Consistently Way Under My 1,200 Calorie Goal

Just checked out your diary (briefly - only a couple days) and just a couple suggestions:

1. As others have said, you need 1,500 calories since you are a male. Your body burns more calories naturally than a female does, so the recommended amount is 1,500. You would need to be concerned even if you were only eating 1,200 calories.

2. You've got to try and eat breakfast. That's your main problem right there: You're not eating any breakfast so naturally it's easy to stay under 1,000 calories per day. A good breakfast is usually 200-400 calories or even more. If you're going to splurge and have a good, high calorie meal, it should be at breakfast time. Get some granola bars at least and get some fuel into your body right when you get up in the morning. Your metabolism gets an earlier start to the day (and thus your body will burn more calories) if you eat breakfast.

These are a couple things I know from experience. I once lost 30 pounds in one month by not eating. I was eating maybe 500-600 calories in a day and I lose weight like crazy. Once I got my appetite back, and I'm not kidding around about this, I gained every pound of that 30 pounds back in less than three weeks. And it wasn't like I was eating a lot... I was eating a normal amount of food... roughly 2,000 calories. But my body had been in starvation mode and it just refued to burn off the calories that I was eating, so it just retained most of them. Why shouldn't it? It thought I was dying!

Trust me, your weight loss will be short-lived if you kill off your metabolism along the way. Don't let your body forget how to burn off the calories that you eat, which is what you'd be doing if you kept eating so little.

(Sorry for the tough love - you'll get it all straightened out!)