It usually goes like this: we have zero self-control over ourselves when it comes to eating for months or even years, reaping the impact of that along the way until we come to the day when we decide to have 150% more control and live on a fifth of our yesterday’s caloric intake.
For most people, this is what a 1000-calories diet is. Too few calories for your body to function properly, let alone be able to burn fat.
Let’s discuss this diet, who it is good for, what its dangers are, and what to do if it’s not working for you.
Who Is The 1000-Calorie Diet Good For?
For most people, a 1000-calories diet leads to a very high caloric deficit. It can only be good for those who know their caloric maintenance to be this small, in addition to those who have built up metabolic flexibility and have taken their time to get there without experiencing side effects.
The Dangers of the 1000-Calorie Diet
The dangers we’ll discuss today apply to the larger group of people who shouldn’t be doing this diet, not the two exceptions we’ve established earlier.
1- Micronutrient Deficiencies Leading To Endless Issues
When you’re only consuming 1000 calories per day, chances are you’ll skip on some food groups. When you do that, so many things can go wrong. There are so many micronutrients our body needs on a daily basis, that we struggle to get enough of even when we’re eating more than double that amount of calories.
Micronutrients are basically vitamins and minerals.
If you go low on fat, you’ll not be getting the fat-soluble vitamins: K, E, D, and A.
If you skip vegetables and fruits, you’re likely going to miss on the other group of vitamins that include the B Vitamin group.
As for minerals, there is sodium, potassium magnesium, iron, phosphor,.. too many to count.
Arguably, the most important when it comes to weight loss are the first three. Sodium deficiency will make you feel physically weak and tired. Potassium deficiency will cause you to plateau in your weight loss journey. And magnesium can leave you with painful muscle cramps.
2- Macronutrient Deficiencies Making You Look Weaker and Older
Macronutrients are divided into fat, protein, and carbs.
If we’re not consuming enough fat, we’ll be missing the fat-soluble vitamins, as discussed earlier.
Neglecting to get enough protein will lead to muscle loss, which will lead to feeling weaker and older. And it will show. This is very common in those who try to lose weight by only paying attention to their calorie intake.
Lack of fiber might cause you some digestional problems, as it is one of the most crucial aspects of a healthy bowel movement.
3- Slower Metabolism That Does The Exact Opposite Of Your Goal
Going this low on calories can cause your body to start getting defensive.
There’s a mode our bodies can tap into that we call survival mode, or “Desert mode”, where our body sees this low food intake and just assumes we’re in the middle of nowhere with no food in sight, and it starts trying so hard to only use energy when it is absolutely critical to do so.
It’s trying to keep us alive.
This is a very slow state of metabolism, which is the opposite of what you would hope for, for ultimate fat burning.
In this case, some people even reported gaining weight.
4- Too Much Hunger That Eventually Ends in Binge-eating
This happens especially if you’re feeling that you’re depriving yourself of food. More often than not, this deprivation will end in overeating.
In fact, I asked in a poll how good of an idea it is to do this high of a caloric deficit when it comes to eventual binge-eating. And a whopping 68.2% said that it led them to this end.
5- Losing Weight From The Worst Sources
As discussed earlier, losing weight by losing some of our muscle mass is one of the most dangerous things that can happen. Not only will we feel a lot weaker and have a hard time doing daily, basic things, but it can also get accompanied by more serious diseases, i.e. osteoporosis.
This usually happens when one would get this low food intake while neglecting protein day in and day out for an extended period of time.
6- Will Make You Give Up Too Early
If you hate how uncomfortable and hungry you feel, and, on top of that, you’re not seeing any weight loss, chances are you’ll decide to give up on the diet.
While this is not a problem in and of itself, it’s even a good decision that you’re abandoning a bad idea.
But it is only good if you’re abandoning it because you have figured out how unhealthy it is, and you now have a better idea of how to lose weight in a healthy way.
However, my fear is that it won’t lead you in a better direction, but it instead:
7- Will Make You Give Up On Fitness
There are three ways we can mess up a diet, 1- take on a stupid diet, 2- not adhere to a good one well, and 3- not give it enough time.
Moreover, it’s not about messing up a diet, it’s about that failure messing us up.
When we try for so long and with so many diets to lose weight and we keep failing at it, we tend to start to accept our weight as an inevitability.
“It’s my genetics.” we start telling ourselves. “She can get there because her genes are designed to help her lose the weight and keep it off. But not me.”
We can be very good at this.
But it is almost always a result of the continued failures we have gone through.
In fact, I ran a poll asking about the most prevalent reason for giving up on fitness, and 72.5% said that it happened because they were unable to lose weight and/or maintain their new weight.
And when asked what brought them back to fitness, 59.3% said it happened when they tried out a new diet that had rapid weight loss result at the beginning.
So let me introduce to you in the next part of this article, two of those healthy diets that can bring you back into the game.
What To Do Now
1- Be In Peace With The Slow & Consistent Weight Loss Journey
As frustrating as it sounds, this is the healthy way to lose weight.
If you’re rolling you’re eyes at the word “healthy”, let me use another adjective it is: it’s the only sustainable way to lose weight and keep it off.
“Easy come, easy go” is very true here. You don’t want easy. You want it to remind you that you never want to be in this place again.
That being said, I genuinely believe cutting calories to this extreme is the harder way to lose weight, and what I am recommending is relatively easy.
2- Calculate Your Maintenance Calories & Go For a 500-600 Caloric Deficit
If you’re going to stick to the Calories in V.S Calorie out equation, then please don’t do a higher deficit.
We have talked enough today about the dangers of doing so, and while it might seem slow, this is the right way to go.
Be patient. You didn’t put the weight on in a day. You surely won’t be taking it off overnight.
3- Exercising Is Key In This Phase
Remember the Desert Mode we discussed earlier? Exercising is an incredible tool to help our body understand that we’re safe and we need to maintain the state of metabolism or even increase it.
In fact, 38.3% of those I polled said that exercising was the way they managed to break through a plateau.
It shouldn’t be anything fancy. If you’re not exercising, you can start with daily walks, for as little as 10 minutes a day. A sweet spot you can work your way up to is for a nice walk of 30-45 minutes per day.
If you already exercise, you might want to take it to the next level or change things up. Try giving HIIT workouts a chance, for instance, and see where you go from there.
4- Give The Keto Diet A Try (Especially Now)
If you’ve been on MasterMinding Perfection before, you have probably already heard me raving about Keto.
It is one of the diets I was talking about earlier that gives us that quick results at the beginning and encourages us to continue doing the diet.
It is as healthy as you make it be. And it is one of the very few diets where you don’t feel hungry even after long hours of fasting.
You might start needing reminders to remember to eat your meals.
Yeah. You read that right.
For more, here are some crucial Keto tips that will make the journey easier and more efficient.
5- Intermittent Fasting Might Be Just What You’re Looking For
This is the second diet I usually rave about on this blog. And it works perfectly with Keto.
Remember how we were saying Keto will make you feel satiated throughout the day? Intermittent fasting will regulate your eating and fasting windows to drive your metabolism and fat burning even higher.
And the reason it is such a cool companion to Keto is that, as discussed, our hunger goes to a new low on keto, which will lead us to fast without even trying to.
6- Give Sleep The Priority It Truly Deserves
Sleep is a secret weapon, a weapon that will be used against you if you don’t use it for your advantage.
Getting enough sleep is crucial for your fitness goals. Burning fat and building muscle are a lot more easily achievable when you’re getting enough sleep.
On the other hand, depriving your body of its needed rest can lead to higher hunger throughout the day, and significantly more sugar cravings, which goes at odds with almost any fitness goal you might have, let alone weight loss.
7- Drink More Water Than You Think You Might Need
I say more than you think you’d need because we tend to always neglect hydration. What ends up happening is that we reach out for food because we think we’re hungry and it turns out we were just dehydrated.
Moreover, drinking more water is especially important if you have decided to take on Keto and/or intermittent fasting. Your body will be excreting large amounts of reserved water that you will have to replace.
8- Focus More On The Quality Of Consumed Calories
You came here because you were counting every calorie and a half that you’re consuming and you’re still not seeing the results you want. Well, the quantity of calories is obviously not doing the trick for you, so let’s redirect our attention to the quality.
This will lead us to take better nutritional choices, take care of our bodies and have a healthy routine. So that once we have reached our weight loss goal, we will also be feeling and looking a lot healthier.
As Dr. Eric Berg likes to say, “We don’t lose weight to get healthy, we get healthy to lose the weight.”
9- Focus On Achieving Metabolic Flexibility
Things have come full circle here, as a lot of the things we mentioned will help us build our metabolic flexibility, especially Keto and Intermittent Fasting.
What makes this goal critical, is that with a flexible metabolism, we won’t have to worry about our calorie intake as much. We can get away with eating less and our body will be able to extract the energy it still needs from our in-house energy reserves.
What also helps build metabolic flexibility is the last tip on this list, namely:
10- Decide Whether You Want To Go Low-Carb or Low-Sugar
The reason I put it like this is that I want you to know, that unless you’re a bodybuilder, I don’t think you would benefit, fitness-wise, from a high-carb diet.
With high-carb I don’t just mean higher than average. My problem is with this “average”.
In all the research and statistics I have gone through, I arrived at the conclusion that a very large percentage of us eat more carbs, and more sugar than we should.
Now, I’m not recommending that everyone should go to the extreme.
That is why my advice is to eliminate sugar, but what you decide to do with other carbs is for you to decide.