Calorie weirdness..

Justintime

Justintime

Justintime

Soldato
Joined
24 Jul 2006
Posts
8,876
Location
Hoddesdon, London, UK
Well i've noticed since i upped my cals from about 1500 daily to 2400 i actually feel more trim and my stomach has stopped being flabby, its more taut now, also feeling a lot more energetic! Its been a week now and might have actually lose a smidgen of weight too, What gives, i though less calories = more weight loss lol! I'm about 13 stone and 5ft 11 ish. I work out more or less daily with 30-40 mins on a rowing machine, i'm thinking i don't mind 2400 calories at all if this is the right path! thoughts?
 
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Justintime said:
Well i've noticed since i upped my cals from about 1500 daily to 2400 i actually feel more trim and my stomach has stopped being flabby, its more taut now, also feeling a lot more energetic! What gives, i though less calories = more weight loss lol! I'm about 13 stone and 5ft 11 ish. I work out more or less daily with 30-40 mins on a rowing machine, i'm thinking i don't mind 2400 calories at all if this is the right path! thoughts?
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If you're 13 stone at 5'11 your BMR is about 2000kcal, add in the calories burned by your general daily activity and then a daily workout on top of this and if you were only eating 1500kcal/day you were operating at far too great of a caloric deficit. This probably pushed your body into starvation mode and made it cling to its fat reserves while cannibalising muscle. You'll also feel like **** if you do this as your body will try to force its metabolic rate down, causing you to feel tired and listless, in another attempt to preserve energy.

A caloric deficit of maybe 500 to 1000kcal/day (with 1000 as the absolute upper bound) is best if you're trying to lose bodyfat, and as an adult male I probably wouldn't eat below 1800kcal/day for any reason.

e: in response to your "less calories = more weight loss", yeah that's basically true on paper, but if you starve yourself too hard your body just burns all its muscle away (body thinks it's starving -> muscle costs calories to maintain -> body tries to conserve energy by burning muscle instead of fat). If you eat too little you'll lose scale weight but it'll all be lean mass, which is an aesthetic disaster, and as soon you stop eating a starvation diet, your BMR will have now dropped (because you have less muscle) and all the weight you lost will go back on as fat.

So yeah, it's not surprising that you feel and look better now that you're eating more. It's a more sensible dietary approach.
 
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