To get that beach body you want, you have to eat less than 1200 calories a day and spend an excessive amount of time sweating on the treadmill, elliptical, or spin bike… or so that what’s the diet industry wants you to think. By just laying in bed all day, the average female burns 1400 calories in a day.
Your Body’s Energy Demands:
That’s just the amount of energy used by your body to do normal functions like breathing, circulation, and digestion. Add to that the energy used to do daily tasks such as cleaning, cooking, walking, and maybe exercising. Once those are all factored into play the average woman burns 2000-2500 calories a day (If you want to calculate how many calories you burn in a day, this is a reliable calculator macrosinc.net/macro-calculator/maintenance-calculator/). Eating half of your maintenance calories, coupled with excessive cardio can be detrimental to your weight loss goals and health.
Problems associated with large calorie deficits: 1200 calories
The biggest reason people don’t lose weight when on a 1200 calories per day diet is that it’s unsustainable. You stick to your diet all week, but once the weekend rolls around, you go out and socialize. After one glass of wine over your calorie allotment for the day you say, “screw it” and eat pizza, ice cream, an so on. Average out the calories from the entire week and you’re eating over/ at your maintenance calories, causing you to not lose weight. “Well I have the mental fortitude to stick to my diet”, you may be thinking.
That might be the case, but your body is smarter than you think! Your body knows it is being deprived. It sends a signal to your brain saying, “Eat everything in sight who knows when we’re going to be fed again!”. Just like that, your diet crumbles. In one study, animals that had their food intake restricted ended up eating much more once the food was available, showing that binge eating after the restriction is a biological response.
Negative effects of calorie deficits: 1200 calories
If you DO end up under-eating at 1200 calories or less, your body will enter energy conservation mode. Think about the normal functions I mentioned earlier: breathing, blood circulation, and cell reproduction. That’s all your body is focused on so don’t be surprised if you begin to lose hair and have dry skin when depriving your body of nutrients! Your mood? Grumpy, your body isn’t focused on creating those feel-good hormones.
Those toned legs you think you’ll get by losing weight? Forget about that, because first off, you won’t have much energy to lift weights to maintain muscle, and second, your body will much rather burn nonessential muscle for energy than essential fat that’s protecting your organs. (Don’t believe me? Here’s all the effects of undereating, and a toned body isn’t one of them!) Often, when wanting to “tone up” you should actually be eating more calories than you’re burning.
Busting myths…
When wanting to avoid the skinny-fat look, usually we need to build more muscle. You can do this by lifting weights and eating just a bit more than you need to maintain your weight. Those extra calories go towards repairing and building muscle. I hope we’re all on the same page here that lifting weights won’t make you look manly. Women don’t have enough testosterone to build crazy amounts of muscle naturally.
Take a look at Isa Pecini, winner of the Bikini Division at the most prestigious fitness industry showcase event in the world, the Olympia. She spends a lot of time in the weight room, and most definitely does not look manly!
Muscle takes up less space than fat. So, the more muscle you have, the leaner you’ll look even at the same weight. Also, muscle is metabolically active. This means that at rest, muscle burns calories.
The more muscle you have, the more you can eat without gaining fat. The easier it will be to diet down (sustainably) later!
Conclusion:
Hopefully, we will see this myth that all women should be eating the calorie recommendations for a toddler disappear soon! Until then though, listen to facts and don’t deprive yourself of nutrients! 1200 calories a day isn’t sustainable, and you will reach your body goals by undereating to this extent! Fuel yourself with a balanced diet of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, coming from mostly whole foods, and stay active. You’ll look AND feel much better.
If you’re working out, you need to understand the different types of pains. Are you sore? Or is it something more serous, Click the link to learn more: If You Feel Pain During Weight Training, What Should You Do?
