Left over calories

goal06082021 wrote: »

Caramellady222 wrote: »

goal06082021 wrote: »

First: You can probably eat more than that and still lose.

Second: Spoonful of peanut butter is 200cal easily.

Is it unhealthy to eat the bare minimum of 1200?

It can be. Your body burns calories all day long, just to keep you alive; it "costs" calories to keep your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your stomach digesting, your hair/skin/nails growing, your muscles moving, your brain...braining. All of that takes calories - even if you laid absolutely still in bed and slept all day long, you'd burn some amount of calories (this is your BMR, basal metabolic rate). The average adult human burns about 2000 calories in the course of a normal day (this is called TDEE, total daily energy expenditure); however, this can vary widely depending on your age, height, weight, sex, and activity level. The people whose TDEE is low enough that they need to limit themselves to 1200 calories to lose weight are older (50+), sedentary women, who are very short (under 5'4") and already very small (under 120lbs), so they don't have much to lose anyway. Even those women, if they start doing basically any appreciable exercise, are able to eat more than 1200 calories per day and still lose at a safe and sustainable rate.

You "pay" the calorie cost of being alive each day in the form of food. You can "overpay" your calorie "bill" by eating more food than your body needs to burn in the course of a day; similar to how a utility company will keep a credit on your account to put toward your next bill if you overpay, your body stores those extra calories to put toward the next day's calorie "bill" in the form of fat. Now, if you do that over and over again, day in and day out, for a long time, you see how we end up overweight or obese.

The way to reverse that is to "underpay" your calorie bill - it's much easier to do that by withholding food than it is to increase your TDEE by being more active. But, your body has no concept of future planning and it really doesn't want to burn through its savings all at once. So, if you come up too short (i.e. by eating too little), it will try to reduce the day's "charges" by pausing or slowing way down on non-essential calorie-burning activities, like hair/skin/nails maintenance, cognition, even digestion. So, if you eat too little, your hair starts falling out, your nails get brittle, your skin gets dry and flaky, your brain gets foggy, and you can develop digestive issues. Letting your body do this to itself for too long can cause permanent damage - it's not uncommon for people who have suffered from anorexia to later develop gastroparesis, partial paralysis of the digestive tract, making it harder for their bodies to process food now that they have started feeding it again. Undereating for too long can also damage other organs; there's a harrowing but excellent post somewhere around here about a user who experienced heart failure as an otherwise-healthy young adult because she was not eating enough, if I can find it I'll link it.

Caramellady222 wrote: »

Hello,

What do you guys do when you have a significant amount of left over calories for the day but appetite is low?
2-300?

My deficit is 1200 so I’m weary about eating too little.

Thanks in advance for your responses ☺️