It's not working! Someone please help :(

elledo

You guys are probably gonna hate me cos i'm sure it's been said before but i don't have time to sort through a thousand posts.

12 months ago i started on 1800 cals as advised by my trainer (my bmr was around 2000 I think) then as i lost weight he advised me to go down to 1500, then 1350. The whole time I was working out 6 days a week, mixing cardio and heavy lifting. I lost nearly 18 kgs but this all stopped about 5 months ago.
So 3 months ago i tried the eating more thing. I have now gained around 4kgs and it's killing me. Admittedly, i didn't do a full reset i jus gradually increased to 1800 calls. Scoobys workshop days my BMR is 1825 and tdee -20% is 2774. How can i be eating nearly 1000 cals more and still lose weight. Can someone please point me in the right direction? i am so sick of this ans just keep thinking i should go back to eating 1350 cos that worked.

31prvrbs

Hi,

Of course we don't hate you . We all need to really *get* it before we commit.

It's important to remember that our body adapts to what we feed it. Eat less, and eventually you burn less. This is what you witnessed at your previous low calorie levels. So remind yourself upfront that the previous method did not actually "work." Lowering cals will always appear to "work" at first. Especially after they have been increased. But it was the *increasing* of the cals that made the *decreasing* appear to work. It worked the first time because you were eating more, and then you suddenly reduced intake. Eating more revs the metabolism, because the body again must adapt to what you are feeding it. Increasing cals will help you break a plateau much more than decreasing, because you can only go so low. And the lower you go, the less you burn.

When you eat *too* little, your body decides that running basic metabolic functions is more important than releasing extra fat. It's not all about eating as little as possible. Because we know that eating less calories than we burn causes weight loss we fall into the trap of lowering those cals as much as possible to get MORE weight loss, but this is the furthest thing from the truth. In actuality, your body begins to break down muscle, in order to conserve your fat stores which is the bodies desired source of energy. Net effect, you BMR lowers even further. You only need to eat in a slight deficit to lose weight. Eating a larger deficit than necessary actually halts your efforts and begins to make you progress backward.

Your BMR is the minimum amount of food you need just to lay in bed all day. You need that just to breathe. If you're not supplying your body with what it needs to breathe, you can't expect much else out of it. It's operating on "a budget." So essentially you aren't even feeding yourself enough to lose weight.

Here is an article that goes a bit deeper into that:
http://eatmore2weighless.com/why-eating-less-and-exercising-more-can-backfire/

I completely feel your pain. We all had to come to full acceptance of this process before we being able to completely let go and move forward. I invite you to dive in to the resources section (articles/vids, etc) of the site to help you feel more secure in the research behind this lifestyle:

http://eatmore2weighless.com/faqs/resources/

I pray that you'll look through all of the info and reconsider fueling your body properly in the long run, it's the best thing that you can possibly do for your body. But you really have to jump in with two feet. If your body senses that you aren't completely on board, it will simply hoard the food during the times of feast, knowing that the famine is just around the corner.

These resources will help you to be at peace with eating more despite what we've been led to believe all these years.



~Kiki