Calories per day

medee35 wrote: »

I've asked this before? If I did maybe I didn't see a reply or get a full understanding. Thank you for replying but if you are tired of me asking the same questions you are more than welcome to skip over my question and not reply. Thank you

Do you know how forums work? (No shame if not, I realize not everyone spent the early aughts the same way I did.) I saw some of your posts; what you did was the equivalent of walking up to a bunch of groups of people having conversations about something else, asking your question, and then running away. You should have just gone ahead and made this thread first. Now you know.

These forums in particular tend to move more slowly than other social media sites - if you posted the same thing on, say, Facebook or IG, you would probably get more engagement more quickly. It would also probably be trash advice, though, so it's good you posted here.

To answer your actual question and expand on what's already been posted:

You are definitely burning way more than 500 calories per day. Even if you were in a coma, motionless with minimal cognition, fed through an IV drip - adult-sized human bodies simply need more energy than that just to continue breathing and keep your heart beating. That's your BMR (basal metabolic rate), the absolute basement in-a-coma minimum number of calories you burn just to live. Most adults have a BMR around 1100-1300, like callsit said; it's generally not recommended to eat below this number. Read that thread she linked.

Your body's prime directive is to protect the heart and lungs and keep them doing what they do, everything else is secondary. So, when you eat too little, your body starts trying to reduce the "charges" on the energy bill by spending fewer calories on stuff like digestion (you don't digest food as quickly or efficiently as you should - this can actually lead to permanent GI issues/damage to your gut), on body maintenance (your hair starts falling out, your skin gets dry, your nails get brittle, you may stop menstruating), on cognition (your brain is foggy and you have trouble staying awake/concentrating). You don't get as much NEAT because you don't have the energy to spare; you sit more, you fidget less, you take the elevator.

Weight loss happens when you give your body less energy (in the form of food) than it uses in the course of a day. The energy your body uses is a combination of your BMR (X calories for being alive), NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis - all the things you do as you go about your business, like walking from place to place, doing household chores like laundry or dishes, fidget, etc; you burn calories doing all of that), purposeful exercise, plus stuff like digestion, body maintenance, and cognition. Taken all together, that number is called your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) - think of it like your body's daily "energy bill," which you "pay" with the calories in the food you eat. The excess body fat you have is like a "savings account" - weight loss is the delicate dance of making your body dip into its savings to pay the bills, without panicking and cutting funding to other bodily functions.

The average human body "costs" about 2000 calories per day to run, but that number varies with sex, age, body size, and activity level, so go through the MFP guided setup to figure out what your daily energy bill is. Most people can sustainably lose excess body fat at a rate of about 1lb per week; people with more excess can "afford" to lose faster, at least in the beginning, but just because you can doesn't mean you have to, and similarly people with less to lose may find it easier to lose more slowly. One pound of body fat is "worth" about 3500 calories, so by reducing your food intake by 500 calories each day for a week, the idea is that you will have forced your body to "spend" 3500 calories' worth of body fat to pay your "energy bill" for the week. Bodies are complicated and there may be other factors at play affecting the specific number that comes up on the scale from day 1 to day 7, though; it's not uncommon to see a smaller loss, no loss at all, or even a small gain, even if you're bang-on perfect with your eating. You just gotta trust the process and stick with it. As long as you eat less than you burn, you can't NOT lose weight.