Weight Loss Fallacies: 2lbs per week and 1200 calories per day
I received an email the other day that sums up how popular diet/fitness misinformation can leave people frustrated, upset, angry and eventually to flat out give up on the idea of getting in shape.
So the email went something like this:
“I just read your book and it says my RMR is approx 1250 calories. I want to lose 2lbs per week because that is supposed to be a realistic weight loss goal…but to do that you say you have to create a 1000 calorie deficit each day, that means I can only eat 250 calories per day…but I also heard that you should never eat below 1200 calories per day…so how is this possible?!”
What is a realistic weight loss goal?
Of course I’m paraphrasing and this is not the exact words, but this is a very typical email I get every week.
There are a few different flaws and fallacies in this statement…did you notice them? If not, I’ll show you.
Fallacy #1. There is no scientific proof that 2lbs per week of weight loss is a safe or realistic goal that all adults humans can or should expect to achieve. This is a claim based on FTC advertising standards. You only hear this number because marketers aren’t allowed to say any more by law. If they could the number would likely be 10lbs per week. That doesn’t make it any more or less correct, because neither number is based on scientific evidence.
A 6’5 260lbs man can easily expect to lose up to even 4lbs per week, however a 5’1 woman is hardly in the same position. Instead of setting a weight loss goal based on poundage (ie: 1lbs, 2lbs, 3lbs per week) you should be looking at it as a percentage of your bodyweight.
A 6’0 tall man who weights 220lbs with a RMR of approximately 2000 cals/day could easily create a 1000 calorie deficit each day by cutting his calories to 1500/day and burning an additional 500 calories in a good hard workout (mix of weights and cardio).
1500 is still plenty of calories to feel relatively satisfied while still creating a fair sized deficit to facilitate a significant weekly weight loss.
Also 2lbs of weight loss represents less than 1% of his total bodyweight.
Now change the person to a 5’1 woman with an RMR of 1250 calories. She would have to eat around 750 calories per day as well as burning off an additional 500 in the gym. This is starting to sound more like torture than a reasonable diet plan.
The fallacy is that 2lbs is a good target for all body sizes…it is not. Smaller people have smaller metabolisms and shouldn’t expect to lose as much total weight as a bigger person. It would be more realistic for her to shoot for 1lbs of weight loss which would only require a 500 calorie daily deficit…this could be achieved with a much more reasonably daily calorie intake around 1000 calories with a 250 calorie burn from a workout. Doesn’t that sound much more realistic?!
Fallacy #2: 1200 calories is the minimum you should eat in a day
I don’t know where this number comes from and I will be spending some time in the near future looking it up. However based on the RDI and RDA for nutrients the actual lower limit for calories (when you add up the individual recommendations for protein, carbs and fats) comes out to around 800 calories per day for women and 900 for men. So even according to the RDA you can easily eat well below 1200 and get your daily requirements of protein carbs and fats.
These two false assumptions are leading many people down a path of frustration and weight loss failure.
Setting realistic weight loss goals is the first step to success.
Letting go of your fear of eating less food is the second step.
Once you realize it’s ok to eat a bit less food then you will start to see things really change.
John
22 Responses to “Weight Loss Fallacies: 2lbs per week and 1200 calories per day”
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August 22nd, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Yeah, these arbitrary minimum are pretty silly.
Worse though is that arbitrary 2000 calorie RDA that causes many people to think everybody’s BMR is 2000 calories. I have a short female friend who thinks her BMR is 2000 and is very strict with her calorie counting, and suffice to say, she can’t figure out why she is getting fatter!
August 23rd, 2011 at 8:12 am
There is a study examining the upper limits of fat loss rates and they concluded it was around 31.4 kcal per lb of fat on the body per day. So for someone with say 10 lbs of fat, fat could supply 314 calories per day.
The study can be found in the 2004 Journal of Theoretical Biology titled A limit on the energy transfer rate from the human fat store in hypophagia.
August 24th, 2011 at 8:25 am
I believe the 1200 calories a day diet comes from weight loss plans developed by the U.S. Army. I have an old West Point fitness guide that was written in the 1970s that extensively references a 1200 calorie ‘exchange’ diet whereby all foods are categorized by a serving size (1 oz of beef is one exchange) and you are given a daily quota of exchanges to eat. I don’t know where they got the 1200 calorie a day limit but this may be the origin.
August 24th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
i just wanted to say thank you john for every information on your site and book AGD. I will admit i suffered from OCE and i was so concerned about what i was eating and not how much. Every personal trainer or website calculator said i needed to eat about 2300 calories or so for weight loss and to eat 5 6 meals a day with tons of protein. No wander i never got anywhere my bmr for my height is estimated 1800 at 5 9 22 yrs old. After i read your book and eat stop eat i have went from 12 percent body fat too an impressive 7 percent and im in maintenece mode so i do 2000 calories with one fast a week. BTW I did this drinking artificial sweetners like crystal light, eating some ice cream every now and then and whatever i felt you freed me from obsession and i got weight under control thanks again.
August 24th, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Also John for the fun of it im doing a five day fast starting today im documenting weight and measurements to go with it, im going to prove to others what you proved to me and that is how easy you can lose “weight” but true fat loss takes time.
August 24th, 2011 at 10:30 pm
So help me out here. You mention that for the hypothetical woman with a RMR of 1250 calories she would have to reduce intake to 750 in addition to burning an extra 500 in the gym to create the much-touted 1000cal/day deficit.
My question lies in my understanding of RMR. I am under the impression that RMR measures the amount of energy your body would require if you were to wake up, park in a La-Z-Boy, and not move all day. If that is indeed what RMR measures, would it not be much easier for our hypothetical woman to create a 1000cal deficit were she to go about her daily routine while cutting intake and working out?
October 24th, 2011 at 11:04 am
[...] loss is all about calories in and calories out. You need to create a long term caloric deficit to see noticeable results. What varies from person [...]
March 25th, 2012 at 6:02 pm
What you are failing to take into account is that BMR is the amount of calories you will spend if you are in a coma. Even very slightly active people spend more than their BMR. Generally its 1.2 for sedentary active, and 1.375 BMR for moderately active – neither involve heavy excericse.
So a man with a BRM of 1700, say, will need to eat around 2,350 calories merely for MAINTENANCE if he is even moderately active – i.e. not entirely sedentary. In other words this figure does not include any real excercise. So if he eats 1500 calories, he will be creating a deficit of 850 minimum – if he excercises even slightly, it is more. 1500 calories a day is NOT ENOUGH TO FEEL FULL if your maintenance is 2350.
Sure, with will power you can sustain so heavy a deficit for weeks or months, but you are setting yourself up for a crash. Studies have shown that creating anything more than a 500 per day calorie deficit for extended periods often results in crashes. This does not mean you cannot do this for a short time, but you will crash eventually, most probably.
This is why it is HUGELY misleading to suggest that dieting should be based on creating deficits with regard to your BMR – the deficit should be with regard to your daily expenditure, which even for sedentary people is SEVERAL HUNDRED calories above their BMR!
I found this out the hard way – I followed your stuff, John, which I love in general by the way and think your work is genius, so this is not entirely a criticism, and your advice to calculate my deficit based on my BMR. With extreme self control, I was able to do 500 calories below my BMR for a few months, but well below a sub-10 percent body fat and revelaed abs level, I began to have serious crashes. Not realizing what was happening, I did a bunch of research and realized I was not creating a 500 calorie deficit like I thought, but closer to a 1,000 calorie deficit through diet alone!
The advice to crate a deficit based on BMR proved to be ultimately disastrous and led to a major crash on my part – at first it was doable, though very hard, but ultimately, it is not sustainable.
I really think you should advise people to cut calories based on daily expenditure, and not BMR, John (like in AGD you base it on BMR), as you are unintentionally setting people up for a crash, and not properly explaining what is going on.
March 25th, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Sorry, it should read well BEFORE I reached the under 10 percent body fat that was my goal I crashed heavily.
My BMR is 1700, and following the AGD diet and the advice on this site I was eating around 1300 calories per day. Turns out my daily expenditure BEFORE weight lifting (moderate activity) was about 2,350, which means I should have been eating 1,800 calories per day to lose about a pound per week!
At 1300/day, I simply could not sustain for too long. 1800 was far more realistic and enough to feel full.
March 30th, 2012 at 11:11 pm
I’d like to see John comment on George’s experience. In my experience, people who’ve based calorie deficit on BMR have NOT fared disasterously like George did.
March 31st, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Dale, I did not fare disastrously at first – at first it was doable but difficult, but when I got down to having to lose about another 10 pounds to be shredded, it was simply unsustainable. I think there is some growing acknowledgement of that in the recent reverse-taper protocol that Brad – or was it John? – released.
Not only that, but with a BMR of 1700, I felt I almost had nothing to look forward to when I went from dieting to maintenance. 1700 simply is simply a tiny amount of food per day. It is OK to do for a few months, but not forever.
Well, in the past 2 weeks I had continuous crashes and regained 7 pounds, after being about 10 pounds away from shredded/6 pack! Thank God I have regained control with my understanding that BMR simply is not the correct baseline for judging calorie intake – before I crashed heavily, I raised my caloric intake to 1800 (above my BMR of 1700! I am 5:10 and was 154 pounds) and STILL lost weight. It was then I noticed something was very wrong with the diet based on BMR and started to do some research.
Instead of doing a 1300 calorie diet, I will now not go below 1500 unless I have way more than 15-20 pounds to lose. With a TDE of about 2350 (I have a job that keeps me moderately active, not sedentary), I will be running a deficit of about 850 calories. In 4 weeks I should lose about the 7 pounds that I regained, which should put me at around 154 (I am lean but far from shredded at that weight). I will then up my intake to 1700 for about another month. If I continued at 1500 I am sure I would crash again! That should bring me to around 150.
I will then re-asses. If I need a few more pounds off to get shredded, I will go a few weeks at 1800 till I get there (notice this is ABOVE my BMR which John says should result in no weight loss! I am quite convinced that at five ten and 150 pounds and moderate acivity – or even sedentary activity – I can lose weight eating 1800)
THEN when I get to maintenance, I will go to 2000-2300, depending on my activity level for that day, and monitor my weight carefully – my suspicions is that at 145-150 with a moderate level of activity, I will maintain just fine at that calorie level – which is several HUNDRED calories above my BMR and Johns suggestions!
March 31st, 2012 at 8:05 pm
I am not saying all this to bash John – I have learned a tremendous amount from him and admire much of the work that he has done.
It is just that the more I do this weight loss thing, the more I realize the challenge is to go low but not TOO low – you have to fine tweak. THAT is why it is so difficult for so many people. John has done a fine job countering the silly ideas in our culture about how low it is really OK to go – and that is valuable – but he has erred too far on the side of going too low for too long. People are simply setting themselves up for horrific crashes, as I discovered to my shock and dismay. I feel really disappointed that it was not better explained to me that doing that will lead to crashes – John has another post about how RMR and BMR are pretty much all you expend per day, and that is simply drastically false according to the literature – so I cannot help but feel that in this respect John is doing a disservice to his readers. Its Ok to go VERY low at first if you have lots to lose, but after a point it is counterproductive.
The basic point is – BMR is NOT a good baseline to measure calories by unless you have tons to lose and you are in the initial stages of your diet.
April 1st, 2012 at 9:33 pm
George –
I’m sorry about your experience and I hasten to point out that none of the people that I’ve worked with want shrink-wrapped abs. So, perhaps that alone would serve to explain that they didn’t suffer as you did.
HOWEVER, I do agree with John that figuring off of BMR is not unreasonable for all but those individuals who engage in prodigious amounts of activity. We’ve all been lied to. We really don’t need to eat as much as we do.
Further, although I do not personally recommend Very Low Calorie Diets for any of my clients, nonetheless, lots of people report success in following diets as low as 800 calories a day and sometimes lower.
And naturally none of these people continue that aggressive a calorie deficit interminably.
Conclusion: you had an unpleasant experience which should perhaps not be projected upon others.
April 1st, 2012 at 10:41 pm
And in fact, I reported last Fall that I had lost 12 pounds in 24 days. Certainly the majority of that was fluid but it did bring my abs out in stark relief.
I did this on about 1,200 calories a day, strength training twice a week and walking about five miles a day. That was one meal and one snack per day. Strength increased almost across the board. And little in the way of debilitating hunger pangs.
When I got to where I wanted I simply increased to around 1,800 calories a day to maintain. No rebound.
April 2nd, 2012 at 1:13 pm
I also had a negative experience with going too low. I lost a lot of weight over the course of 5-6 months, gradually getting more and more strict as I got into the groove of calorie restriction. Three meals a day, then two, and during the last month I was eating one meal, 1100-1300 calories per day. Then I fell off the wagon, and have regained the weight over the last year and a half. From 255 to 193, back up to 242. I just couldn’t sustain it, and my stomach hurt a lot. Some sort of digestive distress or something.
I wish I had known about the reverse taper concept back then (early to mid-2010,) but obviously ideas evolve and improve over time. I don’t blame anybody but myself. But if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been quite so aggressive, especially during the last month, and after the first 4-6 months, I would’ve upped my calorie intake to at least 1600-1800 calories per day. As a 5′ll”, 193 lb, 30 year old male, I’m sure that would’ve been low enough to lose the last 20+ pounds. But unfortunately I didn’t, and now I have another 65+ pounds to lose.
Instead, I went on a two week diet break. Unfortunately, I read about how periodic diet breaks can be useful, but it was the wrong idea for me, because once I took the break, I could never fully get back to what I was doing before. It was like my brain resisted it or something. Occasionally, I’ll do okay for a week or two, but nothing like how consistent and disciplined I was during those initial 5-6 months.
I never, ever got back on track. The diet break was a catastrophe, a controlled increase in calories would’ve been far better, and I would’ve had the discipline to do it. Now I don’t have the discipline to stick to a diet for more than four or five days (typically Monday morning to Friday night is the best I can do.) I know I’ll get it done, but it’s been a long, hard, frustrating road back to discipline and consistency.
Oh well. Live and learn.
April 2nd, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Excellent awareness and its particular beneficial. Appreciate your setting up this type of good effort.
April 3rd, 2012 at 2:09 pm
In fairness, I should point out that I probably employed reverse tapering instinctively. I was leaning out so rapidly that I did add some calories back in toward the end.
April 5th, 2012 at 12:44 am
@Dale
*HOWEVER, I do agree with John that figuring off of BMR is not unreasonable for all but those individuals who engage in prodigious amounts of activity. We’ve all been lied to. We really don’t need to eat as much as we do.*
I agree that we have been lied to about how much we have to eat, but every single thing I have read suggests that you must calculate daily expenditure by multiplying BMR by an activity factor – the Harris Benedict formula gives it at 1.2 for sedentary activity, and 1.375 for even moderate. Johns friend Brad Pilon uses this formula when calculating daily calorie requirements.
Now I realize that this formula is just an estimate, but John says elsewhere that a person pretty much burns at BMR for daily expenditure, which is simply completely, utterly false. I am sorry but there is no other way of saying that- even a sedentary person burns a few hundred calories more than BMR. BMR is what you spend while being COMPLETELY INACTIVE (i.e a coma).
To be perfectly honest, if you lift weights and do any other moderate activity, then 1800 calories is hardly *maintenance* for you, unless you are QUITE short and weigh extremely little. I cannot imagine how small and thin a man must be to have a *maintenance* of 1800! I am 5 foot 10, and with a weight of 153 my maintenance, while being sedentary, was about 2040 – that is without weight lifting! And I am at those stats a pretty small man for contemporary America. Maintaining at 1800 is simply mathematically impossible for all but the shortest and thinnest of men.
If you maintained at 1800 and are not exceptionally short and thin, you were almost certainly under-counting your caloric intake, which brings me to my next point -
Now, I support being scrupulously honest and clear about things. I can accept that it might make sense to tell people to calculate according to BMR because we *know* that everyone cheats and miscalculates calories anyways, so they need to be given an artificially low benchmark to counteract the cheating, but this is not being quite honest and not treating people quite like adults, however *effective* it might be as a prescription for action for most people.
And the truth is for most overweight people, its not really a problem. They will lose lots of fat with no real rebound if their goal is not having shredded abs. But for those of us with really ambitious goals, this kind of not-entirely-honest *information* can be very harmful,
And up to a point, it IS useful to counter the over-eat messages in our culture with under-eat messages – but only up to a point. Beyond that point, it becomes just as dishonest and just as potentially damaging. People will crash and not understand *why*, just as today people remain fat despite eating the way many mainstream health advisors suggest and do not understand *why*.
April 5th, 2012 at 12:49 am
Jordan D – you might want to eat at maintenance and do Pilons intermittent fasting.
Maintenance for you should be comfortably over 2,000 calories/day even if you are sedentary, and with exercise VERY comfortably above 2,000.
Then the *discipline* you need is only 1-2 days of fasting per week!
This way you dont have to have discipline to be in a caloric deficit 7 days per week, week after wekk – you can eat like 2,500 delicious/ ample/spacious calories per day, and only have *discipline* once or twice per week, depending on how fast you go.
I think mentally, this is where I am now.
April 5th, 2012 at 10:51 am
George, that’s a great idea, and I was thinking along those lines, as well. I want to try the “alternate day” approach, where you go very low on some days, and then eat at roughly maintenance the other days. I’d like to try going low on Mon/ Wed/ Fri, maybe around 1000-1200 calories per day, and then eat at maintenance, or even a little above maintenance, on the other days. This would also keep my weekends open, which is nice.
Also, at this point I’m okay with slower weight loss. Dieters can be very impatient, and that can backfire in a major way. I tend to lose weight very quickly, but then fall off the wagon and rebound. I’ve lost over 60 pounds in 5-6 months twice, but put back on about 50 pounds both times. 267 to 202, back to 255, to 193, back to 242. In the grand scheme of things, all that effort resulted in a pretty pathetic 25 pound weight loss over the course of several years!
So I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can finally accept going a bit slower, if it means a more sustainable weight loss. Dieting only a few days per week will be considerably slower than what I’ve done before, but if I don’t rebound this time, the weight loss will actually be much greater in the long run.
April 5th, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Jordan, that sounds like it has an excellent chance of working! Good luck!
I am pretty much in the same place mentally also. I just no longer have the mental discipline to maintain a heavy caloric deficit for 7 days a week, over several months. Just cant do it anymore
Especially not in America, where everyone is overweight. I find it much easier to stay motivated when I am in a country surrounded by thin people.
So SOME kind of caloric mix-up so that we are not in *discipline mode* 7 days per week but still achieve SOME kind of deficit over the entire week seems to be the way to go for guys in our mental state!
April 26th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Right there with you, Jordan. I lost 65 lbs. in about 8 months and then gained most of it back in the next 6. Right now I’m going low (1200 cals a day) to jump start fat loss, but will do high/low days in a few months, once I’m down .
Glad to hear about your experience with diet breaks, too. I was thinking about using them, but I have a feeling I would have a similar experience.