1500 calories?????
aelkins1990
Posts: 4 Member
So My Fitness Pal suggest I eat 1500 calories in a day! I have been eating around 800-1000. I eat fish, chicken, veggies, cheese, and apples or kiwis, turkey burgers. I don't really know how to consume that many calories without eating junk. Then I workout and it tells me to eat the calories I just burned!!! Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of working out? I'm confused. Help please
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Replies
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Food isn't junk. Change your mindset before you burn out.13
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Trust the process. Enjoy the process.
I eat between 1800-2000 calories per day.
Add some full-fat dairy, nuts, avocado, a bit of ice cream or chocolate.4 -
Chef_Barbell wrote: »Food isn't junk. Change your mindset before you burn out.
This. Going from eating too much and gaining weight to overly restricting your diet is just exchanging one unhealthy for another. You may also not be logging accurately, because 800 calories isn't enough for a toddler!
Your MFP calorie goal already includes the deficit you need for your weekly weight loss goal. So if you don't eat your exercise calories (or at least some of them) you are undereating and will lose too fast.
Log accurately and consistently, exercise for health and fitness, eat your calories, allow yourself some treats, and lose weight without being miserable, tired, and hangry :drinker: Good luck!15 -
Chef_Barbell wrote: »Food isn't junk. Change your mindset before you burn out.
This. Going from eating too much and gaining weight to overly restricting your diet is just exchanging one unhealthy for another. You may also not be logging accurately, because 800 calories isn't enough for a toddler!
Your MFP calorie goal already includes the deficit you need for your weekly weight loss goal. So if you don't eat your exercise calories (or at least some of them) you are undereating and will lose too fast.
Log accurately and consistently, exercise for health and fitness, eat your calories, allow yourself some treats, and lose weight without being miserable, tired, and hangry :drinker: Good luck!
^^^^ALL OF THIS!2 -
Are you meeting protein AND fat goals? Your definition of healthy foods may be too narrow. Nuts, nut butters, avocado, full fat dairy, eggs.....lots of ways to bump up your calories.
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10142490/a-list-of-calorie-dense-foods/p1
I don't see anything wrong with including a treat once in awhile. When I get to goal I need to manage portions for all foods....not just "healthy" ones. I'm trying to eat better......not trying to eat perfectly.
The purpose of working out is to gain fitness, to be a healthy person, to retain a larger % of lean muscle as we lose weight. You can't do that efficiently without fuel. Really large deficits help you lose "weight" faster.....but that's often at the expense of existing lean muscle mass. Healthy weight loss lowers your body fat %.
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amyrebeccah wrote: »One thing that I caution you on before adding too much food is to doublecheck your accuracy. Weigh your portions and make sure that you have that locked up. Then, yes, people are correct, add food. It's easy to get excited and euphoric when you first make a change, but we see plenty of people who were in your shoes crash and burn eventually, and wonder why.
This! If you are accurately logging everything though, then 800-1000 is nowhere near enough!
Also once you start eating back exercise calories, most machines overestimate the calories burnt. I like to eat back about half of my exercise calories, because exercising means I need extra fuel, but if I eat back the whole amount MFP states it's easy to start overeating.0 -
An accurately logged 800 calories is like no food. It's coffee with cream and sugar, an apple, a small piece of chicken, a yogurt, and like...some nuts.1
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How are you feeling after only 800-1000 calories and working out? If you don't feel hungry then you're probably off on your intake0
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I just started logging yesterday. Today I added almonds, tuna salad, and a protein bar and bumped up my calories quite a bit. Thanks for all the useful info y'all!! I'm new to this whole calorie thing.3
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aelkins1990 wrote: »I just started logging yesterday. Today I added almonds, tuna salad, and a protein bar and bumped up my calories quite a bit. Thanks for all the useful info y'all!! I'm new to this whole calorie thing.
Are you using a food scale? Almonds are quite calorie dense.2 -
What are your stats? 1200 calories is the minimum for women, but you have to pretty short at a 1.5-2lb/week loss to have that set for you. Your deficiet is your maintenance minus 250-1000 calories a day + calories burned because it needs to net around your deficiet number. The lower your set at, like 1200, the more accurate you need to be in both food and calories burned to avoid undereating (or overeating at 250 less per week). Also, eating around 1200 is very easy if you eat 300 calorie meals plus 300 calories left for snacks in the day.0
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I know not everyone is here to lose weight but I always wonder how people who "can't eat more than 800-1200 calories" per day (not necessarily you, OP) end up here.
MFP is set up to give you a deficit without any exercise ... meaning if you eat the amount it tells you, you don't need to exercise and you can still lose weight. If you exercise, you burn more calories and need to fuel your body.
Are you weighing all solid foods on a scale in grams and choosing accurate database entries? Lots of good threads here if you search or just scan. Good luck!3 -
buffalogal42 wrote: »I know not everyone is here to lose weight but I always wonder how people who "can't eat more than 800-1200 calories" per day (not necessarily you, OP) end up here.
MFP is set up to give you a deficit without any exercise ... meaning if you eat the amount it tells you, you don't need to exercise and you can still lose weight. If you exercise, you burn more calories and need to fuel your body.
Are you weighing all solid foods on a scale in grams and choosing accurate database entries? Lots of good threads here if you search or just scan. Good luck!
To your first comment, it's quite easy actually depending on how you tackle working within your deficit.
For example:
If you gained weight by eating very calorie dense foods, it doesn't take a large "volume" of food for the calories to add up. Think about how many calories are in a few handfuls of almonds.
Now if you like the feeling of being full. You work to find low calorie, high volume foods. So if you make a meal of 1 cup of egg whites, 100 grams mushrooms, 200 grams of spinach (which is like 4 cups before it's cooked down), 4oz of steak and a couple of tablespoons of salsa, that's a TON of food for only a few hundred calories.
You just fit a huge volume of food into a pretty small calorie count.
This is something that volume eaters do a lot. I'm a volume eater so I know from experience. Small portions on a deficit makes me feel really deprived and then I really struggle to stay on track. So I create recipes that cram large filling amounts of food in the smallest amount of calories. Sometimes I have to take a break half way though and come back to it.
This is how ppl can get really overweight and then turn around and be full at 800-1200 calories. Lower calories/higher volume. There is no more space in our stomach so we feel full.
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MsHarryWinston wrote: »buffalogal42 wrote: »I know not everyone is here to lose weight but I always wonder how people who "can't eat more than 800-1200 calories" per day (not necessarily you, OP) end up here.
MFP is set up to give you a deficit without any exercise ... meaning if you eat the amount it tells you, you don't need to exercise and you can still lose weight. If you exercise, you burn more calories and need to fuel your body.
Are you weighing all solid foods on a scale in grams and choosing accurate database entries? Lots of good threads here if you search or just scan. Good luck!
To your first comment, it's quite easy actually depending on how you tackle working within your deficit.
For example:
If you gained weight by eating very calorie dense foods, it doesn't take a large "volume" of food for the calories to add up. Think about how many calories are in a few handfuls of almonds.
Now if you like the feeling of being full. You work to find low calorie, high volume foods. So if you make a meal of 1 cup of egg whites, 100 grams mushrooms, 200 grams of spinach (which is like 4 cups before it's cooked down), 4oz of steak and a couple of tablespoons of salsa, that's a TON of food for only a few hundred calories.
You just fit a huge volume of food into a pretty small calorie count.
This is something that volume eaters do a lot. I'm a volume eater so I know from experience. Small portions on a deficit makes me feel really deprived and then I really struggle to stay on track. So I create recipes that cram large filling amounts of food in the smallest amount of calories. Sometimes I have to take a break half way though and come back to it.
This is how ppl can get really overweight and then turn around and be full at 800-1200 calories. Lower calories/higher volume. There is no more space in our stomach so we feel full.
I'm a volume eater. I can still easily eat 2500 calories with the blink of an eye.2 -
aelkins1990 wrote: »So My Fitness Pal suggest I eat 1500 calories in a day! I have been eating around 800-1000. I eat fish, chicken, veggies, cheese, and apples or kiwis, turkey burgers. I don't really know how to consume that many calories without eating junk. Then I workout and it tells me to eat the calories I just burned!!! Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of working out? I'm confused. Help please
It is not very likely you are eating as little as you think you are. 800 calories would be like a large turkey burger without bread, a salad and some fruit. Do you log everything, using a scale?0 -
You're starving yourself and it's not sustainable. At a minimum eat your entire calorie goal from MFP.1
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buffalogal42 wrote: »I know not everyone is here to lose weight but I always wonder how people who "can't eat more than 800-1200 calories" per day (not necessarily you, OP) end up here.
Usually they don't want to eat more than 1K cals of squeaky clean broiled chicken and steamed broccoli. It's always the ones that demonize chocolate and chips.
OP - I'm not saying this is you, and I think it's a great thing to incorporate more whole nutrient dense foods but if you have more than a week of cutting, please take a balanced approach and moderate vs eliminate foods that are perhaps a littler more calorically dense and micronutrient challenged lol0 -
buffalogal42 wrote: »I know not everyone is here to lose weight but I always wonder how people who "can't eat more than 800-1200 calories" per day (not necessarily you, OP) end up here.
Usually they don't want to eat more than 1K cals of squeaky clean broiled chicken and steamed broccoli. It's always the ones that demonize chocolate and chips.
I think it's a combination of this, being so restrictive that they don't really like most of the foods they consider permissible to eat (or preparing them in such a bland way that they are not that appealing), plus being confused about hunger signals. If you've been in the habit of eating all the time so you don't know what hunger even feels like OR eating in a way that caused you to feel ravenous off and on, and add to that an ideal that eating is bad, not eating (or eating few calories) is ideal and "stronger," it's really easy to feel confused about whether you should eat more if you feel okay, not starving. If it's not actively unpleasant, maybe it would be like eating when not hungry, and surely that's bad, and if I'm not starving I'm not hungry. Plus, I wasn't eating more than this before (the low volume high cal people who perhaps had just been drinking lots of soda and eating one high cal meal a day) so I can't eat more food and gain weight.
I think a lot of these threads genuinely are looking for permission, to understand it's okay to eat more and even better for you and better for the diet. I didn't start a thread but when I first started (pre MFP) I was undereating and it was this kind of thing, and logging on MFP, reading MFP, and reading more in general helped me understand and get past it. I wasn't hungry at all for the relatively short time I was doing it, but I think I would have eventually crashed or gotten too bored with how restrictively I was eating to want to keep it up.
I also wish we (well, not you and me or most longtime MFPers!, but our culture) could get past the notion that food when dieting or eating healthy can't be pleasurable.1
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