I'd suggest it's even worse than that.

Too many down at that level have seen and perhaps tried and failed ultimately on the lose 2-5 lbs a week fad diets, so they see MFP, perhaps told about it, and figure this time, I'm going to do it better and make it work this time. This seems like a better method.
Oh, 2 lb weekly loss, yeah, that's what I want (never mind it recommends 1 lb weekly). Oh sedentary or lightly active, well, just in case, sedentary.
Oh look, I finished my diary and said I'd be this weight in 5 weeks, and that was by missing my goal by 150 calories, I'll do that or more tomorrow.
Ok look, when I log my exercise, my eating goal goes up, I wonder why, must be a mistake. Wow, in 5 weeks I'll weigh even less now, that's great.

They've probably never looked at any nutrition label (for US anyway) to see the comments regarding values based on 2000 calorie eating level, to have any concept of calorie ranges. 1200 is all they've ever seen when they cared to look. Never mind they could add up probably 3 avg meals normally eaten and hit 2500 calories for a day easily.

Along these lines, I subscribe to Cooking Light magazine. It has a lot of real food recipes and I cook a lot from it each month. This month was the start of a great article about the power of group weight loss plans, referencing MyFitnessPal. Great stuff, like get a food scale, have a plan, "lose weight without giving up our passion for food."

Then the shocker: the suggested range in this article for women was 1100-1200!!

This is apparently the societal norm speaking, even among people who love cooking and food.

Sure, I could have lost weight on 1200 calories a day. But I also lost a damn lot of weight on 1700-2100 a day. And I've been effortlessly maintaining for sixteen months and counting. In hindsight, I realize I could have even pushed this higher.

Steve Troutman's posts/blogs here were one of the reasons I took my route instead. Even realized reading this that, in hindsight, I strength trained the way he recommended too despite the "lift heavy now" chanters. I did circuit training, focus on calorie burn, while very obese, gradually started lifting heavier and lower reps, losing some cardio, as I got smaller.

I am so damn glad I didn't do this the deprivation way. Losing weight wasn't a drag, it wasn't awful, it wasn't even that hard (usually). It was pretty fun actually.

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to extend an invitation to the BI facebook group (or page or whatever the FB lingo is) I'm going to start ramping up activity on the page since I never really did anything with it. I plan on discussing everything from training and nutrition to psychology and motivation. I'll also do my best to filter out industry articles that are worth sharing and post them up. Of course I'll also be doing Q&A over there as well.

I'd love to have each and every one of you as a community only works with people.

Find it here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Body-Improvements-LLC/206180602737670

Thanks,

Steve

Holy hot picture.

I mean thanks.

Liked! I may never see MFP again. And I already found something to share with a poster here. You are truly awesome, Steve. :drinker:

Tagging....excellent information, thank you.

tagged to read later

Great read, thank you ETP and STEVE!

Such a great interview. Please keep them coming

Hey, thanks for tuning in guys!