Eating more to lose fat?

When you reduce calories, you tend to reduce your NEAT (non-exercise activity) calorie expenditure without thinking about it. The extent to which this happens varies but some people's NEAT decreases far enough to outweigh increases in exercise and decreases in calories eaten. I would suggest eating in a small deficit while lifting with your trainer and doing 2-3 days of cardio per week. I'd start out at 1750 calories for a month and see how that goes.

Eating more to lose fat? If we're being technical - when you lose weight slowly and have a progressive lifting program you're going to lose more fat than muscle. Where as if you lose weight rapidly fast- you're going to lose fat and muscle (and its hard to get that muscle back!)
So technically.... Yes, you can eat more to lose fat.

bcwagneripad1 wrote: »

Doctor suggested to take Phentermine to “speed “ up my metabolism after I told him I can’t loose weight on 1000 calories. I am from Europe and live here now in the US. I never heard of Phentermine before but when I googled it I was like “ hell no, I am not taking that”- they took that off the market in my home country Germany. You can get a heart attack on that.

Have an appointment to measure my BMR... will the result be my normal BMR at 1000 cals or what it actually should be?
Never had this done before..

BMR - basal metabolic rate. "Normal" is based on your height, weight, age, gender, etc. Again, look this up on line before your appointment to see what an average range looks like. This is not the same as TDEE, which will be higher.

This is a somewhat complicated issue. It would take a lot of back and forth questions before I could form an opinion about you personally - like how long you were at various calorie levels without losing, what types of exercise you started/stopped alongside that eating, whether your daily non-exercise routine changed, what the macro composition of your eating was at certain times, and more.

Let's keep it simple.

Sometimes, people who yo-yo weight repeatedly on extreme diets will end up with a lower total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which is all-day calorie burn from all sources. One mechanism for this is that they run extreme calorie deficits with mostly cardio exercise and often insufficient protein, then stop exercising altogether and eat bunches of carby fatty stuff (still inadequate protein). Each weight loss is partly fat and partly lean tissue, and each regain is mainly fat. Over time, the resulting body composition leaves them with both a slightly lower resting calorie burn (RMR/BMR) and less daily activity (because less fit/strong) which also means less calorie burn, so lowered TDEE. The second mechanism is that during extreme calorie deficits, they get fatigued and do less in daily life. When that inactivity becomes persistent habit, the result is a still lower TDEE.

Abstractly, if you eat fewer calories than the number you burned on day one of your "diet", and do that for 180 days, you lose weight. In a practical sense, if you eat fewer calories so get fatigued/weak and move less/rest more, you burn fewer calories and lose weight slower than you'd expect, with your energy level, activity and calorie burn slowly but progressively declining over time. Day 180 calorie burn is materially lower than day 1 calorie burn, in that scenario.

It's not likely one will burn so many fewer calories that it wipes out a good-sized calorie deficit, but if you combine a slowed loss rate with factors that increase water retention, the slow fat loss rate can be masked on the scale by water retention. Things that can increase water retention include stress, inflammation, eating relatively more carbs/sodium than usual (even if not "too many"), new exercise requiring muscle repair, and more. This kind of nonsense can get worse if also doing exhausting/stressful forms of exercise (weight training with inadequate rest days, true HIIT cardio too often, etc.).

Add impatience to that mix (like giving up after 2 weeks and getting more extreme), and you get posts that say "low metabolism" "can't lose weight" "about to give up".

Usually, if people are not losing weight on low calories, and they've stuck with it consistently for 6+ weeks, there's a mesurement/estimation problem: Overestimating activity, or underestimating intake. That's by far the commonest explanation.

It is possible, though, that your "sweet spot" for weight loss, calorie-wise, is not the lowest calorie level you can force yourself to endure. If that crazy-low level leaves you undernourished, fatigued and dragging (thus burning fewer calories all day long, maybe sleeping more besides), a more effective calorie level could be at a higher point that gives you better nutrition, more energy and keeps you more active.

No matter what, losing the last 10 pounds usually requires more meticulous tracking, and should take quite a while, as 0.5lb/week is the maximum reasonable loss rate.