making the person eat less, exercise more, or both. It’s just hidden in complex schemes and pseudo-physiology.
Before you think I’m just coming down on overweight individuals, let me say that bodybuilders and athletes want to magically gain muscle and lose fat with a similar rearrangement of nutrients. That by adding some magical nutrient (usually an overpriced supplement) will make them start gaining muscle (or losing fat) without changing the dynamics of the energy balance equation. In the same way diet books play on the frailties of overweight individuals, supplement companies play on the frailties of the athletes telling them to “Use this product if you aren’t gaining” when the real problem lies with the diet or training program.
In short: you can’t beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different. You can’t gain bodymass unless your energy intake exceeds your energy output because you can’t make something out of nothing (muscle or fat). And you can’t lose bodymass unless your energy intake is less than your energy ouput. These are rules that every system in the universe has to follow, including the human body. Nature’s rules, not mine to quote the all-knowing Mr. Miyagi. We may not like them, but we have to live by them anyway.
.
A Quick Tangent About Energy Balance
Energy balance is the difference between your energy expenditure (determined by your metabolic rate, activity and some other stuff) and your energy intake (the food you put down your food hole). The difference between those two (whether expenditure exceeds intake or vice versa) determines what happens to bodymass, whether it goes up or down or stays the same. This is even ignoring the body’s tremendous ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
And, yes, different macronutrients can have different effects here, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about the energy balance equation as a whole which determines, fundamentally, what happens when you’re eating more or less than you’re burning through daily activity.
.
Back to the point
People all want desparately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn’t as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren’t really the case. I really do. I’m mentioning that so you don’t just think I’m peeing on your parade. I wish that through some nifty manipulation of macronutrient percentages you could magically get fat loss or muscle/weight gain without changing the energy balance equation.
I’d sell a lot more copies of my books if I told you it was possible. But except for some very minor effects with such manipulations (that will look like magic but are actually easily explained from basic physiological principles), it’s not going to happen and I won’t tell you it can. Once again, it’s not that I don’t want to believe that such is possible, but the reality is that it simply can’t.
Can you sometimes induce some ‘trickery’ into the equation? Sure and here a few examples. Increasing protein can increase metabolic rate slightly, it also decreases hunger. High-protein diets tend to cause greater fat loss for both reasons. As well, my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 uses a complex scheme of training and diet to work around the system, for a brief 24 hour period during that diet, you can actually consume about double your maintenance calories while continuing to lose body fat. But it’s a transient trick at best.
People who will claim with their dying breath “I can’t lose weight.” or “I can’t gain weight.” can be shown to do so when their caloric intake and caloric output is strictly controlled (meaning in a metabolic ward where every meal is meticulously weighed and measured) to accomplish one or the other. Create a large enough caloric deficit, or a large enough caloric surplus, and something simply HAS to happen. Either metabolism adapts (see below) or bodyweight changes.
It might not be fun, it might not be sustainable, but it will happen. As a buddy of mine once asked: “Why don’t you ever see a fat person come out of a concentration camp?” But that’s essentially what a fat person claiming they can’t lose weight on 500 calories per day is suggesting can happen. Because in the face of low enough calories and sufficient activity, weight has to be lost. Or the person dies. Nothing else can happen. Yet folks seem intent on believing that somehow the basic laws of the universe apply to everyone but them.
It’s not uncommon to find individuals who will claim that “I don’t eat that much and I gain weight” or “I eat a ton and can’t gain weight.” which seems to put me in my place and prove me wrong. In research, there’s typically been two attitudes towards these types of statements. The first is that there is truly some metabolic/thermodynamic miracle occurring. The second is that people are just really bad at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Turns out that number two is what’s usually going on.
Invariably, when you get an honest assessment of the person’s food intake (just accept that it can be done right now), their estimates are way off from reality. Studies show that people may under (or overestimate) their true caloric intake by up to 50%. Basically, unless they’ve done it for a while, most people are simply horrible at estimating how much food they are actually eating. Same thing for exercise, people tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they’ve burned.
So when you ask them to compare their food intake to their energy expenditure, they’ll tend to say that they eat very little and burn very much, and be totally off of reality. So what they are expecting to happen to their weight isn’t the same as what’s going to happen to their weight (based on the realities of the energy balance equation).
A lot of the problem is that food intake is measured by survey and people’s memories are notoriously bad, we tend to remember the good days and report those and forget that cake binge or the party last weekend. Health conscious individuals who are concerned with the appearance of health won’t report that trip to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger so that their fat intake will look lower than it really is as well. This makes it tremendously difficult for researchers to get an accurate measurement of how people really eat.
Even the act of writing down your food intake every day makes people eat differently, so studies where subjects are required to keep a written log (instead of relying on memory) tend to be misleading as well. The only way to really measure calorie intake and expenditure is in a lab where food intake is striclty controlled and measured, and activity is strictly measured. This gets expensive fast. But when you do it, you always find that people simply suck at estimating how much they’re really eating or exercising.
A friend of mine who does research on alcohol intake tells me that the same thing goes on: college students, who don’t want to look like alcholics in training, will vastly under-report how much they are really drinking on surveys. Meaning studies that rely on college students to be honest get a very misleading view of reality. If you believe the studies, there is little drinking going on on a college campus. Go visit one on a Thursday night and tell me if that’s reality.
There’s also the issue of people telling researchers what they think the researchers want to hear making it tough to get a really accurate report from anybody. Do you really think that such a small percentage of folks cheat on their spouses (what surveys invariably show) or are people just lying to the researchers? Probably the latter. Humans are simply screwy when it comes to this sort of thing, even when they’re trying to be honest. And animal studies can only tell us so much when it comes to the issue.
This is why, although it’s a huge pain in the *kitten* (at least initially), meticulously tracking food intake for a few days (and by this I mean getting a food scale and measuring cups/spoons) can be exceedingly informative (or depressing depending on how you look at it). When people who swear up and down that they “Just don’t eat that much” sit down and track it, they invariably find that they are eating two to three times as much as they though. Without fail.
Anyhow, and putting it rather bluntly: if there were truly an exception to this simple thermodynamic rule, the government would need to study it because that person would be a living breathing fusion reactor, able to make calories out of thin air ; or able to burn them off to an unlimited degree.
They could use that person’s body to develop free energy machines to provide unlimited energy for the world if one of these people truly existed. They don’t, end of story. But there is a rather big ‘however’ to all of this…keep reading.
.
However, Not Everybody Has it as Easy as Everybody Else
The research, however, is very clear: not everybody has it as easy as some folks do. Some people’s bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can’t lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.
Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined. It probably has to do with how these individuals brains perceive changes in caloric intake which determines how their brains react to those changes. Some people’s bodies simply increase metabolic rate more quickly (or drop it more quickly) in response to increased or decreased calories. You can see similar variations in terms of what’s lost during dieting; given the same diet and exercise program, some people will lose a lot more muscle than another.
And we all have that one friend who eats nothing but ice cream and soda and never gains a pound. Of course, when you look closely, you find that the person really isn’t eating as much as it looks like overall, or they are only eating that one big meal per day that you happened to see, or they are burning it off because they are constantly moving (in essence, they fidget the excess calories off), or they compensate the next day after eating a lot and eat very little so that overall they maintain their weight.
These people’s brains sense the caloric excess more readily and either blunt hunger harder and faster, or get the person to move more, to burn it off. The same thing happens in reverse, some people’s metabolic rates slow down faster when calories are restricted, or makes them move around less during the day so they burn fewer calories, making further fat loss a lot harder. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about this by reading the article Metabolic Rate Overview.
So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just ‘fit’ their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I do hate being silly.
But that doesn’t change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It’s a physiological impossibility to store more than you actually ate because you can’t make something out of nothing. There’s lots of things like this, that you simply can’t do. You can’t make gold out of lead, you can’t find an honest politician, and you can’t store 500 calories if you only ate 300.
So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. You can probably guess which one I think it is. And, so we’re clear, I’m not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad.
Which is why you can’t magically gain weight on 1000 calories per day if your maintenance intake is 2000 calories per day. Either your body will mobilize stored fuels, or it will slow down metabolic rate to 1000 to put you back into balance (and no study has ever shown the latter to occur in the absence of rather massive weight loss). Something has to happen. But weight gain on sub-maintenance calories isn’t one of them.
It’s also why you can’t not gain weight on 3000 calories per day if your metabolic rate is only 2000 calories per day. Either you start storing fuel or your body is speeding up metabolic rate to compensate. Something has to happen.0 -
saw those too. quit it already. the sad realization thread was stupid. she's at a healthy body fat percentage now and just wants a reason to whine about nothing.
U like stalking these threads & getting all defensive about it when people try to give others a little knowledge about what they're doing to their bodies, don't you?
The sad realization thread wasn't stupid...it was a true story. Just because she is at a healthy body fat %, doesn't mean she can't complain. She lost quite a bit of muscle from the beginning, that was the whole point. And while it's true that you will lose some muscle while eating a deficit no matter what, eating enough calories & protein will keep it to a minimal.
I saw this thread and commented. Not sure how that equates to stalking anything. These threads annoy me, so I comment on them. The word "stalking" doesn't seem like the correct term to describe what I do. Stalking is usually used to mean stalking a person, not a topic. Can you stalk a topic? I think you might be stalking me now though. hmmmmmm, you defriended me and now you're stalking me.
The o.p. merely asked for friends who are in the same category as she is. She did not ask for snarky posts telling her that she is starving herself.
I was talking ab how you always reply to the people who are trying to give a little insight about what 1200 does to people. You always seem to not let anyone get by with saying anything about it, like it's a personal offense.
Ever thought the people were trying to help her? A lot of people assume that 1200 is the only way. They come into this with NO knowledge about how weight loss works.0 -
we are all VERY different in how we function
no, we really, really aren't
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/you-are-not-different.html
You Are Not Different
All over the internet, on forums dedicated to everything from weight loss to muscle gain, people will loudly argue that they are different. “My metabolism is different.”, “My nervous system is different”, “My muscles are different”, things of that sort. Everyone is a unique and delicate flower, just like their mom told them.
This usually follows them explaining why the good advice that others have used can’t possibly work for them. They are also usually the ones making no progress who won’t even consider trying something else. THEY. ARE. DIFFERENT.
Individuals who have a lot of fat to lose either think that they can magically gain weight eating only a few hundred calories per day, or that they can lose weight just by rearranging their food in some special way. Because their metabolism is different.
Diets play on this of course, hiding the simple fact that they are causing you to eat less in a complicated pseudoscience of macronutrient ratios and such. But there is never any magic to be had when you look at these books critically: it all comes down to making the person eat less, exercise more, or both. It’s just hidden in complex schemes and pseudo-physiology.
Before you think I’m just coming down on overweight individuals, let me say that bodybuilders and athletes want to magically gain muscle and lose fat with a similar rearrangement of nutrients. That by adding some magical nutrient (usually an overpriced supplement) will make them start gaining muscle (or losing fat) without changing the dynamics of the energy balance equation. In the same way diet books play on the frailties of overweight individuals, supplement companies play on the frailties of the athletes telling them to “Use this product if you aren’t gaining” when the real problem lies with the diet or training program.
In short: you can’t beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different. You can’t gain bodymass unless your energy intake exceeds your energy output because you can’t make something out of nothing (muscle or fat). And you can’t lose bodymass unless your energy intake is less than your energy ouput. These are rules that every system in the universe has to follow, including the human body. Nature’s rules, not mine to quote the all-knowing Mr. Miyagi. We may not like them, but we have to live by them anyway.
.
A Quick Tangent About Energy Balance
Energy balance is the difference between your energy expenditure (determined by your metabolic rate, activity and some other stuff) and your energy intake (the food you put down your food hole). The difference between those two (whether expenditure exceeds intake or vice versa) determines what happens to bodymass, whether it goes up or down or stays the same. This is even ignoring the body’s tremendous ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
And, yes, different macronutrients can have different effects here, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about the energy balance equation as a whole which determines, fundamentally, what happens when you’re eating more or less than you’re burning through daily activity.
.
Back to the point
People all want desparately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn’t as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren’t really the case. I really do. I’m mentioning that so you don’t just think I’m peeing on your parade. I wish that through some nifty manipulation of macronutrient percentages you could magically get fat loss or muscle/weight gain without changing the energy balance equation.
I’d sell a lot more copies of my books if I told you it was possible. But except for some very minor effects with such manipulations (that will look like magic but are actually easily explained from basic physiological principles), it’s not going to happen and I won’t tell you it can. Once again, it’s not that I don’t want to believe that such is possible, but the reality is that it simply can’t.
Can you sometimes induce some ‘trickery’ into the equation? Sure and here a few examples. Increasing protein can increase metabolic rate slightly, it also decreases hunger. High-protein diets tend to cause greater fat loss for both reasons. As well, my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 uses a complex scheme of training and diet to work around the system, for a brief 24 hour period during that diet, you can actually consume about double your maintenance calories while continuing to lose body fat. But it’s a transient trick at best.
People who will claim with their dying breath “I can’t lose weight.” or “I can’t gain weight.” can be shown to do so when their caloric intake and caloric output is strictly controlled (meaning in a metabolic ward where every meal is meticulously weighed and measured) to accomplish one or the other. Create a large enough caloric deficit, or a large enough caloric surplus, and something simply HAS to happen. Either metabolism adapts (see below) or bodyweight changes.
It might not be fun, it might not be sustainable, but it will happen. As a buddy of mine once asked: “Why don’t you ever see a fat person come out of a concentration camp?” But that’s essentially what a fat person claiming they can’t lose weight on 500 calories per day is suggesting can happen. Because in the face of low enough calories and sufficient activity, weight has to be lost. Or the person dies. Nothing else can happen. Yet folks seem intent on believing that somehow the basic laws of the universe apply to everyone but them.
It’s not uncommon to find individuals who will claim that “I don’t eat that much and I gain weight” or “I eat a ton and can’t gain weight.” which seems to put me in my place and prove me wrong. In research, there’s typically been two attitudes towards these types of statements. The first is that there is truly some metabolic/thermodynamic miracle occurring. The second is that people are just really bad at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Turns out that number two is what’s usually going on.
Invariably, when you get an honest assessment of the person’s food intake (just accept that it can be done right now), their estimates are way off from reality. Studies show that people may under (or overestimate) their true caloric intake by up to 50%. Basically, unless they’ve done it for a while, most people are simply horrible at estimating how much food they are actually eating. Same thing for exercise, people tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they’ve burned.
So when you ask them to compare their food intake to their energy expenditure, they’ll tend to say that they eat very little and burn very much, and be totally off of reality. So what they are expecting to happen to their weight isn’t the same as what’s going to happen to their weight (based on the realities of the energy balance equation).
A lot of the problem is that food intake is measured by survey and people’s memories are notoriously bad, we tend to remember the good days and report those and forget that cake binge or the party last weekend. Health conscious individuals who are concerned with the appearance of health won’t report that trip to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger so that their fat intake will look lower than it really is as well. This makes it tremendously difficult for researchers to get an accurate measurement of how people really eat.
Even the act of writing down your food intake every day makes people eat differently, so studies where subjects are required to keep a written log (instead of relying on memory) tend to be misleading as well. The only way to really measure calorie intake and expenditure is in a lab where food intake is striclty controlled and measured, and activity is strictly measured. This gets expensive fast. But when you do it, you always find that people simply suck at estimating how much they’re really eating or exercising.
A friend of mine who does research on alcohol intake tells me that the same thing goes on: college students, who don’t want to look like alcholics in training, will vastly under-report how much they are really drinking on surveys. Meaning studies that rely on college students to be honest get a very misleading view of reality. If you believe the studies, there is little drinking going on on a college campus. Go visit one on a Thursday night and tell me if that’s reality.
There’s also the issue of people telling researchers what they think the researchers want to hear making it tough to get a really accurate report from anybody. Do you really think that such a small percentage of folks cheat on their spouses (what surveys invariably show) or are people just lying to the researchers? Probably the latter. Humans are simply screwy when it comes to this sort of thing, even when they’re trying to be honest. And animal studies can only tell us so much when it comes to the issue.
This is why, although it’s a huge pain in the *kitten* (at least initially), meticulously tracking food intake for a few days (and by this I mean getting a food scale and measuring cups/spoons) can be exceedingly informative (or depressing depending on how you look at it). When people who swear up and down that they “Just don’t eat that much” sit down and track it, they invariably find that they are eating two to three times as much as they though. Without fail.
Anyhow, and putting it rather bluntly: if there were truly an exception to this simple thermodynamic rule, the government would need to study it because that person would be a living breathing fusion reactor, able to make calories out of thin air ; or able to burn them off to an unlimited degree.
They could use that person’s body to develop free energy machines to provide unlimited energy for the world if one of these people truly existed. They don’t, end of story. But there is a rather big ‘however’ to all of this…keep reading.
.
However, Not Everybody Has it as Easy as Everybody Else
The research, however, is very clear: not everybody has it as easy as some folks do. Some people’s bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can’t lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.
Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined. It probably has to do with how these individuals brains perceive changes in caloric intake which determines how their brains react to those changes. Some people’s bodies simply increase metabolic rate more quickly (or drop it more quickly) in response to increased or decreased calories. You can see similar variations in terms of what’s lost during dieting; given the same diet and exercise program, some people will lose a lot more muscle than another.
And we all have that one friend who eats nothing but ice cream and soda and never gains a pound. Of course, when you look closely, you find that the person really isn’t eating as much as it looks like overall, or they are only eating that one big meal per day that you happened to see, or they are burning it off because they are constantly moving (in essence, they fidget the excess calories off), or they compensate the next day after eating a lot and eat very little so that overall they maintain their weight.
These people’s brains sense the caloric excess more readily and either blunt hunger harder and faster, or get the person to move more, to burn it off. The same thing happens in reverse, some people’s metabolic rates slow down faster when calories are restricted, or makes them move around less during the day so they burn fewer calories, making further fat loss a lot harder. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about this by reading the article Metabolic Rate Overview.
So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just ‘fit’ their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I do hate being silly.
But that doesn’t change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It’s a physiological impossibility to store more than you actually ate because you can’t make something out of nothing. There’s lots of things like this, that you simply can’t do. You can’t make gold out of lead, you can’t find an honest politician, and you can’t store 500 calories if you only ate 300.
So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. You can probably guess which one I think it is. And, so we’re clear, I’m not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad.
Which is why you can’t magically gain weight on 1000 calories per day if your maintenance intake is 2000 calories per day. Either your body will mobilize stored fuels, or it will slow down metabolic rate to 1000 to put you back into balance (and no study has ever shown the latter to occur in the absence of rather massive weight loss). Something has to happen. But weight gain on sub-maintenance calories isn’t one of them.
It’s also why you can’t not gain weight on 3000 calories per day if your metabolic rate is only 2000 calories per day. Either you start storing fuel or your body is speeding up metabolic rate to compensate. Something has to happen.
tl;dr0 -
Charliegirl. Just stay at 1200 cal. and you will be fine! You wont die you will lose weight. :happy:0
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So, for me, it's not about trolling because I think I know better than these women. I do know better, and I want to help them. Sometimes I am an arrogant @sshole about it, but most times, I want to help. The problem is that most women don't want to hear it, they are way too fearful about gaining a few pounds. They would rather go to the extreme than think about their long-term health.
Men are different, in general, so I would not expect you to understand, but I encourage you to think more about this, because most of the people in these threads are young women. That is a problem.
Hmm Granola, I think you need to stop sniffing the clouds and come down from your high horse...I take great offence at your thinking that you know better than `these` women
Your personal opinions about `these` women` or any women, are certainly arrogant (as you said that you feel you are)
Your comment also about men are also really not necessary and totally without basis.
If you want to be condescending then at least try to be factual and keep your opinions to yourself?0 -
we are all VERY different in how we function
no, we really, really aren't
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/you-are-not-different.html
You Are Not Different
All over the internet, on forums dedicated to everything from weight loss to muscle gain, people will loudly argue that they are different. “My metabolism is different.”, “My nervous system is different”, “My muscles are different”, things of that sort. Everyone is a unique and delicate flower, just like their mom told them.
This usually follows them explaining why the good advice that others have used can’t possibly work for them. They are also usually the ones making no progress who won’t even consider trying something else. THEY. ARE. DIFFERENT.
Individuals who have a lot of fat to lose either think that they can magically gain weight eating only a few hundred calories per day, or that they can lose weight just by rearranging their food in some special way. Because their metabolism is different.
Diets play on this of course, hiding the simple fact that they are causing you to eat less in a complicated pseudoscience of macronutrient ratios and such. But there is never any magic to be had when you look at these books critically: it all comes down to making the person eat less, exercise more, or both. It’s just hidden in complex schemes and pseudo-physiology.
Before you think I’m just coming down on overweight individuals, let me say that bodybuilders and athletes want to magically gain muscle and lose fat with a similar rearrangement of nutrients. That by adding some magical nutrient (usually an overpriced supplement) will make them start gaining muscle (or losing fat) without changing the dynamics of the energy balance equation. In the same way diet books play on the frailties of overweight individuals, supplement companies play on the frailties of the athletes telling them to “Use this product if you aren’t gaining” when the real problem lies with the diet or training program.
In short: you can’t beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different. You can’t gain bodymass unless your energy intake exceeds your energy output because you can’t make something out of nothing (muscle or fat). And you can’t lose bodymass unless your energy intake is less than your energy ouput. These are rules that every system in the universe has to follow, including the human body. Nature’s rules, not mine to quote the all-knowing Mr. Miyagi. We may not like them, but we have to live by them anyway.
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A Quick Tangent About Energy Balance
Energy balance is the difference between your energy expenditure (determined by your metabolic rate, activity and some other stuff) and your energy intake (the food you put down your food hole). The difference between those two (whether expenditure exceeds intake or vice versa) determines what happens to bodymass, whether it goes up or down or stays the same. This is even ignoring the body’s tremendous ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
And, yes, different macronutrients can have different effects here, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about the energy balance equation as a whole which determines, fundamentally, what happens when you’re eating more or less than you’re burning through daily activity.
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Back to the point
People all want desparately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn’t as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren’t really the case. I really do. I’m mentioning that so you don’t just think I’m peeing on your parade. I wish that through some nifty manipulation of macronutrient percentages you could magically get fat loss or muscle/weight gain without changing the energy balance equation.
I’d sell a lot more copies of my books if I told you it was possible. But except for some very minor effects with such manipulations (that will look like magic but are actually easily explained from basic physiological principles), it’s not going to happen and I won’t tell you it can. Once again, it’s not that I don’t want to believe that such is possible, but the reality is that it simply can’t.
Can you sometimes induce some ‘trickery’ into the equation? Sure and here a few examples. Increasing protein can increase metabolic rate slightly, it also decreases hunger. High-protein diets tend to cause greater fat loss for both reasons. As well, my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 uses a complex scheme of training and diet to work around the system, for a brief 24 hour period during that diet, you can actually consume about double your maintenance calories while continuing to lose body fat. But it’s a transient trick at best.
People who will claim with their dying breath “I can’t lose weight.” or “I can’t gain weight.” can be shown to do so when their caloric intake and caloric output is strictly controlled (meaning in a metabolic ward where every meal is meticulously weighed and measured) to accomplish one or the other. Create a large enough caloric deficit, or a large enough caloric surplus, and something simply HAS to happen. Either metabolism adapts (see below) or bodyweight changes.
It might not be fun, it might not be sustainable, but it will happen. As a buddy of mine once asked: “Why don’t you ever see a fat person come out of a concentration camp?” But that’s essentially what a fat person claiming they can’t lose weight on 500 calories per day is suggesting can happen. Because in the face of low enough calories and sufficient activity, weight has to be lost. Or the person dies. Nothing else can happen. Yet folks seem intent on believing that somehow the basic laws of the universe apply to everyone but them.
It’s not uncommon to find individuals who will claim that “I don’t eat that much and I gain weight” or “I eat a ton and can’t gain weight.” which seems to put me in my place and prove me wrong. In research, there’s typically been two attitudes towards these types of statements. The first is that there is truly some metabolic/thermodynamic miracle occurring. The second is that people are just really bad at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Turns out that number two is what’s usually going on.
Invariably, when you get an honest assessment of the person’s food intake (just accept that it can be done right now), their estimates are way off from reality. Studies show that people may under (or overestimate) their true caloric intake by up to 50%. Basically, unless they’ve done it for a while, most people are simply horrible at estimating how much food they are actually eating. Same thing for exercise, people tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they’ve burned.
So when you ask them to compare their food intake to their energy expenditure, they’ll tend to say that they eat very little and burn very much, and be totally off of reality. So what they are expecting to happen to their weight isn’t the same as what’s going to happen to their weight (based on the realities of the energy balance equation).
A lot of the problem is that food intake is measured by survey and people’s memories are notoriously bad, we tend to remember the good days and report those and forget that cake binge or the party last weekend. Health conscious individuals who are concerned with the appearance of health won’t report that trip to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger so that their fat intake will look lower than it really is as well. This makes it tremendously difficult for researchers to get an accurate measurement of how people really eat.
Even the act of writing down your food intake every day makes people eat differently, so studies where subjects are required to keep a written log (instead of relying on memory) tend to be misleading as well. The only way to really measure calorie intake and expenditure is in a lab where food intake is striclty controlled and measured, and activity is strictly measured. This gets expensive fast. But when you do it, you always find that people simply suck at estimating how much they’re really eating or exercising.
A friend of mine who does research on alcohol intake tells me that the same thing goes on: college students, who don’t want to look like alcholics in training, will vastly under-report how much they are really drinking on surveys. Meaning studies that rely on college students to be honest get a very misleading view of reality. If you believe the studies, there is little drinking going on on a college campus. Go visit one on a Thursday night and tell me if that’s reality.
There’s also the issue of people telling researchers what they think the researchers want to hear making it tough to get a really accurate report from anybody. Do you really think that such a small percentage of folks cheat on their spouses (what surveys invariably show) or are people just lying to the researchers? Probably the latter. Humans are simply screwy when it comes to this sort of thing, even when they’re trying to be honest. And animal studies can only tell us so much when it comes to the issue.
This is why, although it’s a huge pain in the *kitten* (at least initially), meticulously tracking food intake for a few days (and by this I mean getting a food scale and measuring cups/spoons) can be exceedingly informative (or depressing depending on how you look at it). When people who swear up and down that they “Just don’t eat that much” sit down and track it, they invariably find that they are eating two to three times as much as they though. Without fail.
Anyhow, and putting it rather bluntly: if there were truly an exception to this simple thermodynamic rule, the government would need to study it because that person would be a living breathing fusion reactor, able to make calories out of thin air ; or able to burn them off to an unlimited degree.
They could use that person’s body to develop free energy machines to provide unlimited energy for the world if one of these people truly existed. They don’t, end of story. But there is a rather big ‘however’ to all of this…keep reading.
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However, Not Everybody Has it as Easy as Everybody Else
The research, however, is very clear: not everybody has it as easy as some folks do. Some people’s bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can’t lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.
Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined. It probably has to do with how these individuals brains perceive changes in caloric intake which determines how their brains react to those changes. Some people’s bodies simply increase metabolic rate more quickly (or drop it more quickly) in response to increased or decreased calories. You can see similar variations in terms of what’s lost during dieting; given the same diet and exercise program, some people will lose a lot more muscle than another.
And we all have that one friend who eats nothing but ice cream and soda and never gains a pound. Of course, when you look closely, you find that the person really isn’t eating as much as it looks like overall, or they are only eating that one big meal per day that you happened to see, or they are burning it off because they are constantly moving (in essence, they fidget the excess calories off), or they compensate the next day after eating a lot and eat very little so that overall they maintain their weight.
These people’s brains sense the caloric excess more readily and either blunt hunger harder and faster, or get the person to move more, to burn it off. The same thing happens in reverse, some people’s metabolic rates slow down faster when calories are restricted, or makes them move around less during the day so they burn fewer calories, making further fat loss a lot harder. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about this by reading the article Metabolic Rate Overview.
So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just ‘fit’ their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I do hate being silly.
But that doesn’t change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It’s a physiological impossibility to store more than you actually ate because you can’t make something out of nothing. There’s lots of things like this, that you simply can’t do. You can’t make gold out of lead, you can’t find an honest politician, and you can’t store 500 calories if you only ate 300.
So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. You can probably guess which one I think it is. And, so we’re clear, I’m not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad.
Which is why you can’t magically gain weight on 1000 calories per day if your maintenance intake is 2000 calories per day. Either your body will mobilize stored fuels, or it will slow down metabolic rate to 1000 to put you back into balance (and no study has ever shown the latter to occur in the absence of rather massive weight loss). Something has to happen. But weight gain on sub-maintenance calories isn’t one of them.
It’s also why you can’t not gain weight on 3000 calories per day if your metabolic rate is only 2000 calories per day. Either you start storing fuel or your body is speeding up metabolic rate to compensate. Something has to happen.
^so right. Read that before. Dont expect people here to. Some of them don't really care and are set in their ways, thinking they're SO different from everyone else.0 -
tl;dr
indeed. who would want to spend 10 minutes educating themselves on taking care of the most important thing they have, their own body.0 -
tl;dr
indeed. who would want to spend 10 minutes educating themselves on taking care of the most important thing they have, their own body.
i didn't read it and i have no clue who you are, so why should i assume that was educational?0 -
tl;dr
indeed. who would want to spend 10 minutes educating themselves on taking care of the most important thing they have, their own body.
I've read it before, lots of great info! 0 -
1200 is way 2 hard! however it motivates me 2 exercise so i can eat more 0
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^so right. Read that before. Dont expect people here to. Some of them don't really care and are set in their ways, thinking they're SO different from everyone else.
the worst thing is that they automatically assume that anyone who questions their adherence to 1200 calories is attacking them, when it's the exact opposite. i don't go to those pro-anorexia sites looking for women on 1200 calories just so i can hector them about how dangerous what they're doing is for their body. in fact, i don't care AT ALL what people on sites like that do or do not do. but those people on this site, named My FITNESS Pal, i assume want to become fit and healthy. you can't do that if you're starving yourself. forget the people who really can be on 1200 calories in a healthy way because that happens to be what is appropriate for them due to their BMR/TDEE. forget the people who have medical conditions and are under a doctor's care (although it would be nice if they'd disclose that information right up front when the post threads about how great 1200 calorie diets are for them). i'm only talking about those women (and some men) who have latched onto the 1200 calorie number for no defensible reason whatsoever, and here's why... i believe alot of them are lying about 1200. i believe alot of them are actually trying to live on 700 or 800 or 900 calories a day, but are too ashamed to admit that. but they see some support here for 1200, so they are willing to admit to that number. so i'll play that game and "pretend" that we are really all talking about no less than 1200. but i'm not fooled. i think there are lots of people eating less and those are the ones i want to help, if i can. the only way i know how to help them is to occasionally pop into one of these threads and lend some support to those folks who are stating from personal experience and from an understanding of the scientific literature, that there are consequences to under-eating for a long period of time. some of those consequences can be avoided just by raising the calorie level to a more realistic goal.0 -
tl;dr
indeed. who would want to spend 10 minutes educating themselves on taking care of the most important thing they have, their own body.
i didn't read it and i have no clue who you are, so why should i assume that was educational?
Cuz he looks amazing duh0 -
So, for me, it's not about trolling because I think I know better than these women. I do know better, and I want to help them. Sometimes I am an arrogant @sshole about it, but most times, I want to help. The problem is that most women don't want to hear it, they are way too fearful about gaining a few pounds. They would rather go to the extreme than think about their long-term health.
Men are different, in general, so I would not expect you to understand, but I encourage you to think more about this, because most of the people in these threads are young women. That is a problem.
Hmm Granola, I think you need to stop sniffing the clouds and come down from your high horse...I take great offence at your thinking that you know better than `these` women
Your personal opinions about `these` women` or any women, are certainly arrogant (as you said that you feel you are)
Your comment also about men are also really not necessary and totally without basis.
If you want to be condescending then at least try to be factual and keep your opinions to yourself?
In life, some people know better than others. From sociological and psychological perspective, I know better.
It would take a long time to explain to you the sociological perspective here, but I assume you understand that eating disorders occur more often in young women than in men, so there is clearly something in our culture and the way we raise boys and girls differently that is going on there.
I mean, I thought it was pretty common knowledge that women in our culture are valued more so based on what they look like than men are. Women are taught they should be quiet, not take up space, and the fitness industry for women is behind about 20 years at least. We are taught that to be valued we should be thin, gentle, and certainly not assertive.
I’ve also eaten at 1200 calories a day or less. I know disordered eating habits and thoughts, and I know what it’s like to be desperate to lose weight and think that it’s the only way.
I’m better than that now and I know better. I’m healthier in body and mind for it. I have plenty of female friends here who have been through the same thing and know better now.0 -
i am at 1230, daily, and even will going to the gym i try to stay under that goal, which isnt very hard for me since all my favs to eat are super low in cals and super filling. i am trying to burn a total of 2730 cals a day so that would equal about 3 pounds lost each week. which is aiming high. but that was i definatly get at least 1-2 pounds gone each week, so far, so good. 0
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^so right. Read that before. Dont expect people here to. Some of them don't really care and are set in their ways, thinking they're SO different from everyone else.
the worst thing is that they automatically assume that anyone who questions their adherence to 1200 calories is attacking them, when it's the exact opposite. i don't go to those pro-anorexia sites looking for women on 1200 calories just so i can hector them about how dangerous what they're doing is for their body. in fact, i don't care AT ALL what people on sites like that do or do not do. but those people on this site, named My FITNESS Pal, i assume want to become fit and healthy. you can't do that if you're starving yourself. forget the people who really can be on 1200 calories in a healthy way because that happens to be what is appropriate for them due to their BMR/TDEE. forget the people who have medical conditions and are under a doctor's care (although it would be nice if they'd disclose that information right up front when the post threads about how great 1200 calorie diets are for them). i'm only talking about those women (and some men) who have latched onto the 1200 calorie number for no defensible reason whatsoever, and here's why... i believe alot of them are lying about 1200. i believe alot of them are actually trying to live on 700 or 800 or 900 calories a day, but are too ashamed to admit that. but they see some support here for 1200, so they are willing to admit to that number. so i'll play that game and "pretend" that we are really all talking about no less than 1200. but i'm not fooled. i think there are lots of people eating less and those are the ones i want to help, if i can. the only way i know how to help the
m is to occasionally pop into one of these threads and lend some support to those folks who are stating from personal experience and from an understanding of the scientific literature.
Exactly! Some people are unreachable, but others arent. Others eat 1200 cuz tht is all they know. Tht is what happened to me. I lost muscle too. Now I'm 5'5 120 25% bf...skinny fat. I wish I knew thn what I know now.0 -
tl;dr
indeed. who would want to spend 10 minutes educating themselves on taking care of the most important thing they have, their own body.
i didn't read it and i have no clue who you are, so why should i assume that was educational?
you shouldn't. you should try reading it instead. but I can see by all of the posting that you are doing here that your time is quite valuable.0
This discussion has been closed.
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