Monday, October 7, 2013

My opinion on why it is so hard to lose the last few lbs.

I went over to this calculator:

http://www.health-calc.com/diet/energy-expend iture-advanced

and plugged in my stats. With the exercise I do, I should maintain my weight of 69kg on about 2280 calories a day.

I wound it down to the weight I wouldn't mind being: 64kg. The maintenance number went to around 2180. Only 100 calories difference, right? Not much at all. with a deficit of 500, I should get there in 2 months.

Well, the thing is, the human body is very *very* good at adapting. 100 calories is nothing. If I'm low on energy, I fidget less, quite unconsciously. I don't get up and walk around as often, I group things to carry upstairs, rather than dash up and down, I sleep a little more. I make the DH make the breakfast and the tea. I slow down in ways that are very difficult to measure on a simple TDEE calculator with windy dials.

This makes me feel that, if you are already a healthy weight, hitting a specific weight target is uncertain and possibly pointless, quite apart from daily fluctuations. The very fact that you are restricting intake will reduce TDEE. You can't get there fast. -500 cals can be too high a deficit. All you can do is eat a healthy amount and move a healthy amount *consistently* and asymptotically settle around a certain point. Where will it be? Who knows? It depends on what you eat, what you do, and your eating history.

ps: I've read that for some people, the above calculator gives high TDEE values, but I think this actually illustrates the point.


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