12/06/2025
There is so much misinformation out there about dieting and how to lose weight so let me try to be helpful. If you are over the age of, roughly, 45 and are still dieting like you did in high school I can almost guarantee you are using bad data. Unless you are 5 foot nothing and weight 105 pounds you need more than 1200 calories per day. For example at 58 and 5 foot 7 (67 inches) I weight about 145 pounds, and just to lay in a bed in a comfortable temperature room and do nothing I need 1270 calories to maintain my bodily functions and current weight. (Yes I know it's not realistic for a healthy adult to literally lay in bed without moving for 24 hours but one has to have a starting point)To maintain as a functioning adult I need to take in about 1450 or so if I am sedentary and doing a desk job, if I am more active then I need closer to 1700 and if I was a serious workout girl I could get away with closer to 2000 again this is to MAINTAIN weight.
So why do I bring this up? Two reasons, 1 we need to stop using the word diet in its current societal definition....a plan of eating one goes and and (Hopefully) loses the weight desired then goes off the plan to eat like they used to and most likely gain it back.... and then some. We need to start looking at LIFESTYLE PLAN instead so that we can safely and comfortably lose the weight in a manner that will allow us to keep it off long term while also remembering there will be holidays, vacations, wedding and all the other food centric celebrations we deal with. This means you look at your week and think well I have an office party, a dinner out with the spouse so I need to be a bit more careful in my choices the rest of the week so I can splurge a bit. Yes folks you can splurge and still maintain or lose weight. Which is the segway into reason 2, that 1270 calories I came up with in my example above wasn't just a random number, it is my basal metabolic rate calculation (BMR) and this is the number that helps govern your metabolism. If you eat less than this number on a consistent basis yes you will lose weight for a bit but then your body will rebel. It will think you are in a famine situation and start telling your hormones to slow down your metabolism so you dont lose your fat stores...... but wait I want to lose my fat stores that is why I am eating so little..... humans are evolutionary babies in the grand scheme and our internal working have not caught up to the fact we have grocery stores yet, we are still cavemen in that way and if you dont get your wooly mammoth this week and your clan doesn't eat AND your body doesn't slow down your fat burn you might die before you can get more food.
So what do we do. And I am going to throw out some hard truths that none of us want to hear. You need to track your intake for a few days and be honest with yourself and count EVERYTHING and in the correct servings sizes and amounts. Then you need to either use a tracker for your activities (notice i didn't say exercise) and see how many calories you burn in a day. To lose 1 pound per week your intake needs to be 3500 calories less per week than you are burning. You can break that down to 500 per day but it really is cumulative so weekly is fine. But Ms Monroe you just said that I need to be in a 500 calorie deficit every day and my intake is 1400 calories and I burn 1500 calories every day and my BMR is 1300 calories so a 500 calorie deficit puts me below that. Yes, yes it does, so you need to increase your activities.....(that hard truth) .this doesn't always mean you need to hit the gym or start jogging etc. But you do need to move more so make it fun. Put on some crazy music and vacuum like Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire, or take up salsa dancing, or find a cool trail and go hiking (weather permitting of course) go outside with the kids and build a huge snowman, take up chair yoga. There are so many ways to move your body that aren't a drudge.
By the way this goes even if you are taking a GLP-1 medication, as there (as far as we can tell) not an inherent way of just making the body lose weight, yes it does regulate the hormones and appetite but it doesn't stimulate the metabolism like phentermine does. So while the medication helps you still need to do some work to meet it half way.
As always if you're in one of the states I am licensed in (Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon or South Dakota and want more information and medication help to lose weight please go to pushhealth.com and use pmonroe as the provider code and I would be happy to help.
