I've understood correctly that's 800 cals per day? How do you manage, I'm struggling on 1200!
Two things helped me. Firstly what you eat, so making every calorie count. I'd rather have a huge, massive plateful of vegetables that is a large volume of food, than a much smaller amount of carbs.
The lunch I've just eaten for example: a green and yellow pepper, sliced. Three full celery sticks. Half a can of chickpeas whizzed up with garlic. 7 vegetable portions according to the NHS poster for veg serving sizes. It's physicly a lot of food on your plate so very filling, but very few calories relatively speaking.
The second thing is psychological. Realising that you genuinely don't need more food/calories. Especially so if you have excess fat cells in your body. That fat is an energy source so in order to burn it you need to run out of energy from your food. If you have lots and lots of fat in your body, like I did, it takes some psychological jiggery pokery to make yourself accept that you can consume really low calories and be absolutely fine - because you've got lots of energy stored as fat.
Obviously the advice is different if your BMI is the lower end of normal so your fat stores are lower. But if you're overweight or obese, you don't physically need the calories. You just psychologically think you do.
I ate maximum 800 calories 6 days a week (and about 1200-1500 on a Sunday) long term with no I'll effects. Probably 6 months or so, and this was while burning around 3000+ cal per day. Then another 6 months eating around 1000-1200 as my body fat cells depleted.
Re: Calorie Counting
I've never routinely calorie counted. It's far too faffy given that the evening meals I cook are always from scratch, always feed 6 people and I often cook double batches to freeze half. It's hard to work out a single portion of homemade bolognese sauce with any accuracy, for example.
However, it is important, I think, to understand the food you eat on a nutrient level. I was very overweight (BMI 43) and so recognised I needed to properly educate myself on food composition. The best way to do that us with a tracker app (I use the fitbit app).
But I only every calorie count for about 2 weeks at a time. This allows you to much more accurately estimate things like:
- how many calories in this?
- what weight is one portion?
- what does one portion look like on the plate?
- how many carbs in this?
- what's got more protein in it for the same calories, this or this?
Healthy eating, I think, comes down to properly understanding these sorts of things all of the time, every day.
You don't have to accurately calorie count in order to do that. But you do need a good level of nutritional understanding. I found short term calorie counting helpful in that education . But personally, I can't be arsed all the time. But I know that yesterday, for example, I ate around 800-1000 calories with very few carbs. I haven't calorie counted that, I just feel better able to estimate because of previous food logging.