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.
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Learn how to make alfredo sauce. Put it on everything. That will solve your lack of calories.
🤌
One recommendation is a food tracking app. Personally I use MacroFactor, which gives custom calorie intake recommendations based on how fast/slow you’re losing/gaining weight.
This is great as it allows you to select a slow, healthy, sustainable weight loss speed and the calories are simply adjusted to match that (weighing in regularly will be necessary)
Is this a European joke I’m too Free to understand?
I can’t give medical advice, I mean I can but I won’t. Anyway, I was a professional chef who worked in three very different locations before leaving the pirate kitchen life of sodomy.
What’s affordable is going to depend on where you are, so buy in-season fruits and vegetables. Try different recipes using things you know you can afford and when something clicks for you, write it down. Keep a list of the healthy meals and snacks that are easy for you to make because the hungry brain has no past or future. Aggressively mid foods like beans, peas, potatoes, barley and peanut butter are cheap and no one will care if you steal them.
If you’re a shit cook find some videos and follow along or ask a friend to walk you through some recipes if you have one.
Keep heathy, craving satisfying food on hand. Make a batch of nut balls (nut butter mixed with seeds, dried berries and whatever) and keep them in the freezer. Have lots of different tea on hand if that’s your thing, popcorn is filling and low calorie. My go-tos are: hard boiled egg, or a baked potato, or a bowl of peas. Don’t knock a bowl of peas until you try it after a joint, mixed with coconut oil, salt, pepper and cayenne.
Try smoothies. One of my faves is almond milk, spinach, lime juice, cashew or hemp butter, banana, pinch of salt. Blending up greens is a great way to stuff them in and they’re low calorie by volume. What’s great is I can pre-portion all of those ingredients except the almond milk into containers and freeze them. Then making a smoothie is as simple as dumping the frozen brick in a blender with some liquid.
Grocery store prices can vary by day, sales usually go on before they get in a new order and need to clear the shelves. Figure that out and only buy meat in bulk on sale or wait by the dumpster at night. Make a big batch of something like curry, chili or stew with it and freeze in portions anything you won’t eat in the next few days.
There is no shame in using low-income grocery options to get healthy food you can’t otherwise afford. See if there are any in your area. I have friends on disability who get a box of fresh fruit and vegetables every week, food that’s perfectly good but would otherwise be thrown out because of our high beauty standards for crops.
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but don’t beans and rice have carbs which should be avoided for weight loss? And same with pizza lol
As long as calories in < calories out, the source of those calories matter much less (within reason). You could lose weight eating nothing but oreos and hostess snack cakes as long as calories in < calories out. Not great for you for obvious reasons, not least of which vitamin deficiencies, but you’d lose weight.
While strictly speaking calories in < calories out is the most important factor in weight loss, what you eat can drastically affect your hunger and thus indirectly affect your calories in - or at least make you far more miserable in sticking to lower calories. Eating more protein can help but I also find blander food helps as well - which typically means avoiding sugars and sweet foods. You are going to find it extremely hard to stick to a calorie limit eating nothing bot oreos and hostess snack cakes.
I low-key hate the “calories in vs calories out” mantra because I believe it tends to disregard an important source of “calories out:” the ones that don’t get absorbed in the intestines and that you poop out instead. It’s still somewhat early days for the science, but there’s increasing evidence to suggest that a lot of the difference between skinny people and fat people isn’t necessarily that their calorie intake or calorie burn is wildly different, but that fat people’s digestive tracts are better at absorbing all the calories.
“Calorie in” means what your body absorbs. If it absorbs more, then the number is higher for the same amount of food, and vice versa.
How do you measure that for weight loss?
You cannot accurately measure just that. But measuring calories you eat is a good enough approximation to help you control how much you eat. You can estimate you calories out by your weight, if you are gaining weight you are eating (and adsorbing) more then you are using, if you are losing weight then you are eating less - and that is the most important part.
There is also water weight to account for, but realistically there is an upper and lower bound to that and over several weeks you can get a pretty good idea for what level of calories you ingest leads to weight gain or loss. And if that changes for any reason you can adjust the amount you eat in correspondence. We are just looking for averages over time and the overall balance here, no need to be super accurate with exactly what you adsorb and what you have accurately used during an exercise. I never even measure calories burnt as it does not give much value vs just weighting your self over time.
Of course, which is why I said within reason. As long as you’re making an effort to make your diet varied, I find trying to religiously track macros tends to be fairly counterproductive for most people, as it makes the whole process far more of a pain in the ass.
You don’t need to avoid all carbs. Try to chose those that don’t absorb so quickly. Whole grain products are better for this reason (appart from the obvious fiber content). Also starch in rice or wholegrain pasta is better than regular sugar, because it takes the body more time and energy to break down.
Too many carbs is bad, but zero carbs is counterproductive too. The goal is to get some protein and some carbs, but fewer carbs when you are losing and not exercising enough for your body to turn them into energy right away.
If you are eating a lot of fruits & vegetables and exercising, then a serving or two of rice and beans eat day will be used as your body needs to and the calorie reduction will take care of the weight loss.
A high carb diet isn’t healthy, but you will still very much lose weight if you count calories and stick to around 1500/day. At 1500 calories, you can eat nothing but twinkies and lose weight.
Instead of trying a bunch of different conflicting methods for weight loss from these comments, I would recommend you instead first understand the science of it with:
I’d be cautious stating that these videos represent science. People are free to make their own dietary choices of course, but ‘water fasting’ and ‘low-carbohydrate high-fat’ diets are questionable. Also, FYI, Dr. Jason Fung is a Kidney doctor.
I have found that after doing a 5 day water fast, it was much much easier to limit myself to whatever daily calorie goal I was aiming for.
Speak with a doctor, not the internet.
Weight loss advice is nearly a religion. You’re going to have a million different people telling you that something absolutely is or isn’t a certain way. They’ll claim science isn’t science, that the body is magical and mystical and you won’t achieve your goals if you don’t do exactly X or y.
The body does some weird things when you start going into starvation mode but it’s not magic.
If you maintain a calorie deficit, eventually you will lose fat. You’ll also lose muscle.
The calculations for how many calories you actually burn doing something are kind of voodoo, they vary wildly per individual.
You create a calorie deficit so that your body will burn the fat. You work out so that your body will put more energy into building the muscle you’ll be losing. The only way you lose weight is through breathing out carbon dioxide. If you sit around sedentary that’s going to take a very long time.
Pick a target for how much weight you want to lose over a month. Pick a calorie deficit that makes sense to you. Weigh yourself every couple of days and calculate a sliding average. Tune the number of calories you’re eating after the first couple weeks to maintain your weight loss target.
You do need to be careful with extremely low calorie diets. You want to be monitored by a doctor and have regular blood tests to make sure stuff isn’t going awry.
If you want to go cheap, use a free intake monitoring app, eat eggs, beans and rice, try to cram some vegetables in there where you can. Don’t go out of your way to avoid fat but don’t guzzle it either. Shy away from processed carbs like bread and noodles. Don’t necessarily go keto, but keep your carbs in check.
Best advice in this thread. OP please read.
Look up the YouTube series on that very topic from Renaissance Periodization. It helped me loss 30 pounds and keep them off for more than 6 months now.
Extreme low calorie diet are not sustainable for long, especially if you are starting out.
First thing first, count your calories for a week or two to get the baseline calorie consumption for your current weight. Try to not change your normal food consumption while taking your first baseline calories because it will make the first weight loss cycle more difficult than it needs to be.
Then, start by removing 250 calories from your diet and burn 250 calories every day for 6 to 9 weeks.
Then, go into maintenance where you slowly add a bit more food and stabilize your weight. If you see that you are gaining weight during the maintenance, just cut back a little bit and keep that calorie intake as your maintenance intake. That will become your calorie baseline for the next cycle.
Repeat until your goals are met. Don’t hesitate to take a longer maintenance break if you feel like it.
That will give you a sustainable way to lose weight and you will also learn to count calories without weighing everything you eat.
If you can easily cut 250 calories without any problem, try to cut more calories the next cycle, and see how it goes. If it’s too hard, then go back to 250/250 calories cut.
As for the food, I don’t know where you live, but nutritional yeast is a cheap way to add protein to any meals and add a cheesy flavor to the meal.
As for fat, cheap nuts or neutral oil can help meet your needs.
And for carbs, seasonal fruits and vegetables are usually cheaper, so go with that.
The only thing you should take from this post is that slow and steady is the name of the game. You are fighting millions of years of evolution, so it won’t be easy.
TLDR: slow and steady. Cut 250 cal from your diet and burn 250 calories from activity for 6-9 weeks. Maintain for the same amount of time. Repeat.
My go-tos are legumes: cheap, easy to cook, go well with a lot of stuff, filling and full of fibre. If I feel snackish I go for a can of peas, f.i…
Pair them with rice, more veggies and lean meat, when you can score a good deal.
The talk around weight loss is kinda crazy and a lot of it is dominated by pseudoscience.
However, we are pretty much positive that eating at a calorie deficit will result in weight loss in 99.9% of cases and you aren’t going to be the 0.1%. There’s a lot of anecdotal data about how eating too little will make you stop losing weight or even gain more weight because of your ‘metabolism’, but no controlled studies that show that to be a significant contributor without other causes. It’s not some magical metabolism trick, you’re just cheating on your metrics and doing less because you’re tired and cranky and have no energy because you aren’t eating right.
Saying that, eating at a massive deficit can definitely make you feel like shit and will make it hard to exercise, do not recommend. You will also likely have a part of your brain dedicated to fantasizing about food 24/7 and your libido will likely be in the trash if that matters to you. This will be very hard to maintain, and you have to remember that there’s never going to be a day where you can go back to eating like ‘normal’. Your current normal is why you need to lose weight and your goal is to eventually establish a new baseline.
Lastly, highly recommend against adding calories back due to exercise. We don’t have a lot of good data about there being any reliable indicators of actual calories burned available to the average person and you’ll find a tremendous amount of super variable answers when you find instances where people tried to actually test the estimates you see online. The time you put into exercise isn’t about weight loss, it will help, but it’s a bonus just for you because you deserve to have the body that you want.
If you 1500 calories, then exercise and burn 500 calories, yes you would need to eat another 500 calories to reach 1500 calories.
Burning 500 calories through exercice is a lot
This helped me: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/what-should-you-eat/
Nice resource. I get good exercise and eat a lot of raw or unprocessed foods, but my portions are whack and there’s not a lot of consistency day to day. I’ve been wanting to clean up my diet for a while and I’m gonna add this to my planning document.
See if you can track down Weight Watchers stuff. The plan itself is expensive, but the basic approach is to simplify doing exactly what you describe. They formalize food categories, portion size, and simplified tracking. Alternatively, they have recipes meeting specific calorie goal, while also having good nutrient value
I second this, and they have a digital only plan that is just $10/month. You can use their app, which is actually very good, to track your food. They use a point system to simplify the process.
