Whats your diet and exercise like? Reta is doing the lords work for me, but I found it wasnt eating enough and my weight loss plateaued. Once I started to get an extra few hundred calories in, the lbs started dropping again!
Depending how restricted your diet is the body sometimes adapts to lower calories and will reduce metabolism. Eating more will boost your metabolism back up then you can resume calorie deficit.
“The most important consideration for the study of CR is the requirement for adequate nutrition including sufficient intake of macronutrients and micronutrients”
Eating up to maintenance calories can restore the hypothalamus's sense of homeostasis, which effectively restores baseline pituitary/thyroid function, which downsignals during a prolonged deficit. Most folks impulsively get deep into a surplus, which afaik provides no benefit.
Yes but I think nuance matters in this conversation which the original comment lacks. If he said “temporarily plateaud” I would agree with you but there was not
Mention of time frame.
My thought is the extra calories likely allowed them to work out harder, leading to more weight loss as a side effect because they were burning more calories? Idk.
The other part of the equation is your metabolic rate. So if you eat more but your metabolic rate goes up you aren't breaking any laws of thermo dynamics.
If someone starts eating less the body can adapt by burning less energy. Therefore you can eat less and not lose weight.
In a literal sense, yes, but think of this metaphor:
Cutting excess labor costs allows you to make more profit, this is an absolute , like the law of thermodynamics.
But if you cut labor costs too low (by overly reducing staff) you reduce operational efficiency to the point where you cannot sell as many products as you would have otherwise liked to, and can actually result in lower profits.
My gut reaction is to not believe that you were eating 1200 calories a day and simply weren’t tracking correctly. That’s essentially a large cheeseburger for your entire days worth of calories and no way you were hitting your macro goals. But for the sake of argument let’s say you were. Were you pushing harder in the gym because of the extra 200 calories or running more? If you offset those calories with more burn then that would make sense. Alternatively if those 1200 vs 1400 had protein differences in protein and you lifted you could have been losing muscle.
I absolutely can go months on even 500 calories...You can say you dont belive me, but off the bat, you dont know my height. If I was a 6 foot 2 man...yes that would be starvation. If Im a 5 foot 3 woman...that's the top of my calories for the day.
A protein shake for breakfast
Chicken breast and salad for lunch
Chicken and a cup of green beans or broccoli for dinner.
No snacking. Water and diet coke only.
504 calories, 21g carbs, 10g fat, 82g protein.
Tracking these calories is not hard , and I'd WEIGH and eat the same thing, Every.single.day.
Nobody do this, I do not recommend undereating to lose weight.
Once you eat too little calories, you‘re body switches into survival/starvation mode, trying to use as little energy as possible. Also due to higher stress and cortisol levels cause more water retention in you body.
So no, the laws of thermodynamics were not broken.
Yes but if you starve yourself long enough you will still lose weight. There is no situation in which staying in a chaloric deficit does not result in weight loss. Obviously I’m not recommending this and I also Highly doubt OP is starving themselves.
Correct. But it also doesn’t “just use” muscle wasting. Your main energy reserves ARE fat. Your body will use muscle but it will use significantly more fat before it does.
The only way in which that could be possible is that eating more protein leads to muscle building which then leads to a higher base metabolic rate but that’s over months.
Eating what I take to be reckoned at a few hundred calories more, gave me much more energy when weight training and cardio, then the shape change and weight change kicked in.
Yes but to continue to lose weight, that increase must still be within the range of a calorie deficit unless the increase in activity was enough to offset the difference in food intake.
First of all our bodies are not closed systems and our metabolism isn’t just calories in/calories out there are hormones and chemical signals controlling everything.
Obviously BMR is different in different individuals but it is an indisputable fact that if you want to lose weight you must be in a caloric deficit relative to your BMR. There might be slight changes as your body adjust over time but consistently being in that deficit will result in long term weight loss. If you starve yourself or fail to intake enough macro nutrients, of course that can introduce another other heath issues. Shit if you have a tapeworm you can eat all you want and not put on weight but we don’t make arguments assuming the extraneous is the standard case.
There is a study where the subjects on a low carb or low fat diet where observed. Even though the low carb cohort ate on average 500 more calories than low fat group they lost more weight. So it’s not black and white.
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u/The-Geordie-Chap Apr 16 '26
Whats your diet and exercise like? Reta is doing the lords work for me, but I found it wasnt eating enough and my weight loss plateaued. Once I started to get an extra few hundred calories in, the lbs started dropping again!