Is 1350cal with 2700 deficit ok for weight loss?

[Katymz]

I'm female, 27, 5'1 and 93kgs wanting to get down to at least 70kgs.(was 110kg in July untill I changed my diet)

My calories in and out are pretty much the same everyday.

I'm not working at the moment so most of the exercise I do is workouts off of YouTube. i've only seriously started exercising consistently in the last couple of days.

I'm confused about how much I need to be eating to lose weight. I feel like I eat a lot already and would put on weight if I increased my calories.

I eat pretty clean have cut out all the bad stuff apart from having at most 2 black coffees a day with 1 sugar.

For example:

*Breakfast: protein shake

*Snack: Greek yoghurt with berries, walnuts, almonds, pepitas, raw oats and black coffee

*Lunch:cherry tomatoes, tuna or egg with lettuce or 1 egg omelette with green vegetables

*Snack: apple, walnuts, black coffee

*Dinner: quinoa, 1/2 chicken breast, zuchinni, cherry tomatoes, carrots, beans, mushrooms, spinach.

4L water.

[etvete]

I would say that if your deficit is truly almost 3000 calories that is way too large. Over an extended period of time with a deficit this size you may start to see some not so good things happen including losing your period, losing your hair, dizziness, fatigue, muscle loss and others.

I encourage you to find an online BMR calculator to see what the amount of calories your body needs in a day simply to function. That number would then be the lowest amount of calories that you would eat. For example, my BMR is 1600 calories and I am 27, female, 5'8'' (173 cm) and 190 lbs (86kg). 

[Baltoscott]

Eating more is counter-intuitive, but I agree with @etvete about trying to eat at least your BMR.  Here is a link to a calculator that will estimate that.  Even people who are the same sex, age and height will vary somewhat in their true BMR vs. calculated estimates, so use the estimate as a starting point (I put your numbers in and it came back with a BMR of 1800/day).  Start there and if you don't lose any weight in a couple of weeks, go a bit lower, but I would think of 1350/day, which is about 75% of your calculated BMR, as an absolute minimum after trying 1800 for a few weeks.  

It is good that you are exercising, as that not only burns calories, but signals your metabolism to use what you are eating to rebuild muscle.  Since you are eating at a deficit, you will likely still lose muscle, which you probably don't want, in addition to fat, but exercise will shift the balance to fat loss. 

Big deficits, especially with no exercise, signal your body to slow its metabolism.  It will do that in part by breaking down and consuming muscle tissue (metabolically expensive) at a greater rate than fat (metabolically cheap).   If you are only eating 1350 cal/day and your deficit with exercise is 2700/day over several weeks or months, there is a good chance your metabolism will slow down, which will increase muscle loss and lead to slowing or stopping overall weight loss.

And don't forget that this all takes time.  Daily weight variation is normal and a woman's monthly cycle influences water retention, so it takes several weeks to see if you are on the right track and whether you need to make adjustments.  

[Dominique]

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@Katymz wrote:

I'm confused about how much I need to be eating to lose weight.

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Since you were successful in lowering your weight from 110 to 93 kg (17 kg in 5 months is a lot, 15% of your starting weight), and you appear to have been logging your intake, you should have a reasonably good idea of the calculated caloric deficit needed.

Now, you won’t necessarily be able to extrapolate your future weight loss from past weight loss: being 17 kg lighter, you now expend less energy; on top of that, having lost a large amount of weight in a relatively short period of time, some level of metabolic adaptation is likely to have taken place: in other words, your energy expenditure is lower than that of a woman your size and your age who has maintained the same weight for a long time.

You may want to have a look at the approach described in the "Losing All Your Weight At Once" video, referenced in this post. It makes sense to me, to avoid the risk of a rebound.