Eat more to Lose more, explained.

Great post!

The brain slow down thing probably explains why the chronic under-eaters are so adamant on continuing.. It's because their brain isn't functioning well enough to understand the problem! Oh my, what a vicious cycle.

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that those of us with restrictive-type eating disorders are exempt from that list of 'chronic under-eaters' =/

BUMP

I find that now that I'm counting calories, I don't want to eat as much. I am frequently pushing away my plate before I finish what's on it, and before I started MFP, I ate everything in site. However, I will still track my 1/2 eaten food as just that. 1/2 instead of the whole item. I still find it quite easy to hit 1200 most days.

However, I wanted to note that most of these symptoms listed are also symptoms of hypothyroidism. Last fall, I was eating quite a bit, but my cells could not convert the food into energy, and I had the dried up skin, flaky nails, hair falling out, sleeping all the time etc. Now that I'm on the right dosage, my hair is growing back, but it's frizzy. My nose isn't bleeding all the time, and my nails are growing back in. Although, my nails do still have some serious ridges on them, but I'll take any improvement I can get. I can stay awake now for an entire 16 consecutive hours without requiring a nap. It's awesome.

It seems that whenever your cells and organs do not get enough energy, it's more or less the same issues.

I am bumping this for awesomeness and planning to read it EVERY time I feel like I need to stay under that silly number! Thanks!

Thanks for the post - I NEEDED to read this today!

Thank you SO much for this post!

Hey,

What was posted on first message was so true.

I force myself to eat as many calories as my basic metabolism ask every day ( ~1600), even if some day I cannot do my exercice and so I will be above my calories goal.

I think it's important, loosing weigth is not so easy so why making the thing harder by slowing our body???

Well said! I've been seeing a lot of posts about trying to burn 1000 calories or eating 1200 calories and burning the same amount - this is just madness if you're ending up with a net of 0 calories or something very low. This needs to be said more often I think

Well said post. There's no way I can stick to 1200 cals a day with exercising. You need to eat your exercise calories to stay nourished. Thank you for posting this.

cheers

My only problem is I am not reaching 1200 but I am not hungry after I eat my planned meals. I just do not see the sense in eating whenever I am not hungry....isn't that what got me here in the first place? Any suggestions how I could get more calories in without making myself feel YUCK whenever I get up from the table? I know not many people have this problem but this is a problem for me. I get 900 to 1000 calories in on a good day. Should I splurge one day? Only problem with that is I ate out for my anniversary and gained a pound and it really discouraged me and I felt YUCKY after our dinner anyway. Need help please!

Eating too much of the wrong kinds of foods may have been what caused you to gain weight, but usually it's a very gradual process, with a net gain of 10-15 lbs a year. To gain a pound in a month, you just have to eat about 120 calories a day more than you burn. To lose a pound a month, you eat 120 calories less than you burn every day.

If you burn 2200 calories a day just doing your normal activities (a typical number for a woman), going down to less than half of that over a long period of time is simply starving yourself. It triggers starvation mechanisms in your body that tell it to burn muscle for energy, slow down your metabolism, and hold onto every windfall calorie that comes its way. Stress hormones increase, fat burning slows down, nails and hair become brittle, and your appetite might be surpressed for awhile to help tolerate the period of famine that your body thinks is happening.

The longer it goes on, the more focused you become on food over every other aspect of your life. Once upon a time this was a message to leave the cave and go look for a mammoth to kill, but now it can exacerbate any kind of guilty feelings over food, and contribute to disordered eating.

So for several reasons your appetite is not always a reliable gauge by which to measure your caloric intake. Obese people tend to not have a good "fullness" indicator in the first place, and dieting messes with it even more. You can't reliably use it to tell you when you've eaten enough. MFP figures out about how much energy you burn every day, and then subtracts enough calories that you will lose weight. Exercise burns even more, so eating back your exercise calories is not going to slow your loss unless you are overestimating how many calories you burn. You should eat regularly, and try to eat most of your calories, even if you aren't hungry.

The way to eat more without feeling too full is to go for healthy calorie-dense foods like nuts, peanut butter, avocados, and whole grains. Eat fish like salmon or mackerel that have lots of healthy fats. Eat fruit. Enjoy a treat occasionally without feeling guilty about it, because this is a way of life, not a diet. Life includes celebrations and enjoying delicious foods.

I also wanted to say great post to the OP.