I’m trying to lose weight and was told that hwo I eat about 800-1000 calories a day is too low and lowers my metobolism which will prevent weight loss. I’ve looked up some meal plans and can’t really afford stuff like chicken breast, steak, or salmon every week. So that is why I’m wondering how I can eat 1500 calories a day. Are there some alternatives that I can do?
Also I’d like to ask, say I exercise and burn say 500 calories would I have to eat those calories back or no? I ask cuz I’ve been told yes and told no.
Man, I gotta be real with you. You aren’t going to be able to crowd source this. There’s just too much outdated information, well meaning but flawed advice, and outright bullshit online. Finding the up to date, good answers among the junk would only be possible if you already knew it.
The only reliable way to get good answers about bariatrics is going to specialists. Seriously, you can’t even totally rely on a general practitioner to be caught up, though you might get lucky with an internist. You can make do with nutritionists if they’re either fairly newly graduated, or you know they keep up on their subject.
Hell, there’s some specialists that lag behind in terms of proper, evidence driven best practices.
And the thing nobody online will likely admit is that there isn’t a single, complete answer because part of how fat loss and gain works is governed by individual circumstances regarding hormones, metabolism, and capabilities, which still ignores external factors in making a prescribed weight loss plan work. If your broke ass lives in a food desert, and you’re limited to the corner store for the majority of your supplies, the task gets much harder, just as one example of what I mean by that.
Any medications you’re on, that’s got to be factored in to an overall plan, even OTC meds, supplements, etc.
Now, there are strategies that are fairly reliable in helping manage calorie intake, like going predominantly plant based. You’ll have to study up and make sure that whatever plan you set up has the whole gamut of nutrients you’ll need, but as long as a food desert isn’t in play, that’s usually easy enough. The good news about that is that the core foods tend to be very affordable, and easy to buy in bulk as long as you have storage space.
Another piece of good news is that if you’re using exercise as part of your overall plan, not only will you give yourself a wider space for intake, but it improves your health no matter what weight you’re at along the way. I mean, losing excess fat is great, but it isn’t going to magically make your cardiovascular system work at its best.
And, again, you can only take this comment with a grain of salt because you have no way of knowing that I’m up to date on the interrelated subjects to a degree high enough to be useful. For all you know, I’m thirty years behind on things. And, truth is that the general subject matter isn’t a high priority for my reading time. I do put a bit of time every week into digging through journals and publications with a focus on medical shit, but bariatrics isn’t something I’m into for my own curiosity. So I have to be at least a little behind as default because I’m always behind even on my favorite subjects because I can’t devote enough time to it all.
Weight management is something you have to take on as a long term project where you adapt along the way. You can’t look at it as weight loss either, because just losing excess fat is only part of the project. You have to keep it off and improve your overall health.
Eating healthier is not nearly as complicated as this post makes it sound, unless you have unusual underlying medical issues or are aiming to sculpt your body in a very specific way.
- To lose weight, eat about 5-10% less than your daily caloric requirement (there are tons of free calculators and counters online). Water helps to feel full. Increasing exercise can help if changing dietary habits is a struggle.
- To eat healthier overall, eat less processed foods, more fresh stuff.
That’s it. This is all the advice most people realistically need to lose weight/eat better. The hard part is being disciplined about it. Now, discipline, on the other hand, that’s a very personal matter.
And that right there is the kind of comment I was talking about. Well meaning, I’m sure, but so damn general and vague as to be useless to anyone that’s asking what the post is asking.
And, the whole “underlying medical issues” part is key there. Obesity is an underlying medical condition that changes how your body works. It messes with insulin, cortisol, serotonin, and after a point resists weight loss.
Dude is over 250 lbs at approximately six feet tall. If he isn’t a fairly regular weight lifter, he’s into at least overweight BMI, which is absolutely in the range where it counts as a medical condition that can be resistant to casual methodology, and that’s something that bariatric specialists deal with regularly. It’s part of the reason that people have so damn much trouble sustaining weight loss, and maintaining it long enough for the underlying changes to shift back to a healthier cycle.
Discipline is not a significant factor when the patient is at the point where OP is. Claims that it is are empty headed, outdated claptrap that does nothing useful for the patient.
Frankly, your comment is the kind the kind of jackassery that I was talking about.
Well CICO is always true, but what modern professionals would help with is the other stuff: mental health, planning, long term, etc.
So in the lab, CICO wins, it’s thermodynamics. In real life, people need more support, and they (rightfully, realistically) can’t maintain CICO.
True.
CICO it’s what is called a bounding condition. It’s true but the CO half is almost impossible to know or predict long term outside of being in a 24 - 7 lab.
Hormones, types of calories, activity, and biology all have a huge effect. And long term even small errors in these numbers can have big impacts on weight.
While being accurate about it is hard outside the lab it is very easy to tell where you are on the balance and how much out you are. Just count the calories you consume and weight yourself regularly. If you are gaining weight then you are eating too much, so lower the number of calories you are consuming, if you are losing weight then you are eating less than you are burning. If you weight remains stable then you are in balance. And the amount you are gaining/losing tells you how much of a surplus or deficit you are in.
Over time you can then change the amount you eat by I few hundred calories at a time and you will see yourself move on that balance point. If anything else changes but your intake remains the same then it is likely your calories out that has changed. But even if technically you are digesting less for some reason it does not really matter - the bigger/easier leaver you have to pull is the number you are eating.
Because you are measuring the final output - your weight - it is fairly accurate over time and helps you track actual progress. There is no need to get super accurate about how much your body adobes, shits out or you burn off at rest or through exercise - those might be important in the lab but in real life the far easier to measure weight and how much you are eating is more important.
I can attest from a personal anecdote that eating plant-based makes it enormously easier to cut calories. Provided you don’t decide to take the costliest, least healthy route of basically living off heavily processed plant-based substitutes or the cheapest, second-least healthy route of living off pasta, ramen, and cereal, you’re likely on a diet with plenty of healthy mono- and polyunsaturated fats (and pretty minimal saturated), a high amount of proteins from nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes, a moderate amount of carbs in the form of cereal and simple sugars from fruits, and an absolute abundance of fiber (of which 95% Americans don’t get enough).
Even just incorporating something like tofu into your diet helps a bunch, because it’s basically all protein and good fats while having just a small amount of carbs. Per calorie, it does the best job I’ve ever seen of making you feel full for a long time.
