In my Internet reading on dieting, I came across this great article from The Huffington Post with tips from medical doctors on weight loss. There were two key points of this article that stuck with me.
This has certainly been true in my experience. When you increase your exercise without dieting, your body naturally wants to consume more calories to make up for what you burned off in your exercise session. While exercise alone is still better for your body than doing nothing, it is not going to achieve a weight loss goal.
When I saw how low these caloric intake recommendations were, I was shocked! 1200 calories is not very much at all! When you work with this target in mind, you have to budget your calories just like you would budget your money. For me, it worked out to 300 calorie breakfast, 100 calorie snacks, plus 2 400 calorie salads. That’s it! You can see in the pictures in this post how this worked out for me. Everything has to be carefully weighed and measured to stay in caloric “budget.”
Salads are a great choice for dieters because you get a lot of “filler” vegetables for almost no calories. My salad base is about 100 calories. I then have 300 calories to spend on “yummy” ingredients. Here is how I tweaked the salad for dinner.
Are you shocked at the minimal caloric requirements for dieters? Do you even know how many calories you consume in a typical day? Before this experiment, I certainly didn’t. Please share in the comments.
While the estimates of 1200 and 1400 calories are certainly less than a person needs, or adequate to lose weight, they may be too low to stick with long term. If I dropped to 1400 calories, it wouldn’t last long. There are some online tools to estimate caloric need, but true caloric expenditure is difficult and expensive to measure. There are commercial products such as the BodPod that will measure your expenditure, but they are not cheap. Finding out your resting energy expenditure is a good place to start, but your caloric needs will change as you gain muscle and lose fat. In short, it’s a challenge to know where to go if you don’t know where you are starting.
I think everyone must wince when they see the 1200/1400 calorie counts. Interesting to know about all the calorie technology available. It would be nice to have calorie counts tailored to each individual but in absence of that, you could always start at 1400 then adjust upward slowly until you had a system that works for you.