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Old 08-25-2008   #4 (permalink)
Rhone
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Baltimore, MD
Posts: 265
Rhone is on a distinguished road
It's often recommended that men shouldn't go under 1800 cals as a minimum and that women shouldn't go under 1200.

I wouldn't recommend going as high as 2000 for you (for maintenance, maybe, but not for weight loss), though; I think around 1300-1500 would be a good target. In case you've hit a plateau, I would seriously consider going up to 2000 or so just for a week (and cutting out the extra cardio for that week), then drop back down to 1300-1500 and add the extra cardio back in. That should kick your fat loss back into gear.

Also, is it possible for you to schedule your extra cardio for a different time of day than your weight workouts? I guess that might be hard if you're doing it all at a gym, but I think it would benefit you. You get a bit of a metabolism boost for a little bit after a workout, but later on your metabolism will drop from the calorie deficit (especially if you're relatively sedentary in that time-frame). By splitting up the weight workout and the extra cardio, you could get two boosts instead of one.

Regarding anorexics: When the body loses fat too fast it throws out all sorts of hormones to try to hold onto it (and store more of it like crazy when possible), but there's only so much it can hold onto when you're eating next to nothing. If you're eating less than what your body absolutely requires for survival, then your body will be pretty much forced to cannibalize itself--but it will eat away at muscle just as rapidly as fat. That, of course, is plain to see from the very depressing skin-covered skeleton appearance that most anorexics end up with.
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