whats wrong with me?

You have to eat to fuel your body. Especially if you are doing exercise. I realized I wasn't eating enough calories. I am comfortable with my 1560 a day and well have seen awesome results.

I eat almost every calorie it says to...and I've seen good results...when i don't, I plateau....

Hi people. This is gunna sound really stupid but i feel that i am over eatting when hitting the 1,300 mark in calories Even tho i exercise i try not to eat those calories back. Days i find it hard to even get to 1,200 calories then other days i feel im going way over. Take saturday,sunday and today. saturday was low i ad 667 calories (upsetting day so food didnt come into mind) yesterday 1,657calories and today 1,496calories even tho im still within calories as ive exercised i just feel that ive done rubbish and ate too much and it really winds me up...

If you wanna feel free to add me as a friend id like that, new people = new ideas

It has been drilled into our heads that we have to eat LESS to lose weight. It's really hard to override those mental tapes when we're really motivated to lose. The problem is that science has proven that we need to fuel our bodies in order to function properly and to lose weight.

We are all trying to get healthy here... weight loss is one happy side effect of being healthier.

Choose health.

:flowerforyou:

There is nothing wrong with you! But you should be at least eating the 1200 a day minimum mark. What do you have your lifestyle set to and how many calories does MFP recommend that you eat? You've kinda yo-yoed the last few days going from 700 to 1700 calories. As far as eating exercise calories there are a lot of opinions but it appears you aren't a big eater so I would suggest don't worry about eating them back and if you are hungry beyond the 1200 then eat, if not hungry then just try to get to where you are reaching the 1200.

I read on another post here this analogy.....think of your metabolism as a fire burning. If you don't add logs to the fire (fuel) the fire will smolder and go out. If you don't fuel your body, then it doesn't have anything to keep it burning. If you want to fuel the fire to burn those pounds then you must give it the proper amount of fuel, or you will starve your fire.

I've only been using this site for a while (down 4 pounds already!) but I know what you mean. I weighed about 270 at the start and set my weight loss goal for 2lbs/week, and my goal was set at 1820 calories a day. I do a pretty good job meeting it usually, but one day last week I overshot and had about 2300 calories. I felt like a failure until I did some math in my head and realized that even though I'd passed my goal I was still eating considerably less than I needed to in order to lose weight (I drop 1lb/week at 2320 calories). Since then I haven't felt too guilty about overshooting the mark, as long as I meet it most days and don't fail too heavily on the days I don't meet it.

Sounds to me like you're missing some crucial information about calories. If you eat below a certain amount of calories your body will actually start to slow down your metabolism in order to conserve energy; it's one of the tricks that your body pulls to keep you from starving if there's no access to food. If you've got days where you're having 660 calories then you're hurting yourself needlessly.

I think the problem might be that once you saw the magic number (1200!) you decided to treat it as a rule and not a guideline. You decided that anything above that is a failure and anything below it is a success, and the further below it you are, the more successful you are. There's problems with that type of all-or-nothing thinking. If you overshoot it by 100 calories, you're still losing weight, just not as fast. Try not to rush things, and remember to forgive yourself if you have a day that's less than stellar. The only way you can really fail at this is if one day you say "to hell with it!" and then go gorge yourself on cake or something like that. As long as you wake up each day and try to hit around the mark, you'll still lose weight if you go over by 100 or 200 calories.

It sounds like have shrunk your stomach so much you think you have eaten a lot when you haven't. 1200 calories isn't enough, anything over 2 pound loss eats into muscle and you end up worse off. I eat 6 meals a day low fat low sugar high protein and bodybuild. Remember it has nothing to do with quantity and everything to do with quality! You should be eating something every 3 hours. My rough schedule is 8am Breakfast, 11am snack meal, 2pm Lunch, 5pm dinner, 8pm supper, 10 pm night snack sounds like a lot but they are small portions of good food. It trains your body to never get hungry so you burn more calories.