Phoenyx
Step away from the cake..
For me personally. If I don't stay on the higher end of my calories, I get hungry but am not very good at reading & responding to my body signals so I end up bingeing. I'm now trying to push myself to eat more to prevent this happening.
One way of doing it is to stick to a slightly higher limit for a bit, and see if it's working.
To be honest, ive done a lot of reading on this, and whilst calories matter, your body is not a calculator, and one extra biscuit a day will not result in a massive weight gain - for example, it's estimated that on average, we consume an extra 500 calories more a day than our grandparents did. If you consume an extra 500 cals a day over the 30 (or whatever!) years you've been alive, and one lb of fat is 3500 stored calories, you'd be over 900lbs heavier! Which obviously isn't so...
So whilst calories count, what you do with them is more important - the calories only end up as fat if you store them. Which is why we all know skinny people who eat loads and don't put on weight - they just don't store it as easily. There are lots of things that affect this storage:
- body composition (muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue even if you're not moving about)
- macronutrient composition of what youre eating (some people store carbs more easily than others, for example, and my ex husband just can't store carbs as fat easily which is why he eats huge bowls of pasta and is only 9 stone!!!)
- how often you're eating - when you eat, particularly sugars or simple carbs, you release insulin, and whilst there is insulin in your bloodstream, you cannot burn fat (insulin puts glucose into fat cells, and other places, and whilst that's happening, you can't also release it from your fat cells). So eating too frequently can be detrimental to fat burning because you are constantly releasing insulin
- type of exercise you're doing - high intensity releases hormones which help with muscle growth and appetite control
There's probably more but I cant think if them of the top of my head.
One key theory is that your body, unless you force it, will try and keep your body in stable conditions (homeostasis), including your body weight. So it will resist losing weight, but it will also resist gaining weight and try and stick to certain set points (which is why, despite eating like a pig most of my life, I'm not 20 stone overweight, just 5...its also why If youve lost 5lbs because of a stomach but, you seem to put exactly the same amount of weight back on) Apparently your body does this through adjusting your metabolism. So what you need to do is try and reset your set point. It makes sense but ive probably oversimplified it.
Anyway, since understanding more of this, I've been a lot more successful in losing weight, but I've also had to cut a lot of processed food out of my diet. So worth it though!
There's a whole stack of resources I can recommend for anyone who wants further info....
Hope this is helpful to someone!
One way of doing it is to stick to a slightly higher limit for a bit, and see if it's working.
To be honest, ive done a lot of reading on this, and whilst calories matter, your body is not a calculator, and one extra biscuit a day will not result in a massive weight gain - for example, it's estimated that on average, we consume an extra 500 calories more a day than our grandparents did. If you consume an extra 500 cals a day over the 30 (or whatever!) years you've been alive, and one lb of fat is 3500 stored calories, you'd be over 900lbs heavier! Which obviously isn't so...
So whilst calories count, what you do with them is more important - the calories only end up as fat if you store them. Which is why we all know skinny people who eat loads and don't put on weight - they just don't store it as easily. There are lots of things that affect this storage:
- body composition (muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue even if you're not moving about)
- macronutrient composition of what youre eating (some people store carbs more easily than others, for example, and my ex husband just can't store carbs as fat easily which is why he eats huge bowls of pasta and is only 9 stone!!!)
- how often you're eating - when you eat, particularly sugars or simple carbs, you release insulin, and whilst there is insulin in your bloodstream, you cannot burn fat (insulin puts glucose into fat cells, and other places, and whilst that's happening, you can't also release it from your fat cells). So eating too frequently can be detrimental to fat burning because you are constantly releasing insulin
- type of exercise you're doing - high intensity releases hormones which help with muscle growth and appetite control
There's probably more but I cant think if them of the top of my head.
One key theory is that your body, unless you force it, will try and keep your body in stable conditions (homeostasis), including your body weight. So it will resist losing weight, but it will also resist gaining weight and try and stick to certain set points (which is why, despite eating like a pig most of my life, I'm not 20 stone overweight, just 5...its also why If youve lost 5lbs because of a stomach but, you seem to put exactly the same amount of weight back on) Apparently your body does this through adjusting your metabolism. So what you need to do is try and reset your set point. It makes sense but ive probably oversimplified it.
Anyway, since understanding more of this, I've been a lot more successful in losing weight, but I've also had to cut a lot of processed food out of my diet. So worth it though!
There's a whole stack of resources I can recommend for anyone who wants further info....
Hope this is helpful to someone!
I feel huge and horrible, and moody :/ if they show a loss I feel great. 
