Calorie Confusion!

sunshinesoprano
sunshinesoprano Posts: 66 Member
in Food and Nutrition
So, last year my doc told me to cut my cals to 1200/day in addition to my exercising. So, I did and yay...lost 50 lbs!
But, I've been plateaued for about 4 months and I'm over it.
I went for my yearly checkup Friday and she told me to stay at 1200. When I do this, no loss, but when I intake more cals, I'm losing. I told her I was using MFP and she recommended Lose It!. So, I signed up and they told me to do 1654! I know it uses a different calculation than MFP. MFP suggests 1290. I'm so confused. I also have a LOT of muscle mass in my legs.
Any ideas?

Replies

  • TamiMeras
    TamiMeras Posts: 3
    Whenever anyone hits a plateau it's a good idea to switch things up, be that exercise and diet combined or one or the other. Building muscle does several things, first when you begin to build up muscle tissue, you are essentially tearing it down, then it goes through recovery(takes on water), but eventually your body has to work harder to maintain the muscle mass than fat mass. So your body fat goes down naturally. You may be in one of those cycles. I am a firm believer you need to take on much more protein but keep your ratios of protein/fat/carbs to the goal you are trying to reach. If you are just doing weight loss, MFP works, if you are looking to build muscle and reduce body fat and maintain, then maybe try Lose It. I am a personal trainer, I can help you with some of that.
  • stt43
    stt43 Posts: 487
    1200 is quite low. As you cut down to that straight away, after you lost all the weight there is nowhere left for you to go. Your body can happily stay as it is on 1200 calories, and you can't cut down any more as you are all ready on too little as it is. What would have been better is for you to drop your calories gradually, eventually dropping down to 1200 over time, but that doesn't matter now :-).
    So, what you need to do is do a reverse diet, which it seems like you are already doing. As you said, when you increased your calories a little your weight loss started again. This is because your metabolism is probably damaged from being on so low calories for so long. You can either slowly increase your calories a little until your metabolism is back to normal, or throw in a cheat day once a week to get your body used to taking in more calories. (You can search on google or youtube 'reverse dieting' or 'metabolic damage' to get some better information about all this).
    If I were you I wouldn't drop below 1500-1600 calories per day. If this isn't working then try adding increasing your exercise to burn off extra calories.

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