How legitimate is this article?

Livestrong.com is about as authoritative as someone's blog.

How I lose weight -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2537130/Portion-sizes.html

^^ This

www.choosemyplate.gov/myplate/results.html?name=undefined&age=21&gender=female&weight=125&heightfeet=5&heightinch=1&activity=sed&weightN=126&heightfeetN=5&heightinchN=1&validweight=1&validheight=1&

and this ^^

It's custom made for me though. But I do agree that a calorie is a calorie. Calories are not different from each other, food's nutritional value is what's different.

It is not a good article at all but there are plenty of reasons not to eat below 1200 (or any other very low number). It seems that the author may be just someone who has read a load of woman's mags and decided to write a blog (I hope it isn't a professional :-))

From what I have read starvation mode is somewhat a fallacy - your body becomes more economic but there is a lot of evidence showing starvation mode isn't partially real

BUT

From all the studies I have read you will definitely (not "more likely to" lose lean body mass. Most diets will do this and the harder the diet the more you will lose. You can end up fat skinny.

Your body needs a certain amount of nutrients to function properly. Without them you will feel sluggish and could feel moody, angry, depressed.

Also 1200 is not a magic number where everything changes for everyone one. It is a sliding scale but will depend upon obvious factors like how big you are. I'm 6"1 and I am sure going on a 1200 diet would do me a lot more harm than a scaled down me that was 5"1 (Although it would still do me damage then I guess)

Best way to lose is a mix of eating the right amount of the right food and doing plenty of exercise including weights.

not read the article, but most articles about "starvation mode" are a little OTT and "starvation mode" is a misleading concept anyway.

I prefer to view the whole thing like this: humans evolved to survive food shortages in the palaeolithic era, when getting food required catching/finding it (which required exercise, sometimes very strenuous exercise) and going through phases when food was not so plentiful......... we did not evolve in an environment that enabled us to have 6 pack abs when surrounded by a surplus of food that takes no physical effort to acquire......... this explains the obesity epidemic......... but you also have to consider how the human body responds to a lack of food, i.e. to enable you to survive as long as possible during a food shortage.

The first changes that happen when you deprive yourself as food are behavioural ones, i.e. what biologists term "an increase in food seeking behaviour" - if Homo erectus wasn't eating enough, then they'd feel very hungry, obsess about finding food, and spend a lot more time hunting and gathering. When they finally got some food, they'd keep on eating it until it's all gone because they don't know where their next meal is coming from. This exact behaviour in a modern day Homo sapiens who's eating too few calories results in obsessing about food, craving McDonalds, then when their resolve breaks, stuffing their face with whatever high calorie foods they have around them at the time. Same exact response.... different environment and situation. When you understand this survival response in humans, then it becomes clear just how counterproductive eating too little is when dieting... it explains why so many people are stuck in a cycle of yo-yo dieting and of excessive restriction followed by consuming excessive amounts of food or even binge eating.... unfortunately most people blame this on a lack of willpower or self discipline, and punish themselves by being even more restrictive... when the reality is that they are hard-wired survival responses and the way to stop them happening is to *not* be so strict, and to have a small deficit,

if the lack of food continues, other responses kick in after a while, such as loss of lean body mass (i.e. the body makes up the energy shortfall by metabolising muscle tissue along with the fat) and adaptive thermogenesis (the body directs energy resources away from non-essential processes in the body to ensure that the important organs have enough energy to function right)....... these enabled Homo erectus to stay alive in prolonged food shortages for longer, and have a better chance of still being alive when food is more plentiful... in this situation, the longer your fat stores last the longer you (or Homo erectus) will survive. While it's often erroneously believed that the body stores fat or fat burning halts completely in this situation.... fat burning does slow down as the body burns less energy (adaptive thermogenesis) and draws on muscle cells as well as fat to get energy that's not coming from food. This results in the metabolism slowing, so that when rebound overeating occurs, more of that food you eat gets stored as fat than it would have done if you'd eaten that quantity of food before you started eating too little....... again, from an evolutionary point of view, the times when you do get hold of food, it increases your chances of survival if as much as possible of it is stored as fat, so you can last longer and have a better chance of being alive when food becomes plentiful again.

For dieting, what you need to emulate is a *mild* food shortage... Homo erectus were hunter-gatherers... they needed muscle to find food, so in a mild food shortage, the muscle that's being used to obtain what food they can obtain, is protected and not metabolised, and fat is metabolised to make the energy shortfall instead. Unused muscle can be and often is metabolised by the bod in a mild food shortage, or even when there's no food shortage at all.... when it comes to muscle "use it or lose it" is the mantra - and it applies all the more so when you're trying to lose fat........ so by doing exercise that stimulates the muscles while eating at a *small* calorie deficit, you're emulating a mild food shortage where muscles used for hunting/gathering are protected to ensure that Homo erectus can keep on getting food. In a severe or very prolonged food shortage, there's more threat of death from starvation so it's more likely that muscle gets metabolised along with the fat. If you already have low levels of body fat, then the body can't afford to lose much more fat, so that also increases the risk of muscle being metabolised. Remember, we didn't evolve to have six pack abs in a society where the food supply is reliable and not eating is a personal choice... we evolved in a world where food supply wasn't reliable and a food shortage was a serious threat to survival and fat stores were your key to surviving it.

Put these things together - the behavioural responses to eating too little (which kick in early on) and the physiological responses to help you to survive until food becomes plentiful again, it should be clear why eating too little is extremely counterproductive if you want to have less fat in your body and look fit and lean. Instead, have a small deficit, which is relative to how much fat you need to lose, and do exercise that requires sufficient muscular effort... that is what gives you the best chance of burning fat while keeping your lean tissue. Also, even more importantly, a small deficit is far less likely to result in the kinds of behavioural responses to eating too little - excessive hunger, obsessing about food, binge eating - which screw up so many people's diets.

1200 calories is very little for an adult, even an adult who does nothing! Let alone for people who exercise. It leaves no room in your diet for any freedom at all. Which will lead to binges sadly.

I went from a 1200 calorie to roughly around 1800 calories and I have found I am bingeing so much less, it's a lovely freedom!!!

Are you still losing?

Not as fast as everyone else but yes I am. I look at weight loss not as a sprint but a long marathon. Not all calories are equal. I would rather 200 calories in nuts then 100 calories of processed foods.

I agree, especially since going on low carb, high fat -- I will be eating this way for the rest of my life and I sure don't want to live on 1200 cals a day or less! I do fine on about 1500, and have lost about a kilo every 2 months or so. Slow, but it will likely stay off as long as I don't go back to the SAD way of eating. (My fitbit measures my TDEE at about 1800 cals/day burned.)