Why you should eat all your Calories

An excerpt from my blog. For the full article, follow the link on my ticker

The basis for weight loss is simple. Calories in are less than Calories out. Seems easy enough, so now you can go away happy and content that you'll lose weight by starving yourself. Not true. At all. See, we have something known as a BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate. It's basically the number of calories per day we need to survive if we slept all day, to maintain our current weight. And then, we have what is known as a TDEE - Total Daily Energy Expenditure. What this is, is the BMR multiplied by a number based on your average activity level. For someone sedentary, you would multiply the BMR by 1.2 (approximately). So if someone had a BMR of 2000 calories, their TDEE would be 2400 in a sedentary lifestyle.

So, how does this help you? Well, to lose weight you need to create a defecit to your TDEE. Now, 1lb of fat is equivelant of 3500 calories. So over the course of a week, to lose 1lb, you would need a 500 calorie defecit per day. To lose 2lb, 1000 a day. Etcetera, etcetera. But hold your horses, because there's something else you need to bear in mind.

If you create too large a caloric defecit, your metabolism can become down-regulated and slow down in order to preserve you, as it sees that you're not taking enough in to sustain yourself long-term. This isn't a problem to begin with and you will lose weight while your system maintains a higher TDEE than the amount of calories you're putting in, but eventually you will stop losing weight - or plateau - when that TDEE falls to match your current eating.

This is where eating disorders begin. Stage by stage, people start to eat less and less in order to keep ahead of the falling TDEE, and the dirty little secret is this; you don't need to do that. It's not healthy. It's starvation, over an extended period of time. You may think calories are the be all and end all, but you simply can't get enough nutrition from a severely restricted diet. Which is why we need to avoid this. Like the plague.

Okay, so are you keeping up so far? I suggest you take a moment to re-read all of what I've said so far. It's a lot to take in. Moving on, we come to some numbers. As a general rule of thumb, unless you are incredibly short, the lowest you should go on your calorie intake (to ensure enough nutrients in) is 1200 a day for women and 1600 for men. Yes, minimum. I know, I know - Blablabla Diet says to eat no more than 500-900 a day. Truth is, that isn't safe and should only be done under the supervision of a Doctor. These numbers are still far under what your TDEE is likely to be. Mine for instance is over 3000 a day. I'm not very tall - 5'9", so I hope that gives you some perspective.

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One thing to remember is that you want the numbers to be as close to 0 as possible on the 'Remaining' row. Some people make the mistake of trying to leave as huge a number as possible in their Remaining Calories. You don't need to do that, honestly - the Daily Goal you have been set already has your defecit factored into it, so if you leave too many calories you're making that defecit even bigger and potentially putting yourself at risk of entering that viscious cycle of having to eat less and less to keep losing weight.