Calorie Intake To Lose Weight As Fast As Possible

Contrary to the typical advice of well-meaning but misinformed fitness experts, calorie intake to lose weight doesn't have to be always small or moderate, and in some circumstances a so called starving diet may be a better option for many people.

In fact, your calorie guidelines should be modified according to how much body fat you carry, activity levels, and how motivated you are – if you don't see any reason to get in shape, maybe you shouldn't even start dieting. Therefore, grossly overweight folks can set a small calorie intake to lose weight faster.

In other words, if you are a fat ass (you know who you are), there is no need to worry too much about messing up your metabolism because your hypothalamus is permanently informed of your body weight.

And your hormonal response is different when you are at, let's say, 40% body fat or 10%. What you most need at this point is results to fuel your motivation. There is no need to make a problem out of nothing.

For this reason, a tiny calorie deficit may lead to frustration because you wouldn't notice any change in the short term – it may take years until you would finally reach your goal. Eventually, you will get discouraged, give up, and accept your condition as a fatality.

Most people think that drastically reducing calories would make them feel ravenously hungry, which is not entirely accurate. Appetite is regulated physiologically by a bunch of hormones, whose levels are determined mainly by your fat percentage.

An exception is ghrelin, which appears to be a key hormone in initiating the hunger that occurs between meals. In other words, if you normally eat at a certain time, ghrelin secretion peaks prior to that specific time, stimulating your appetite.

Consequently, if you decrease your meal frequency (which is a good idea when reducing calorie intake to lose weight fast), you will still feel hungry prior to your previous meal times.

However, this shouldn't be an inconvenient because ghrelin will adapt to whatever meal frequency within about two weeks.

My point is that for obese people, appetite or hunger is determined mainly by psychological factors, and setting up a low calorie intake to lose weight rapidly may be exactly what they need.

An ambitious diet plan would provide about 800 calories, which include lots of lean protein (about 1.0 g/lb of lean mass or target body weight), plenty of vegetables, and a bit of omega-3 fatty acids – you should also throw a multivitamin supplement into this mix.

In other words, the essential nutrients that allow you to survive optimally, while avoiding any deficiency or substantial loss of lean body mass.

Nevertheless, this fast weight loss can't go on forever, and eventually you'll reach a point when calories should be increased because your maximal deficit would now change in proportion to your fat stores. So how do you know when this threshold is reached?

According to an interesting paper, “a limit on the maximum energy transfer rate from the human fat store in hypophagia is deduced from experimental data of underfed subjects maintaining moderate activity levels and is found to have a value of (290+/-25) kJ/kg d.” (This represents roughly 69.31 calories per kg of fat or 31.4 calories per pound of fat.)

It's important to note that the subjects in this study were doing only moderate exercise, and therefore this value may be inflated for folks who train intensely. But if you are severely overweight, I doubt that you have the ability to train even moderately, so this value should be pretty accurate.

In this case, you can safely estimate your body fat percentage with the Body Mass Index (BMI) method, which is very convenient. Also, your energy intake for maintenance should be about 15 calories per pound of body weight.

For example, a 300 pound man at 40% body fat would have 120 pounds of fat, enough to provide roughly 3768 calories of energy over the course of the day. His maintenance would be somewhere around 4500 calories.

A calorie deficit of 3768 would be inappropriate in this case because an intake of 732 calories would barely cover his protein requirement. As mentioned, when reducing calorie intake to lose weight fast, an obese person should consume about 1.0 g/lb (of LBM or target body weight) of lean protein.

Therefore, in this case we get 180g, which equals 720 calories from protein. After adding some veggies and essential fats, this person should consume slightly above the recommended minimum of 800 calories.

As a final caveat, the paper above should be used only by obese folks (who can't train hard) to get an idea about their minimal calorie intake to lose weight as fast as possible.

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