Eat More 2 Weigh Less

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New to EM2WL and need help to understand it

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amber115
amber115 Posts: 6
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Hi I have been a member on mfp since the end of january and I have lost 40 lbs on a 1200 calorie a day diet. At first the 1200 calories was hard but I adjusted rather quickly but now I am feeling the effects of eating to little such as my hair is thinning, im tired alot, and my energy levels has gone down, and ect. My questions are what do I need to eat food and calories? What kind of exercises work for this program? Can I do jm dvds for my workouts? How many days a week should I exercise? And is there different phases in the EM2WL program. I am a perfectionist and just want to make sure im doing this right. Thank you so much for any advice or help I can get.

I am 5'0
139 lbs
29 year old female

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  • alcon79
    alcon79 Posts: 193 Member
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    Welcome to the group Amber! You'll find that everyone here is super supportive and can offer excellent advice.

    With that said, your best place to start is to read through the stickies and get a real sense of how it all works - food, macros, exercise, etc. That should help answer some of your basic questions and feel free to PM me with any other questions you have.

    There's a lot of information to take in, but you'll get the aha moment soon enough. I started EM2WL in June and I haven't looked back. I'm on a diet break this week, so 2100 cals a day baby!
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    Hi I have been a member on mfp since the end of january and I have lost 40 lbs on a 1200 calorie a day diet. At first the 1200 calories was hard but I adjusted rather quickly but now I am feeling the effects of eating to little such as my hair is thinning, im tired alot, and my energy levels has gone down, and ect. My questions are what do I need to eat food and calories? What kind of exercises work for this program? Can I do jm dvds for my workouts? How many days a week should I exercise? And is there different phases in the EM2WL program. I am a perfectionist and just want to make sure im doing this right. Thank you so much for any advice or help I can get.

    I am 5'0
    139 lbs
    29 year old female

    Great work so far, it is more difficult because you have less room for error the less you have to lose. About 39 left?

    So with an estimated BMR of 1277 (more or less depending on bodyfat%), you lucked out with 1200 cal diet not having as bad an effect on you.

    The exercise made it worse though if you were not eating burned calories back.

    As far as workouts, depends if you are feeling un-muscular already due to lots of cardio so far, or if you have been doing lifting already keeping strong.

    Lifting has great fat burning effect, even though the calories burned during the workout are smaller, it's greater looking at 24 hrs of time.

    This means you eat less than if doing massive amounts of cardio.
    But you may want to eat more with a smaller metabolism, so increased cardio may be desired.

    So if you did 3 days x 1 hr of lifting a week, and only walking on days off, your estimated TDEE would be 1800.
    If your metabolism was full burning, which sounds like it isn't. It has to get there. That's why you stopped being hungry.

    So while you are figuring things out, start eating 100 cal extra each day for a week, then another 100 next week, ect.

    Now, this close to goal, 15% deficit is appropriate, so 1530 daily goal is good idea. Each and every day.

    So got 3 weeks to get calories up.

    Your TDEE changes if you really want to do more cardio to eat more. Don't think of the cardio for weight loss. Diet is for weight, hopefully just fat, loss. The extra cardio would merely be to eat more.

    You'll find the math for that on the stickies. So not much of an increase for ya since you are shorter.

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