Can’t lose weight on 1200 cal per day

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  • megalodon182014
    megalodon182014 Posts: 8 Member
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    If you are eating 900 calories a day and still not losing any weight. What kind of exercising are you doing? How many minutes or hour per day to you exercise? What kind of food are you eating? I will tell you this... If I eat 900 calories per day. I need to burn 1200 calories in order to lose weight. If you do not burn more calories then what you ate, you will not lose weight. Another thing is what type of food are you eating at 900 calories everyday? And type of exercise are you doing? In the end you got to put more work into exercising to burn more. Hope this helps. Good Luck.
  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 984 Member
    edited May 2020
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    Shezian, it's important to know that, being short and not actually overweight, it takes time to lose weight.

    As TeaBea says, your body needs a set number of calories, just to survive. Activity on top of that requires more calories. With an activity level of 'Sedentary', that's what MFP would have as your maintenance figure - the number of calories to stay at your current weight. A higher activity level requires more calories to maintain your current weight.

    The general advice, for people who don't have much to lose, is to set MFP to the lowest weight loss rate of half a pound (0.25kg) a week, which works out to be a deficit of 250 calories off your maintenance number.

    HOWEVER, the minimum that MFP will allow is 1200 calories. Eating below that, unless under strict medical supervision, is really really not recommended unless you actually want to make yourself very ill.

    Using my current figures as an example (as I've said before, our starting stats are not dissimilar).
    My maintenance figure is 1340 calories.
    To lose 0.25kg a week, I'd need to be eating 1090 calories a day. That's below the minimum so I'd be set 1200.
    My deficit is therefore only 140.
    No matter what rate loss I select in MFP, I'd still be set 1200 calories, I'd still only have a deficit of 140 and I'd therefore only be losing at 0.12kg a week. It would take 8 weeks to lose 1kg.

    At such a small deficit, it doesn't take much to blow it if your weighing and logging aren't accurate. It also doesn't take much water weight or bloating from your monthly cycle to mask any loss. Weigh yourself weekly as a tracking mechanism but be aware that weight goes up an down a little, naturally, and don't be surprised if you don't see any clear change for a while.

    I was 68kg when I started on MFP. I can't remember what my maintenance calories figure was back then, but I was allocated 1200 calories and perhaps did have a deficit of 250 at that point. As I lost weight, the number of calories my body needed to maintain that new weight went down. I was still allocated 1200 calories which meant my deficit kept getting smaller and smaller and the weight loss rate got similarly smaller. It took a long time, but I'm now at 53kg and have switched to maintenance.

    You CAN lose weight without starving yourself or making yourself ill, but it'll take time and you need to be realistic about that. Don't believe the hype or the ads you see on TV or in magazines as you don't have a lot to lose to start with.

    (Also, make sure you eat your exercise calories, otherwise your net figure will be below the 1200 minimum).

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