Trigger warning disordered eating, diet talk, calorie counting, etc.
(caveat, i’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice)
It is generally accepted in the weight loss/dietary medicine/fitness industry that in order to lose a pound of weight you need to burn or cut 3500 calories from your diet. That means if you want to lose a pound a week you need to cut 500 calories a day. If you want to lose two pounds a week you need to cut 1000 calories a day.
The advice on how to do that varies, but it usually comes in the form of “well, just shave a little bit off of a meal here or there, skip that extra cookie” but if you’re trying to cut 1000 calories a day that’s about 330 calories a meal.
What did you have for breakfast today? I had a gluten free bagel with an olive oil butter spread and raspberry jam.
260 calories for the bagel, 45 for the butter, 60 for the jam, 60 for the cream in my coffee. About 425 calories. Cut out 330 and I guess I can have cream in my coffee and about half a tablespoon of butter.
What did you have for lunch? My day has been hectic, I had a couple handfuls of peanuts and some freeze dried banana slices.
At about 200 calories for the peanuts, 70 for the banana slices, and another 60 for more cream in my coffee I guess I’d better just skip lunch.
What are you having for dinner? Things are a little odd for me right now; I might have some leftover frozen soup and maybe a string cheese and maybe a smoothie. It’ll be about a thousand calories, probably, because I’ve eaten light meals for the rest of the day. Maybe i’ll leave out the smoothie.
There you go. I’ve cut my thousand calories. I’ll lose two pounds this week.
Never mind that there isn’t actually a hell of a lot of room for cutting a thousand calories out of my daily diet, never mind that at the end of the day I’m not eating enough to support a healthy ten year old, never mind that I’m tired and irritable and my head hurts.
The websites all say that if I cut a thousand calories a day I’ll lose two pounds in a week.
What they don’t say is that you’re cutting those thousand calories out of the food that gives you energy to talk to friends. What they don’t say is that if you cut a thousand calories and leave yourself with only a thousand, only eight hundred, only three hundred, only a hundred calories a day that those lost pounds aren’t going to flatten your stomach or thin your thighs, they’re going to make you tired. They’re going to make you cold. They’re going to make it hard to concentrate and they’re going to make you feel sick.
If a doctor tells you they want you to lose ten pounds they think they’re saying “I want you to have the benefits of weight loss showed in diet studies” and they frequently don’t realize they’re saying “I want you to cheerfully be Sisyphus.” The aren’t thinking about where those five hundred or thousand calories a day are coming from, they’re not looking at your specific diet, and if you’ve lost a significant amount of weight in the past (even if you’ve gained it back) they may not realize that cutting a thousand calories a day will not make you lose a reliable two pounds a week. They think they’re saying “practice a little willpower and your heart will be healthier” and what they’re ACTUALLY saying, IF THEY MEAN IT, is “weigh everything you put in your mouth. Level off every spoonful. be hungry until you hit your goal weight, then be hungry forever. Get weaker. Spend more time measuring rice and less time eating with friends. Popcorn at the movies is a sin. Nobody deserves birthday cake.”
Food is complicated and our relationships to food are complicated, but if you really, really want to take a look at how weight loss works you should hit up some bodybuilder forums before competition season. Bodybuilders on a cut are a standing joke because of the endless boring plates of chicken and broccoli and broccoli and chicken they eat to get to their show weight. Go look at those people trying desperately to add any spices to their meals that will help them taste good and will make them feel good when they’ve cut fat and carbohydrates out of their diets for six weeks. Watch what bodybuilders eat the day after the show. Watch a bikini model wipe the foundation and spray tan off her face, throw on a pair of sweats, and eat a whole box of donuts because she’s been hungry for weeks and she’s celebrating the end of being hungry.
Now imagine that without cheat days.
That’s what it’s like to try to lose any significant amount of weight.
I remember being in weight watchers as a teenager. I remember the success stories people would tell at the beginnings of the meetings, and I remember that there was one girl in the group who was younger than me. We were supposed to applaud, because she’d figured out how to use the flex points system to ensure that she could have two slices of pizza at her thirteenth birthday party.
Did you know that weight watchers is one of the the most successful long-term diet program? Even though it kind of doesn’t work?
And that weight loss success is considered losing 10% of your bodyweight and keeping it off for a year? One year. And that 80% of people who are overweight or obese have a significant amount of trouble managing that (for extremely good reasons)?
Also, more to the point: I weigh 215 pounds and am five and a half feet tall; my BMI is 34.7. I am obese. If I lost 21.5 pounds I would weigh 193.5 pounds and my BMI would be 31.2. I would still be obese.
Most of the health benefits of weight loss are apparent at about a 5% weight loss. But if I lose about 12 pounds and continue to be obese (which I will be if i lose 12 pounds) my doctors are still going to counsel me to lose weight.
Even though it means counting calories and eating chicken and broccoli and worrying worrying worrying about going over my points/calories/goals for the day.
Better to set aside that bagel. Let me skip the smoothie.
Never mind that the smoothie was added to my diet in the first place to make up for nutrient deficiencies that are a result of an autoimmune disease. Never mind that my body needs at least 1600 calories a day to maintain my body temperature and literally nothing else.
Never you mind that the vast majority of physicians the world over don’t have a clue what to do with their obese patients. Never you mind that the weight loss industry is an unregulated morass of snake oil and false hope. Never you mind that there is as of yet no gold-standard, reproducible treatment program. Never you mind that studies show obese patients already face cruel discrimination by health professionals, and already receive substandard care.
That quote is from a Canadian doctor who advocates for evidence-based weight management.
Here’s one from a clinician who worked to develop a scale for treating obese people based on their actual health markers and not just their weight:
Healthy overweight and obese people (male or female) have very little if any health risk from their extra weight and should probably be left alone (certainly not be encouraged to lose weight). No one has yet demonstrated any long-term benefit of weight loss in this ‘healthy’ (Stage 0) obese population and there is far more potential to do harm than good (especially, when the weight comes back, as it most likely will – often with a vengeance).
I wrote this up because someone sent me an ask discussing their myfitnesspal tracker allowing them to track a very low number of calories for a goal of 2lbs a week weight loss.
If your goal is to lose weight in order to get the health benefits of losing weight you need to plan on losing weight as slowly as possible, because losing two pounds a week with absolutely fuck your shit up. Losing a pound a week might fuck your shit up.
Do you know how long it takes to build muscle, to actually add muscle weight, once you’re past the early gains that new lifters see? It might take a year of hard work to add about five pounds of muscle to your body.
That’s actually pretty close to the way we should expect to lose weight, if your goal is to lose weight at all. (which I don’t think it should be)
I’m in the National Weight Control Registry.
From 2012 to 2014 I lost 30 pounds - less than a pound a week - and I kept it off until 2017. The NWCR is where we can pull the biggest pool of data on long-term successful weight loss.
I remember being hungry. I remember being cold.
I started losing weight and tracking calories when I was diagnosed with celiac disease. I had to obsessively read labels anyway, I might as well read and track the calorie labels too. Plus I’d just found out I wouldn’t be able to eat any of the foods that I liked so I might as well take the opportunity to be disciplined by external forces.
Thank fuck for Trader Joe’s because it’s super, super easy to keep off weight when there’s no food around that you can eat unless you take the time to cook it yourself, but it’s a lot harder to sink into the depressing mire of counting calories and self denial when you can just make a fucking sandwich without having to bake bread from fucking scratch.
Your body is not going to be happy if you deny it sustenance. You are going to feel sick, you are going to feel cold, it is going to be hard to concentrate, you are going to have cravings.
There is no way that you are going to lose two pounds a week or a pound a week without experiencing some really significant negative outcomes that might have long-reaching consequences with respect to metabolic damage and hunger signals.
You need to feed yourself.
You do *not* need to be skinny, you do *not* need to lose thirty pounds, you do *not* need to have a thigh gap or a bikini bridge or whatever pro-ana bullshit that 4chan is trolling with this week.
You need to feed yourself.
If you are interested in managing your weight you probably need to care more about what happens going forward than in reversing what’s already happened. Eat nourishing food that makes you feel good. Exercise. Get a lipid panel done if you can and watch your sugars.
Exercise in a way that is fun for you and makes you feel good. Take care of your joints. Stay hydrated (and it doesn’t have to be with water - literally any nonalcoholic beverage will hydrate you, coffee and soda don’t have enough caffeine to offset the amount of water in them, just drink fluids). Sleep.
There are many, many ways to improve your health.
Cutting a thousand calories a day out of your diet to lose two pounds a week is not one of them.
