The Reality of Low-Calorie Dieting

My dog just walked in But yeah I think we talked at program design, we talked about this where, you know, you have people who they've seen other people in the industry thinking they need to eat 30,000 calories a day and get lean. That's not how this works. Like if you're doing, if you're training for Tour de France, yeah, cool, you eat 3,000 calories. Most people aren't active enough that need high levels of calories. We're now told that you shouldn't diet on 1200 calories. Well, what if that's the what if that's the amount of calories that makes you lose weight? Like there's a lot of there's a lot of blanket statements in the industry that just simply aren't true. You know, you have people that have people who will be resistant to losing weight. Some people have to diet harder than others. Some people have women who have Hashimoto's. They have to diet harder. that women who have to eat 1100 calories, they're 80, 90 kilos at the 1100 calories to lose weight. They eat 1400 to gain weight. So there's a lot of things that go on with that, that, you know, there's a lot of a lot of misconception and confusion in the industry. I love that because you remind me of something I said way back, which will introduce our next topic. But in what you just said, I love how you put things in place and how things will pan out. but the thing is it is predictable if you're not up and down all the time if you're not questioning everything you do if you're actually giving the level of commitment and effort that we established at the get-go but if you're trying to shortcut the process you make it harder for yourself and a saying that you put up that i screenshotted is you need to match your expectations to your level of commitment and it's not that it's bad if you keep going through these periods of up and down because maybe there's a lot of limiting beliefs and trauma in quotation marks to try to work through which is something that I find with a lot of my girls it's normal and it's okay working through that is how you actually make your results permanent but you also need to stop trying to shortcut your way there you need to stop questioning how long it's taking this is what's going to make it stick but don't what don't expect seven year results in a one month time frame so leading into the next topic yeah this whole like 1100 1200 calorie thing and we were talking before about how a calorie deficit on paper doesn't mean it's a calorie deficit in your body and i think also bringing in that trauma element because you're really good on bringing that into how that can kind of skew our results and how some people may need to go lower than normal calories yeah oh 100 and the thing is like we we use uh monitoring of calories for in order to keep some type of level of accuracy but it's not it's not 100 accurate so there's a lot of things you have to look at where, like, I'll give you an example. So former client of mine's eating 1500 calories a day. I've done a DEXA, we're looking at pictures, maybe body fat tests. I have a pretty good idea of her body fat percentage and her fat-free mass percentage. So cool. We can do a BMR for this. Let's use catch McArdle. We can get a fairly close idea of what her BMR is. And then I can look at, You know, adding 20 percent for neat and thermic effect and then adding in a little bit for her exercise activity. And then, cool, we can take a deficit. So fifteen hundred calories is the deficit. She weighs one hundred twenty five pounds or so. So you're talking about someone who, you know, weighs 50, 56 kilos, 56 kilos with under 40 kilos of fat free mass. You calculate that out. You know, BMR is not that high and the TDE is not that high. If this person wants to lose weight, well, we're going to have to diet. It's just the unfortunate part of not having a lot of muscle mass and being a really small woman and not having a lot of exercise, like a lot of high output exercise. That person is going to have to eat a little bit less. So we're going to have to knock off a little bit more calories than they want. So let's say, you know, TDEE sitting at about eighteen hundred, put on about fifteen hundred calories. Now, here's the problem with women and being precise and being consistent and having patience. That level of deficit is not a huge deficit, right? So that's going to equal maybe 280 grams of fat loss a week, right? Now, if you have a low number like that, there's not a lot of wiggle room for making mistakes on your tracking. There's also not a lot of wiggle room on mistakes you may be making that you don't know you're making.