This will save you heart ache and time!

Are you asking yourself “How many Calories is Too Little?” or “How low can I go to lose this weight as fast as possible?” 

The diet industry wants us to believe that to lose weight we have to eat 1200 calories…

This myth has kept me from losing weight for a long time.  Could I eat only 1200 calories… sure. 

But I was starving, and being that hungry all the time lead me to eat out of control.  

It made me feel like I was a horrible person because I couldn’t just suck it up and deal with the hunger.

I felt like it was all my fault that I couldn’t lose weight because I couldn’t control my appetite. 

This meant, I was doomed to be fat for the rest of my life. There was no way out…

I was wrong!  I did figure it out, but I had to do it different.

How Many Calories is Too Little?: Don’t shoot for the lowest

When your trying to lose 100 pounds you try to overhaul everything.  This leads to start and stop.

You fall into the All-Or-Nothing trap (The Star Wars geek in me sees the squid saying… “It’s a trap!”)  and try to control your food….

Guess what?

This doesn’t work!

So, where do you start?

The first thing to do is to honestly track what you eat now!

NOTICE-honestly…

This is IMPORTANT!

Why am I stressing this point?

Because I was you!

We like to pretend we aren’t eating as much as we are! So head over to http://MyFitnessPal.com and create an account.

Download the app to your phone and start tracking for one week. Don’t change what you eat just track it.  If your eating at home weigh your food.

What’s next?

Now you have a good idea of what your eating.  The diet industry would tell you to deduct 1000 calories from your current day.

DON’T do this!

This will lead to major hunger and then you’ll miss all your foods, and you’ll start the circle of I really want that, you’ll eat the treat, get mad at yourself and then the cycle will just repeat until you give up.

Instead….

Just deduct 250 calories to start.  Seriously… don’t do more than this.

Focus on adding fruits and veggies this will fill you up faster and you’ll eat less.  

If you like pasta, add a ton of veggies to 1 cup of pasta.  Don’t tell yourself you CAN’T have pasta, just make pasta a healthier option.

How Many Calories is Too Little?: Why Cutting Calories LOW is a Recipe For Disaster

If after a lifetime overhauling your diet 100% and aiming for perfection has left you feeling dissatisfied, lost and struggling.  Particularly if you use food as an emotional tool. Then keep reading!

As you probably know by now, I was obese from childhood through my early 40’s.  I used food as a coping tool. It solved all my problems, and it’s how I coped with everything.

Sooo, massively cutting calories meant I had to cope with these feelings in some other way.  Usually anger, sometimes depression…

When I couldn’t handle the low calories anymore the anger would turn on myself. And I would take it out on me by eating everything I could get my hands on.  It’s a miserable place to live.

Weight loss is more than cutting calories and moving more when your ability to deal with life and emotions is tied to the food you eat.

I started asking myself “How Many Calories is Too Little?” But in a completely different context.  I wanted to know what I could handle. How could I subtract a little and still cope with life… 

Taking the change slow, is how you start to learn to change the mindset and habits you have so you can keep the weight loss consistent.

​How Many Calories is Too Little?: But Michelle I want the weight off NOW! So I will cut my calories low to get there….

Let me share…. We all want it off now! But my experience is this…

One of two things happen…

Possibility one, you do reach your goal!  Yay you! But then life happens, and you haven’t learned to cope with your emotions and you haven’t setup habits to support your new life. So guess what?  It all comes back, or most of it… even worse you gain more.

I did this twice… Losing 100 pounds in 4 months.  Gained it back in 6 and then gained more over the next 10 years while trying to lose again.

Second time I lost 100 pounds in 6 months… gained it back in a year and then spent the next 10 years trying to take it off again, while gaining even more.

Possibility two, you never reach your goal. You go into a dieting cycle of 10-20 pounds off and you keep cycling because you haven’t learned to cope with life without using food.

Emotional eating sucks! I lump stress eating, happy eating, sad eating, no control eating all under this umbrella…

All of these are a sign that we use food to cope with the ups and downs of life. Life isn’t going to stop being a rollercoaster… so to lose 100+ pounds we have to learn how to cope with the highs and lows without using food to cope.

This is the reason I had to go slow the final time I lost 100 pounds.  And why I coach women to start slow and learn how to deal. It may start off slow, but you can cut more calories more as you learn.

Let’s Close This Out…

Losing 100+ pounds is a life changing event!  In the last 5 years I have experienced more life than I did in 42 years.  But I did it because I learned to change my mindset and my habits as I was losing weight.

I tell my coaching clients, weight loss isn’t going to fix your relationships, your view of yourself or the house you live in.  So if you’ve started asking yourself “How many calories is too little?” This is a great step one, step two is if I cut my calories a little how will I cope with life without that food.