Did I kill my metabolism?

Do without the laxative. It's normal to occasionally skip a few days when consuming very little food.

Consume enough fiber, both soluble and insoluble. Consume enough water and fat. Perhaps you can find some value in a magnesium supplement.
In extremis you can try consuming castor oil, but be aware that it may leak out uncontrolled at a time of it's choosing.

Even vigorous walking/running may help.

I did sorta the same thing - lost very quickly on a low intake. I found moving to maintenance for between 2-4 weeks very useful. I continued to lose weight during this time and had much more energy. Then after awhile I moved back to a healthier 1,200 range. You just gotta watch those binge cravings when you increase.

But yeah as others have said you haven’t damaged your metabolism. If you did continue such a low calorie intake you would continue to lose until you inevitably died, or increased calories. So you don’t /have/ to go back to maintenance or even increase, but I’d strongly recommend it for your physical and mental health.

How long did it take you to lose the 30lbs?

Trying a different way to explain.

Your body requires a certain amount of calories to maintain your weight. Muscle requires more calories to maintain.

If you exercise and eat at a modest caloric deficit the exercise will tear up your muscle but your body will utilize its fat stores to compensate for the caloric deficit while rebuilding your muscle. After spending years at that modest deficit to lose the fat you will end up much healthier and with close to the same lean mass (muscle content) as before meaning that your caloric requirements for maintenance will not have decreased by all that much. Sure it took a while to lose that fat but now it will be reasonably easy to keep it off and you will feel much stronger as you have kept your muscle while losing a lot of excess weight.

If, however, you exercise while eating at an extereme caloric deficit the exercise will tear up your muscle and your body will just cannibalize it along with the fat and you will lose muscle along with fat. You will lose weight quickly but you will also be losing your muscle. After spending months at that exterme deficit you will end up much weaker and with a lower lean mass meaning that your caloric requirements for maintenance will have decreases considerably making it much harder to eat reasonably at deficit.

The issue here is that muscle is very hard to build. You have to eat at a caloric surplus and you have to work hard and even then you would be lucky to put on 5 pounds of muscle in a year. A diet for health should really focus on muscle maintenance more than fat loss in my opinion. You must on some level realize that working out 75 minutes a day while eating only 1440 calories (let alone 1050) is not a good idea right?

Kayla647 wrote: »

So I've lost 30 lbs which I am proud of, but it's been a learning process, I started off at eating gross 1050 calories a day while exercising 75 min a day, so my net turned out quite low. This went on for over a month I got sick, so I upped my calories to 1200 gross still exercising 75 min a day, I increase intensity about every week so my body doesn't get used to it. I now am at 1440 Cals a day to lose 1.5 pounds a week, and The scale has been a stuck, I'm worried I killed my metabolism, I weigh everything with a scale. On another note I feel very backed up, only go to the bathroom once every 4 days.. so I'm crazy bloated, been on a laxative for 4 days so far not helping. I want to know how to get my metabolism back up, I know I lost the first 30 lbs too fast, but I have a bmi of 38 still so I know I can lose so much more.

Two things. No you did not kill your metabolism, as someone else stated, if that happened you would be dead. It is however possible that you thew yourself enough out of balance that your body was resorting to emergency calories from other organs, and now what you eat is going towards repairing damage, which means you are retaining a bit more until you are at a healthy point again. Be patient, it will balance out soon, and then start going down again.

And two, the constipation is probably connected to all that. Likely part of your body's way of trying to compensate for the imbalance and get the most out of every bite. Also poop is heavy. As soon as you get rid of it, you will possibly lose a couple pounds.