Photo: Julia Volk

Is 1200 calories a day starvation?

Yes, for most of us, a 1200 calorie diet is a starvation diet.

lisakilgour.com - 1200-Cal is a Starvation Diet - Lisa Kilgour, Nutritionist

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Recently, I hosted my first room inside the new social media app Clubhouse (I'm @lisakilgour if you're on it too :) and one of the listeners asked a great question: "How many calories should I be eating in a day? Is it 1200? 1500? Even 1200 calories feels like a lot to me some days."

Tell me, what’s your relationship with 1200-calorie diets?

Does this seem reasonable to you? Or too abstract to visualize?

Have you tried it in the past? How did you feel?

What feelings come up when you think of a 1200 calorie diet? Tap into what your body thinks about this way of eating. The truth is – 1200 calories is WAY too low for the average human body to function properly. Way way way waaaaaaaay too low. But – almost every diet & meal plan uses this number as the magic weight loss number. It’s so common that many people feel that 1200 calories is something to strive for every day. That 1200 calories are the MOST they should eat in a day. In reality, your body needs at least 1200 calories to function properly if all you did was sit on the couch and watch TV. If you, say, walked to the kitchen and prepared a meal, then you’d need to eat more to deal with that energy output. Add a walk around the block or a trip to the gym and now your body thinks you’re starving. Yes, for most of us, a 1200 calorie diet is a starvation diet. So, where did this magic weight loss number come from? This was first proposed in 1920 by Dr. Lulu Peters, who recommended that every woman count every morsel of food she eats and to eat no more than 1200 calories.

This came from 1920. And countless health experts followed suit.

This means your grandmother, mother, and maybe even your great-grandmother lived under this terrible dieting “rule”. No wonder why it’s so ingrained into our collective psyche. New clients often show me calorie counting charts because they’re trying to lose weight and they don’t understand why the scale isn’t moving. They bring them to me for help and advice. And, on pretty much every single one of them, the most they’ve eaten in a day is 1200 calories. It always breaks my heart. This is a chart of a very determined person who is feeling hungry most of the day in the hopes that the scale will change. They’re doing what they were told to do perfectly, but it’s not working.

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Sometimes, at first, you will lose weight on this very low-calorie diet…until your body decides enough is enough and slooooows your metabolism down so you’re not starving anymore. At that point, your weight plateaus and you might find it very easy to gain that weight back. Your body won. It didn’t like starving, so it rejigged its energy output to work under this low cal regime. The dieting industry has been around for 200+ years and if you take a look at all of the diets at once, you’ll see how ridiculous they are. Health experts have told us:

To eat only rice, potatoes, and vinegar

That ladies should never eat in public unless it’s lobster salad & champagne (yes, this was an actual recommendation…and yes, it was by a man)

To only eat cabbage soup

To trade potatoes for bacon, and bread for fried chicken

To eat bars, shakes, and other expensive supplements instead of cooking real food When you look at all of these diets all at once, it’s easy to spot (and, frankly, mock) a fad diet. But when you’re desperate to lose weight and/or feel better, it can be much harder to steer clear of the latest shiny new fad diet when it promises such an easy “solution”. There’s a much better way – let your body guide you. No counting or starving, just eating whole food that you ENJOY. THIS is Undieting. This is real life healthy eating. This is heavenly <3. It’s the solution for slow but permanent weight loss. Click here to read about the 5 hallmarks of a fad diet. Remember them and use them to say a big NO the next time a new fad diet comes to town <3.

Xo Lisa

P.S. I dive deeper into fad diets and many other topics in my new book, Undieting <3

lisakilgour.com - 1200-Cal is a Starvation Diet - Lisa Kilgour, Nutritionist

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