Apparently, 800 Calories Wasn’t a Sustainable Nutrition Plan

For a while, I was really good at losing weight.

I was also really good at barely eating.

Some days I was somewhere between 800 and 1,000 calories.

And here’s the inconvenient part:

It worked.

I lost a substantial amount of weight.

The problem arrived when I tried to live like a normal human again.

I’d eat more normally and gain it back — substantially. Eventually, eating itself started to scare me.

Food came with guilt.

Eating more came with shame.

Eating less felt like success.

That’s a pretty shitty relationship to have with something you need to survive.

Then I hired a trainer

I eventually had fitness goals I couldn’t reach on my own, so I hired someone who knew significantly more than I did.

When he asked how much I was eating and I told him, he damn near keeled over.

Then he told me I needed to eat more.

Fantastic. The one thing I was terrified to do.

My lived experience had taught me a very convincing lesson:

Eat less → lose weight.

Eat more → gain it back.

Now I was supposed to trust this person telling me to do the opposite?

I’d hired him because what I knew had taken me as far as it could. So I trusted him.

Losing weight and building a body aren’t the same goal

Over time, my calories went up. I started resistance training with purpose. Protein became a serious part of my nutrition.

Eventually I was eating around 1,600 calories a day — an amount that once would have terrified me.

Today I eat more than 2,000 calories a day. And I’m still losing fat.

Read that again from the perspective of someone who once believed 800 calories was the only thing standing between her and gaining weight.

That is not because eating more magically causes fat loss. It doesn’t. Energy balance still matters.

It’s because I finally learned the goal was never to eat the least amount of food I could survive on.

The goal was to give my body enough to train, recover, build and keep muscle — and to use an approach I could actually live with while working toward body-composition goals.

Over that earlier period, my measurements showed something I still find pretty remarkable:

20 pounds of fat lost.

20 pounds of muscle gained.

That’s my result, not a promise of what someone else will experience.

It changed the way I thought about food.

Your body actually needs fuel

There’s a larger principle here, and some science behind it.

When we lose weight, energy needs drop in part because there is simply less body to maintain. Restriction and weight loss can also produce an extra drop in energy expenditure known as adaptive thermogenesis. The size of that effect varies a lot between people. Better-designed studies often find a smaller or less durable effect, especially after weight has stabilized. That’s one reason I don’t describe what happened to me as having “broken” or “destroyed” my metabolism.¹

There’s another problem with chasing the lowest possible calorie number: weight loss is not automatically fat loss. Without the right training and nutrition, lean tissue can leave too.

Resistance training gives your body a reason to keep and build muscle. Protein supplies the amino acids that process needs. A large meta-analysis of resistance-training studies found that higher protein intake improved gains in muscle mass and strength, with the average benefit leveling off around 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day in the populations studied.²

Energy matters too. Building tissue, recovering from training, running ordinary physiology, and getting through a day all cost fuel.

Food isn’t just what’s standing between you and a smaller number on the scale.

It’s also what you’re asking your body to build with.

A smaller number isn’t the whole story

My old approach didn’t fail because it couldn’t make me smaller.

It obviously could.

It failed because I couldn’t live there.

Somewhere along the way I’d started treating food like the enemy instead of fuel.

That does not mean the answer is simply eat more. If fat loss is the goal, an energy deficit still matters.

The lesson for me was different:

The goal isn’t to eat as little as possible. It’s to eat appropriately for what you’re asking your body to do.

Today I’m trying to build muscle. I have physique goals. I care about composition.

So I eat accordingly.

I train accordingly.

And protein has become a rather ridiculous part of my life.

This is part of why we built AION Sculpts

Nutrition should not be reduced to eat less and move more.

Someone trying to lose fat while keeping muscle does not need the same plan as someone trying to gain muscle, improve performance, or just eat like a person again.

Your goals matter.

Your training matters.

The foods you’ll actually eat matter.

Your real life definitely matters.

That’s part of what AION is built around. He adapts nutrition to the person — goals, training, schedule, the foods they will eat — instead of treating the lowest calorie number as an achievement.

Under-fueling is not a badge of honor.

I had to learn that one the hard way.

Which brings me to egg whites.

At one point during this stretch, someone asked how many egg whites I was eating.

I proudly answered:

“Three tablespoons.”

She laughed.

Apparently I was playing with the big dogs now.

We measure egg whites in cups.

These days I drink two of them.

We’ll talk about that next. It’s going to require some explanation.

And frozen berries.