BMR!! who eats under that like me?!

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Replies

  • sissie2955
    sissie2955 Posts: 47
    Dan - Can you PM your info? The thread is locked and I wanted to bump it for later or try to print t out to look at.
  • LowcarbNY
    LowcarbNY Posts: 546 Member
    I agree here. I have been doing this a long time and I have had two major people in my life during my journey. 1 A trainer that is also and RN & 2 a doctor. If you continously eat below what your body needs your body will first go after muscle to survive including the muscle around your heart. Some eople that have done the adkins type diet have later had severe issues or died due to the loss of muscle from around the heart.

    What muscle is "around your heart"? My heart is muscle. You will not catabolize muscle unless you have inadequate protein in your diet. So long as you eat enough protein for cellular repair and for any glucose requirements not met by your diet your body will be quite happy to use its stored fat for energy. When you run out of excess fat then you can worry.

    Maybe you failed to understand what your expert friends told you.
  • krisiepoo
    krisiepoo Posts: 710 Member
    HI!

    I'm no nutritionist but I have done a semester in nutrition for my degree and, as I understand it, your BMR makes up the bulk of your daily calorific usage - all the moving around and stuff we do adds up to nowhere near as many calories. In order to lose 1lb of fat you must create a calorie deficit of 3500 calories (that's how much energy is stored in a pound of body fat). If you eat at or just above your BMR you will lose weight but so slowly it'd be barely noticeable.

    For instance, if you want to lose a pound a week you have to cut 500 calories a day off your minimum calorie needs in order for your body to burn fat to make up the calories.

    Does that make any sense?

    B x

    Oy vey... you NEED to eat ABOVE BMR but BELOW TDEE. I eat above my BMR but 20% lower than my TDEE and am losing "noticable" weight.
  • dlwyatt82
    dlwyatt82 Posts: 1,077 Member
    Imagine needing $5 a day to operate your body.
    Without the $5 you dont get the proper gas for the engine or the oil.
    You are in essence, running on empty.

    Now if you have a body fat level that puts you in the obese II or obese III category then this is okay for a while.
    If you are just overweight then you are doing it wrong.

    The body is a complex system and many factors come into play with losing weight.
    Unfortunately cutting cals to bare bones isnt going to work forever and the catabolic effects on lean tissue can be extreme.

    This is crap. Whether or not eating at less than your BMR is a bad thing, the explanations for it need to be based on actual science, not just this "imagine a fuel tank" nonsense. It's like the people who insist that you need to eat a bunch of small meals during the day, because your metabolism "is like a fire that you don't want to let go out."

    Using metaphors is fine for helping someone to understand a concept, but they should never be the actual explanation.
  • krisiepoo
    krisiepoo Posts: 710 Member
    I am wondering about the BMR too. I hadn't even heard of it before I joined almost two weeks ago and my BMR is something like 1800 and I've been recommended to eat 1400 on my diet in order to lose 2lbs per week and so far I'm bang on target so am thinking that my diet recommendation calories must be right and the BMR is maybe if you don't want to lose weight????

    Can anyone baby step me through it :)

    This is the easiest website I've found to follow http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/

    Did MFP recommend 1400?
  • mrskevsmith
    mrskevsmith Posts: 1
    I just realized that I am not eating enough calories!! that would explain why Im not losing weight....THIS IS SOOO FREAKING DEPRESSING.... WHO CAN HELP??
  • firstsip
    firstsip Posts: 8,399 Member
    Did you use a fork to type this? Right down to "exxercise"?

    rude.. if you don't have anything helpful to comment and help with then why bother at all?!.. I wrote this at night and tired.. and obviously didnt proof-read! big whoop!.. didnt know I was going on a spelling Bee to start a post!

    Don;t let idiots like that ruin your day. There are some everywhere. Just ignore crap like that and keep it moving. :)

    Still here ;) I'm not an idiot, but I guess if it's opposite day...
  • Helloitsdan
    Helloitsdan Posts: 5,564 Member
    Imagine needing $5 a day to operate your body.
    Without the $5 you dont get the proper gas for the engine or the oil.
    You are in essence, running on empty.

    Now if you have a body fat level that puts you in the obese II or obese III category then this is okay for a while.
    If you are just overweight then you are doing it wrong.

    The body is a complex system and many factors come into play with losing weight.
    Unfortunately cutting cals to bare bones isnt going to work forever and the catabolic effects on lean tissue can be extreme.

    This is crap. Whether or not eating at less than your BMR is a bad thing, the explanations for it need to be based on actual science, not just this "imagine a fuel tank" nonsense. It's like the people who insist that you need to eat a bunch of small meals during the day, because your metabolism "is like a fire that you don't want to let go out."

    Using metaphors is fine for helping someone to understand a concept, but they should never be the actual explanation.


    Heres the explanation.

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12
  • shorty35565
    shorty35565 Posts: 1,425 Member
    My BMR is 1332 according to MFP and I'm pretty much sedentary. I'm a housewife, so about all I do it takes care of our tiny apt which doesn't take much. I always eat more than 1332, but I never net that unless I don't exercise.
  • mccbabe1
    mccbabe1 Posts: 737 Member
    I am wondering about the BMR too. I hadn't even heard of it before I joined almost two weeks ago and my BMR is something like 1800 and I've been recommended to eat 1400 on my diet in order to lose 2lbs per week and so far I'm bang on target so am thinking that my diet recommendation calories must be right and the BMR is maybe if you don't want to lose weight????

    Can anyone baby step me through it :)

    This is the easiest website I've found to follow http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/

    Did MFP recommend 1400?

    i put my wt loss at 2#'s a week and it said to eat 1200 calories a day to get to that wt...
    just seems low and sometimes i'm way freakin hungry still.. LOL :/
    thank you for that scooby workshop sight! imma check it out now..
  • CoderGal
    CoderGal Posts: 6,800 Member
    Imagine needing $5 a day to operate your body.
    Without the $5 you dont get the proper gas for the engine or the oil.
    You are in essence, running on empty.

    Now if you have a body fat level that puts you in the obese II or obese III category then this is okay for a while.
    If you are just overweight then you are doing it wrong.

    The body is a complex system and many factors come into play with losing weight.
    Unfortunately cutting cals to bare bones isnt going to work forever and the catabolic effects on lean tissue can be extreme.

    This is crap. Whether or not eating at less than your BMR is a bad thing, the explanations for it need to be based on actual science, not just this "imagine a fuel tank" nonsense. It's like the people who insist that you need to eat a bunch of small meals during the day, because your metabolism "is like a fire that you don't want to let go out."

    Using metaphors is fine for helping someone to understand a concept, but they should never be the actual explanation.


    Heres the explanation.

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12
    And if that wasnt enough to read:
    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/637094-cinderella-s-weight-loss-knowledge
  • dlwyatt82
    dlwyatt82 Posts: 1,077 Member
    Heres the explanation.

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12
    And if that wasnt enough to read:
    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/637094-cinderella-s-weight-loss-knowledge

    I'm not sure which data in either of those posts you are referring to. There is one table in dan's post showing comparisons of "overfed" to "underfed", though I would assume that these terms refer to a comparison of caloric intake and TDEE. It does make sense that a larger caloric deficit would have a larger effect on your metabolism; however, that's still based on comparing intake to TDEE, not BMR. For a very inactive person, TDEE and BMR will be fairly close together, and eating "below BMR" would still be a potentially reasonable (500-1000) deficit. For those of us getting a lot of exercise or who have very active jobs, you obviously wouldn't want to eat that few calories, as the deficit would be huge.

    Before I'd accept the statement of "you should never eat less than your BMR because it will screw up your metabolism", I'd want to see studies that took this into account, trying to determine whether it's an excessive deficit (from TDEE) that causes these consequences, or whether the BMR number really is some magic boundary that shouldn't be crossed.
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