cheaperseeker said:
deleted.user.16 said:
Whenever someone posts about the scale not moving, the response is always the same: eat more. More food, more carbs, pile on more of everything. That advice is completely backwards.
I'm not trying to come off harsh, but that's simply not how any of this functions. What actually helps is more salad, more soup, more veggies, more movement, and fewer calories. Skipping a meal is fine, it won't hurt you. If you'd rather not skip, that's your call, but a healthy overweight adult won't suffer any damage from it. Pushing yourself to eat 3 meals daily when you have no appetite goes against every bit of common sense.
To shed pounds and remain in good health, you definitely
must take in a set number of calories.
A few main takeaways from the piece linked below (and plenty of other credible articles and studies echo the same idea):
When calories are cut too drastically, the body undergoes metabolic adaptation — it responds by reducing its metabolic rate and holding onto energy, which is what brings weight loss to a halt. On top of that, such a pattern can cause muscle wasting, overwhelming tiredness, stronger food cravings, and disrupted hormones, all of which make keeping weight off over the long term much tougher.~
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Why Eating Too Little Can Stall Weight Loss
Undereating doesn't accelerate fat loss — it actually decelerates it. Your metabolism requires fuel to work properly, and proper nutrition is what makes lasting progress possible. More details are available in this article.
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www.weightkidneycare.com
I have not come across any trustworthy research showing that eating in a smaller deficit would lead to greater fat loss. Decades of studies have measured real energy expenditure, and the arithmetic consistently checks out.
The usual reason CICO appears to break down is that two things get overlooked: the drop in energy expenditure that follows weight loss, and how bad most people are at estimating their own intake. That means it is possible to stop losing on a fairly low daily intake once you are in that post-weight-loss state (which might never go away), but I have not seen anything proving that eating more would restart loss in that situation.
A very aggressive deficit producing fast weight loss can certainly bring problems. The clearest ones are dizziness, actually passing out, fatigue, exhaustion, electrolyte disturbances, and more gallstones. So dropping weight extremely quickly can harm your health.
After weight is lost, energy expenditure falls for 3 reasons. First, the fat and lean tissue that is gone no longer burns any calories, and that effect can be big when a lot of weight has come off. Second, moving a lighter body takes less energy — I am not sure how large this is in practice, but logically it has to occur. Third, the body reduces energy expenditure as it tries to hold on to energy and/or fat stores. My view is that this metabolic adaptation to low intake depends more on how much time has passed and how much total weight was lost than on how low the calories actually are.
When I began at 145 kg, before any GLP medication, I was eating 1600-1800 kcal a day, barely moving at all, and steadily lost 6kg per month until I reached roughly 90 kg — so about 9 months or so. After that, loss gradually but steadily dropped to zero across the following several months with no change in how much I ate, and it stopped at 75 kg. It stayed there for around a year or so, until I began ozempic, and it remained there for another year, all on the same intake.
This huge shift in energy expenditure did not need extreme deficits; it happened at an intake exactly matching what was needed to hold that lost weight.
Keeping weight off is brutally hard. The low energy expenditure plus the greater hunger that comes with massive weight loss left me hungry most of the time, even though my diet was built to blunt hunger — very high protein at 40-50% of calories, low calorie density, and complete avoidance of high calorie density / highly rewarding / high glycaemic index foods. That is precisely the trap that makes long term weight loss almost unattainable, yet reaching it does not demand an extra-low intake, only weight loss and possibly the duration of low intake. Fortunately GLP drugs curb hunger, so hopefully holding on to that lost weight will be achievable
