to think 1,200cals per day should only maintain your weight if you've buggered up your metabolism?

[DottyboutDots]

My friend and I are both trying to lose weight. She does around 800cals a day on the elliptical, while I swim and play squash.

She claimed that a woman approaching 40 can only eat 1200 cal a day and stay slim. I countered with, well I ate 1500 (adjusted with eating my excercise cals) a day on and off for a year and lost 3 stone.

Her examples are a) her mother who has eaten the same exact two meals a day for 20 years with a third option that she changes and is slim and b) our two friends who have openly admitted having food issues and don't eat very much.

She then mentioned that our overweight gynae (we met having our 3rd babies) had agreed with her. I said look to the messanger on that one.

Surely, there are healthy, slim women who eat more than 1,200 a day and stay slim. Please say there are, I need hope that the rest of my life is going to be a gastronomical desert.

Yes it's starvation or, more accurately, malnutrition. Skipping meals and eating a melon for lunch means you're probably malnourished... even if you don't feel it. And it really isn't a first world problem, it's a very serious third world one.

"I find it depressing that so many women still calorie count."

Weight gain/loss/maintenance is essentially a maths exercise. It's very easy to overeat, get acclimatised to over-large amounts, make poor choices or absent-mindedly graze your way through too much food. Counting calories or weighing portions or keeping a food diary are a good way to reset the bar. Similarly people who overspend are advised to keep a spending diary. Not depressing or a teenage fad... just a sensible monitoring exercise.

I eat way less than that in an average day and maintain my weight. If I ate that much daily I'd gain weight, I did when I was pregnant and breastfeeding.

But I have a genetically low metabolism, my father is the same, as was my grandmother and dd takes after us. We're just naturally tall and slim and need less calories than the rda.

I'm 5'8 btw, and about 55kgs. Not very active though.

A calorie is made up science. Very stupid dangerous science.

What food does in a controlled lab environment is not the same as what food does in your body compared to my body compared to my body at night compared to my body when breastfeeding etc.

Low carbing, paleo, primal and just not eating processed shit food makes calories redundant because they are.

500 calories of broccoli and 500 calories of chocolate are not equal. One will made you fat and one is nutritious.

I think diets and commercialism have made us forget how to eat and replaced it with how much to eat. Because it really doesn't matter about your portion size of cucumber, it matters about your portion size of frosties which aren't food to start with.

A calorie is not 'made up science'. You are absolutely right, though, that different food affects your body in different ways.

I don't think eating any particular kind of food makes calories redundant. It might be difficult to eat enough broccoli to make you fat, but it's not difficult to eat too much avocado or coconut oil or other paleo friendly healthy fats.

Both the quality and the quantity of food you eat is important (along with the quantity/quality of exercise you get, and sleep for that matter).

If I eat 1200 cals I don't lose weight - and I want to- as I exercise and 1200 is not enough. I eat around 1300 cals a day at the moment. And I am losing weight. I exercise at least 5 days a week so need more food to counteract that. If I didn't exercise I would probably only eat 1,000 cals and be able to lose weight

thenightsky - you sure you weren't eating enough and your body wasn't going into starvation mode?

When I was doing distance training I was overloading on lots of carbs but wasn't eating enough, so my weight didn't budge :(

Since I have started eating low carb, low dairy but eating the right about of calories the weight has come off. I've lost around 1 1/2 stone from my heaviest point, with plenty of energy to do my distance training.

You can find out your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) using the Harris-Benedict equation:

BMR= 655.0955 + (9.5634 x weight in kg) + (1.8496 x height in cm) ? (4.6756 x age in years)

That's what you need to eat to maintain your weight if you do NOTHING.

Multiply it up if you take any exercise:

Little to no exercise = BMR x 1.2
Light exercise (1?3 days per week) = BMR x 1.375
Moderate exercise (3?5 days per week) = BMR x 1.55
Heavy exercise (6?7 days per week) = BMR x 1.725
Very heavy exercise Daily calories needed = BMR x 1.9

but I also agree that it depends on "what" calories you eat eg raw meat has very indigestible calories (not that we eat much raw meat) and the same goes for wholemeal foods rather than processed. So you can eat more calories if you eat it in the form of veg and raw foods as your body can't use them all (the opposite is true of sugar whose calories are instantly and fully accessible)

I'm 5 foot tall.. I an eat bugger all and still put on weight. I can exercise hard (running and heavy weight lifting), 5 days a week and get fitter, but not lose any weight (OK, some of that is probably muscle replacement).

When you're my height your calorific requirements are so low that it's really, really hard to cut enough calories to lose weight, and really, really easy to eat too many and put on weight.

Like others, the only way I can lose weight is starvation (eg. when ill) or major low-carbing (monkeying with my body chemistry) - neither of which have been an option for a few years due to pregnancy and breastfeeding, so I've just maintained by being really, really careful.

I practically starved myself after ds, turns out my 600-800 calorie a day was actually making me put weight on. Since eating a bit more I seem to be losing weight, previous to ds I'd always counted fat grams as supposed to calories. It's the empty calories to avoid, the ones with no nutritional value.

more bad science.

if you think you only need 600/1200cal per day to stay the same weight, you should be looked at by scientists as you could solve world hunger.

of course the more simple explanation is that you are eating more than you realise.

Am shocked by this thread. Some of you are on starvation diets. I thought women needed at least 2000 calories a day to maintain a healthy weight.

Faster.... If I only put food past my lips twice in a day and didn't snack I'm hardly likely to have miscalculated.

People are built differently, my family on my father's side are all tall, lazy and slim and need very low calorie intake.

My mother's family on the other hand are plump, active, apple shapes who eat 3 times what we do and maintain their weight.

Yesterday for example I had 1277 calories, that includes tea which I take sweet and a handful of chocolates in the evening. That figure was high as we had pizza for dinner and everything else I ate was sugary (bank holiday!), the same amount of food on a normal day but healthier choices would probably be lower calorie.

So far today I've had 64 calories.... All tea. I don't do it to lose weight, I just don't get hungry til midday or so. I'll grab something in a while, I'm thinking a toasted bagal with butter, and then I won't be hungry again til dinner.

According to My fittness pal I need 1400 calories to maintain my weight. I'm small, reasonably slim, but have limited mobility. I think 1400 calories is actually quite a reasonable amount of food for me; I eat a healthy diet with the odd slice of cake or glass of wine.

summer - then go and see the doctor as you are a medical miracle.

Or maybe not everyone fits the same physiological mean

I've spent my whole life being told 'you don't eat enough!' by people. It never seems to occur to anyone that it could possibly be perfectly fine for a person to just eat to their appetite instead of forcing an extra 1000 calories down their throat because it's what the guidelines say.

The key word there is guide lines, not laws of physics or exact universally applicable rules. Guidelines.

I am not telling you to eat more - I am saying your calorie counting is incorrect.

if you average around 1300 cal per day you are massively under calculating, or a medical miracle.

I don't think someone who eats 1300 calories a day is automatically a 'medical miracle' just by virtue of that. I frequently eat around that amount on a daily basis and don't consider myself miraculous by any stretch of the imagination. I just don't eat a huge amount. I am 5'8 and around 9.5-10 stone (not weighed myself in ages), I go to the gym around 4 times a week and also frequently walk miles in a day. I don't starve myself, I just don't need to eat much!

It's not just about input it's about output also.

Chasing a numbers game is kind of futile if you are slim but unfit. I'm still a little paunchy but can run for miles at a good pace and feel great for it.

Doesn't it also come down to your own definition of "slim"? Many posters describe themselves as slim but probably have very different weights and body shapes. I'm pregnant at the moment but usually won't let myself go above 57kg (just over 8 and a half stone), which at 5ft7 means I only eat 1200 calories a day. Depending on how and where you store fat and your bone structure, I reckon someone else could weigh a stone more and probably be the same dress size as me. And thus eat 500 calories more a day....

Also, if you weigh less, a 3 or 4 lb weight gain will be much more noticeable and instantly make your jeans tighter which it might not do to someone bigger so smaller people may find they are concentrating harder at maintenance.

But I must admit, I have always thought the 2000 calories a day guideline gives the wrong idea in that it implies you can't be overweight if you eat 2000 calories and no more. Sadly, I don't think that is true for a lot of people.

faster, there are lots of days I only eat one meal..... I've actually never counted up calories until today for my post above, I just know that its unlikely one portion of dinner is over 1000 calories. Therefore I must often eat less that 1200. No counting required for that calculation.

I used myfitness pal to work out how I could lose 5lb (I want to be 9st), I am 5ft 4 and it said I would lose 1lb a week if I ate 1200 (with no exercise) so doesn't sound too far off being the norm for someone who was quite slim already (say under 9st and similar height to me)

1200 is a fair amount really.

I think it is genetic. My family are all slim and always ate loads. My DM did put on weight during the menopause with HRT, but she was the only one who had never had much of an appetite since a small child.