For a week I have eaten about an average of 1000 calories (even on Memorial Day) and exercised (aerobics) every other day for a half hour and somehow I have gained a pound. Can someone explain to me if I am missing something here? After quitting smoking and having two kids I have been struggling with my weight for two years. What is my problem??? Any ideas?
Sincerely,
Jennifer
Of course your body is holding on for dear life to every crumb you're eating. It's starving. Try upping your calories to 1200-1300 for a week. If that doesn't work, add some more. You have to EAT to lose weight.
You will also see some gain from muscle when you start exercising. The muscles retain water when you work them. Also muscle weighs more than fat, so you can lose fat and not weight when exercising. If that is happening, you should see your clothes getting looser though.
And second the 'eat more' advice. You should make sure your calorie deficit is no more than 1000 each day.
But, my burn meter only shows 1800, so if I eat 1000 shouldnt I be okay. Am I doing something wrong here???
how much do you weigh and how tall are you?
For breakfast I have a small bowl of Fiber One raisin bran with skim milk and a cup of coffee with half and half and equal.
For lunch I either have a salad with grilled chicken and light dressing or a lean cuisine.
For dinner I have a small portion of the healthy dinner I make for my family.
Im 140 and 5'4. With 8 lb H cup breasts (I weighed them after reading a post on here) LOL!!!!
I looked around to try and find the post that details what calories are required by your body to function...You know, grow hair, keep heart beating,lungs working, blood circulating etc. but I couldn't find it. What I do know is that this site is big on not eating under 1200 calories if you are a female as it's considered very unhealthy.
Found something neat on ehow.com. . .says I need 1850 to maintain my weight at the lowest activity level which is basically the same as this site calculated. So what kind of shortage should you follow to lose a couple of pounds a week??
Thanks for the input. Its greatly appreciated!
Jennifer
That is at the lowest level of activity. Basically sitting or lying down all day. What is your real level of activity, you mentioned working out? And two pounds a week might not be realistic for you. You can only lose about 1% or your body weight in fat a week. A deficit of about 750 should be your goal.
Cinderella.. I am 5'2 and a half :) and 28.. I weigh right now 125 I am 5 pounds from my goal... i have been on and off this site for three years (I think) now. I keep changing my goal weight and knee surgery last year made me gain some back... The reason I tell you this is so that I can compare you to me a little.. (though I do NOT have 8 lb boobies! Holy crap how do you walk!)
Breakfast: either bowl of special K with light soy milk or a smoothie made with carnation instant breakfast light soy milk and frozen berries (I am lactose intolerant; I can't have too much dairy, reason for the soy milk..)
Lunch: HUGE salad with chicken lots of veggies and light dressing
snack: fruit, or special K bar, or low fat muffin I make
Dinner: small portion of what I make my fiance for dinner.. healthy stuff..
snack: low fat brownies, or ice cream or frozen pudding or yogurt.. (I actually freeze yogurt and pudding, takes longer to eat, so I think I am REALLY getting a treat)
OK so this is about 1400 to 1600 calories a day.. I burn about 1800 with no work out.. I try to get in 45 minutes a day on the eliptical...
I think that you are not eating enough or often enough... try adding 2 snacks to your diet, I think you will see results soon, though you have been limiting yourself for so long that you may initally gain a few pounds.. but they will come right back off!
GOOD LUCK!!!!
So I just did some reading before I read this post, a F.A.Q. fom caloriecounts finest.
"Why must I eat at least 1,200 calories a day when I want to eat less?
In order to get the daily food servings you need for a balanced diet, it takes about 1200 calories a day. With careful planning, you could have a balanced diet on 1000 calories, but the restrictiveness of a very low calorie level can lead to binging and weight cycling, which will take you further from your weight loss goal. What's more, very low calorie diets can cause excessive muscle breakdown and metabolic adaptations, which can drive down your calorie requirements. In the end, you'll need fewer calories to maintain a higher weight."
it appears as though one would be perfectly fine eating 1, 000 calories and the only reason they need 1, 000 calories is because to get all their nutritional servings. I love logic and everyone else tends to hate me for it because I go against the grain ~.~
So really, this is a good example where you should measure yourself, remember building muscle under fat may make the fat stick out more and would be discouraging, make sure to do the toning excersizes and not the muscle-building ones ... I'm not too sure what aerobics is classified as ... My mom just said it gets harder to lose weight when one gets older, maybe everyone else is right about eating more :D
I personally am not keeping track of making sure I have a balanced nutritional diet. The website is just concerned about making sure everyone can get enough of the vitamins and daily recommendations ...
You're not eating enough. I don't understand how anyone can even bare eating that small amount. It's torture!!! I tried it for a few days a while ago; but man oh man that was a huge mistake. Stop torturing yourself and start eating more.
Original Post by du57y:
it appears as though one would be perfectly fine eating 1, 000 calories and the only reason they need 1, 000 calories is because to get all their nutritional servings. I love logic and everyone else tends to hate me for it because I go against the grain ~.~
Er, actually, you missed the last sentences, where they talked about "metabolic adaptations."
What's more, very low calorie diets can cause excessive muscle breakdown and metabolic adaptations, which can drive down your calorie requirements. In the end, you'll need fewer calories to maintain a higher weight.
If your body thinks it's never going to get any more than 1,000 calories a day, it starts saving up energy reserves (ie, burning fewer calories a day, storing more) so that when the next Ice Age comes, it doesn't starve to death.
It's a great cycle: you eat radically less than your body needs to maintain minimum function > your body adapts to require less > you don't lose as much weight as you'd hoped > you start eating less > your body adapts to require less....
This is why you can't just get all your nutrients from vitamin pills and have done with it - because it isn't actually all about the nutrients, the actual calories are important too. The Jetsons would be so disappointed. ;c)
Anyway, to the OP - I'm 4'11" and 151 lbs, and I burn more than 1850 calories just sitting still. Any day where you or I actually get out of bed - which I'm assuming is most days, especially if you have kids! - means more calories burned. As an example, yesterday I didn't go to the gym, just class and a bunch of misc. errands, and my burn meter topped out at about 2,000. I ate about 1400 calories, which means I still burned 600 more than I ate; assuming every day is exactly the same, I can expect to lose slightly more than a pound a week, and not make my body freak out and think the apocalypse is nigh. (And, um, not feel deprived or starved or irritated that I'm "dieting.")
The other thing is, Jennifer ... it's been a week. One week. That extra pound could be retention from under-eating; it could be water retention from salt; it could be hormone-related; it could be the result of weighing yourself at a weird time of day, or in an unusually bulky outfit; it could be just the random totally normal fluctuations that happen all the time anyway. You may have just caught it on the scale at a time when you were particularly likely to feel discouraged. (Because I am a huge and unapologetic nerd, I love plotting my weight every day on the graph here, so I can keep track of the general trend and see what's just a normal fluctuation and what's an actual upward swing - I can't even tell you how many flip-outs that's prevented!!)
So yeah: take-home messages? Let yourself eat a little more. Don't beat yourself up over every bite, or every pound. Give your body what it needs, and try and do whatever it takes to reduce the stress of this whole process, and the weight will come off. You'll do great. :c)
well I'm not so upset I was proved wrong this time, due to my own errors, I personally was trying to figure out what the hypothetical situation of eating 1 pound of food that has 1 calorie vs. 1 gram of food with 50 calories, how does that turn out? the 1 pound of food just goes through you and you only retain that 1 calorie?
Anyway, "f your body thinks it's never going to get any more than 1,000 calories a day, it starts saving up energy reserves (ie, burning fewer calories a day, storing more) so that when the next Ice Age comes, it doesn't starve to death.
It's a great cycle: you eat radically less than your body needs to maintain minimum function > your body adapts to require less > you don't lose as much weight as you'd hoped > you start eating less > your body adapts to require less...."
looking at our thing, if you have less calories than you burn, shouldn't you be technically losing weight anyway? Like no matter how much your body wants to store it, if it's truth you're outputting more than is incoming you will lose the weight?
I personally was trying to figure out what the hypothetical situation of eating 1 pound of food that has 1 calorie vs. 1 gram of food with 50 calories, how does that turn out? the 1 pound of food just goes through you and you only retain that 1 calorie?
In a word? yes. (As unlikely as that hypothetical is ... but let's take, like, a pound of celery and a gram of lard.) The weight of food can be made up of a lot of different things - and in the case of very low-calorie food, which tends to be things like celery and jicama and all those other dense crunchy raw veg, most of the weight comes from water and from cellulose, which humans can't digest. So yeah, if you ate a pound of celery, most of what makes it weigh a pound would go right through you. (Literally.) If you ate a gram of lard, you would still get the calories out of it, because your body would break down the fat molecules that make up the lard, release the calories, and send whatever it couldn't use out of you along the same route the celery traveled.
The thing you need to understand is, calories aren't units of weight, they're units of energy. Loosely, 1 Calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius. In the sense we care about here, it's also important that the energy be "digestively available," that is, stored in a bond that can be broken by the digestive system.
So, yeah. Energy can be released, as far as chemistry and physics are concerned, in a few different ways. The most common way is by breaking apart molecules. That's what happens when we release heat and light energy by burning paper, and that's what happens when we release energy by burning fat. So every time a new molecule is formed, what's essentially happening is that a potential energy source is being made: every time your body gets calories that it can't use right away, it uses then to make molecules so that it can store the energy up for later use. Of course, if you never burn up those molecules and release the energy, it just stays there.
So when we say that "3500 calories = 1 pound of fat," what we mean is that the body needs to produce one pound of fat for every 3500 calories it wants to keep on tap for future use, not that 3500 calories themselves actually weigh one pound.
looking at our thing, if you have less calories than you burn,
shouldn't you be technically losing weight anyway? Like no matter how
much your body wants to store it, if it's truth you're outputting more
than is incoming you will lose the weight?
This is where we get into "metabolic adaptation" again. This is a really cheesy analogy, and I apologize in advance, but think of your body as a factory: when it's got a lot of working capital, it's going to hire a lot of workers and keep the assembly line humming so that it can churn out lots of products (and then sell them and bring in more money). If the funding starts to dry up, any business that doesn't want to go under will run off reserve funds for a while, but will ultimately start cutting costs: maybe slowing down production, firing costly employees (other than the CEO)... ;c)
What this analogy translates to in the human body is the following: if you cut down a little bit on the incoming calories, your body realizes that this is the moment it's been preparing for, and it starts breaking into the fat stores and burning the stored-up calories instead of waiting for new calories to come in. If you cut down a lot on the incoming calories, your body smartens up and realizes that it can't go on borrowing from the reserves forever, and if it's going to have enough extra calories to keep powering you for a while, it has to spend more judiciously.
So it slows down. It cuts back on non-essential functions. You may be a little more draggy during the day, but now instead of burning 1900 calories at rest, you're burning 1600.
And you're upset. Because you're not burning fat anymore, and goshdarnit, the whole reason you're doing this is to lose weight! So you cut back on your calories some more. And for a little while, your body is caught by surprise and has to scramble to borrow from the energy reserves to pay off the debts to all the organ systems it's trying to keep running. But it starts cutting costs again - and that nice big deficit you thought you had created isn't as big a deficit anymore because the output isn't as great. (And meanwhile, you're starting to feel really gross.)
After a couple cycles of this, we get to the "firing the most costly employees" part of the already-tortured analogy. Muscles cost more, in terms of energy, than a lot of other organs, and they're comparatively less important than, say, the brain. So when your body starts to realize that it really needs to cut costs or it's doomed, it decides to kill two birds with one stone: instead of breaking into the fat reserves to get energy to power the muscles, it can just start breaking up the muscles to get energy to power everything else. That's why, in addition to "metabolic adaptation," the post you quoted from also mentions "excessive muscle breakdown."
And, sure, your muscles do have weight. So when you lose muscle, you certainly do lose weight, too. But ultimately, this kind of weight loss - by severe calorie deprivation - happens in bursts, not in a steady pattern; it often means that the weight will be lost from the wrong places (muscle rather than fat); it can permanently mess with your metabolism (because it's easier to slow it down than to speed it up); and it just makes you miserable and unhealthy the whole time.
So yes, you'll lose some weight. In the end, maybe you'll even lose a lot of weight - I mean, anorexia may be unhealthy, but there's no denying that anorectics are
pretty darn thin after a while. But no, it will absolutely not be efficient weight loss. It probably won't even be permanent weight loss - if you ever increase the amount you eat, rather than racing your metabolism to the bottom, once you've forced yourself into metabolic adaptation your body will hang onto those extra calories for dear life, literally. And it will certainly not be healthy weight loss.
Make sense?
< / nerdiness >
"So when we say that "3500 calories = 1 pound of fat," what we mean is that the body needs to produce one pound of fat for every 3500 calories it wants to keep on tap for future use, not that 3500 calories themselves actually weigh one pound."
That part I found particularily useful, as well as my curiousity: How does my body physical extract calories from a carrot stick? Ah it's getting really complicated now XD
But for that last part you wrote, if you read the last post I did on my own thread, if I got used to eating 500-1000 calories, accidently mind, I never went hungry (and I'd be called the last person in the world to be annorexic) I thought SO LONG as I was under my calorie number and not starving then everything would be ok, if I jumped to a higher number would it make me gain suddenly? I've been like this for mostly months.
How does my body physical extract calories from a carrot stick?
It shoots digestive acid at the carrot stick, and the acid sets off a chemical reaction that breaks the bonds in the carrot molecules. Energy is released as a byproduct of the chemical reaction of digestion. (Yeah, bodies are fun. 
)
As for, "if I jumped to a higher number would it make me gain suddenly?"
Yeah, probably a pound or two at first while you get sorted out, so don't panic. But if it's only been a few months, you're not likely to have permanently shut down shop, so to speak. Pull the calories up to a little over the "without exercise" number, then start some light exercise just to prod your body into remembering that it's got to burn those calories now, and it should shape up fine. As I said, though, the numbers may nudge a wee bit up for a moment, but it'll even out and start to go down.
(And I'm so with you on the "accidentally forgetting to eat." I never used to believe it was possible - I mean, who accidentally doesn't eat?? - but then I started keeping track, and apparently I do it, too. Oops. I blame my meds. And, um ... crop circles. The crop circles made me do it. Totally.)
Oh I blame crop circles for everything ;)
That's a really interesting explanation that makes a lot of sense about the carrot energy. I'm sorry Cinderella for spamming your thread XD
*sigh* I don't want to eat more and shoot up my weight :'(
nassira, LOVE the factory analogy, makes it very clear.
I am pretty sure I have an incredibly adaptive metabolism. My factory is very efficient, I tried to fool it into taking from the reserves but after 20 weeks it has gotten wise to me and adjusted to the new level of funding. Damn. How do I force it to speed up production and take from reserves again? There are LOTS of reserves so I don't know what the problem is.
Original Post by victoriagirl:
nassira, LOVE the factory analogy, makes it very clear
I am pretty sure I have an incredibly adaptive metabolism. My factory is very efficient, I tried to fool it into taking from the reserves but after 20 weeks it has gotten wise to me and adjusted to the new level of funding. Damn. How do I force it to speed up production and take from reserves again? There are LOTS of reserves so I don't know what the problem is.
*grin* Glad my analogy appeals to someone. I have kind of a reputation for awful analogies, so now I'm always super-wary of trotting out another one! ;c)
As far as speeding up the line ... if I knew that, I'd write a book and sell it. Seriously. The one thing I've seen a lot of people suggest that seems to work is to mess around with what proportion of your deficit comes from exercise vs. calorie-cutting - give back a little more "funding" and then try and make it churn out a moderately greater quantity of the "product."
