Hi Penny,
So when you say suggested calories, I am assuming you mean the calories recommended by fitbit app based on your desired weight loss goal, so all the following is based on that assumption. The fitbit app is probably over estimating your burn and maybe over estimating your basil metabolic rate (BMR). I wouldn't follow the fitbit recommendations as you are probably overeating. Go to a BMR calculator such as: http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/#result and determine a better BMR.
So BMR is the rate at which your body burns calories just to stay alive. It is based on your age, weight, height. Then your daily activity can be added on to that rate to determine your total caloric need for a day. Here is a site you can check for walking: http://www.everydayhealth.com/Calories-Burned-Walking.htm Once you know how many calories a day you are buning, you can set your consumption based on that number minus about 500 which should give you a 2 lb weight loss per week.
There is no such thing as starvation mode in normal dieting. It's a dieting myth that doesn't seem to die. I believed in it for a long time myself, but based on more recent studies, it's just an excuse now. If you eat absolutely nothing, you would not enter a catabolic state (state in which body consumes muscle tissue) for more than 60 hours and even then its short lived. You metabolism slows down for only a few reasons: 1) you loose fat. 2) you allow muscle to atrophy. 3) you slow your activity level. Yes, it takes energy to maintain fat stores AND energy when you move to move the extra pounds. This means that as you loose weight, you have to increase the intensity of your exercise to gain a corresponding benefit for calorie burn.
What happens when we loose weight is we hit plateaus where the weight stops coming off, even though we eat the same. This is due to our current burn rate coming into equallibrium with our consumption rate. We have two choices at this point: 1) eat less or 2) exercise with greater intensity. Notice I didn't say exercise more! Exercise intensity means if you currently walk 2 miles, try jogging 2 miles. Get your heart rate up. You can try High Intensity Interval Training(HIIT). Run as hard as you can for 30 seconds, then walk/jog for 90 seconds and repeat 7 more times (warm up first). You can do something similar with weight training, but the effect is to get the heart rate and respiration up to its highest for short bursts. Exercising more can add additional stresses that can cause more cortisol to be secreted which hinders fat loss.
There are more than 40 hormones involved in the entire digestive and energy cycle. These need to be balanced and the balance can be affected by so many things. There is not a single thing we can do to fix everything, but only a combination of things that will work. In my research I've boiled it down to some big headers, some of which we know: 1)Diet (eating healthy, whole foods) 2)Exercise 3) Frequency of food. In the time in which our gnome was developed, mankind didn't have access to food 24/7. They also did not have access to processed foods. Even as late as 200 years ago, about the only processing that was done involved smoking, pickleing, fermenting, drying and grinding. Now days, we bleach, soak in chemicals, inject, mix with chemicals, use chemicals for preservatives, inject hormones to force faster growth, add fat replacers and a host of other things (I spent 14 years in food manufacturing, so I've seen it first hand) to manipulate our food into something its not supposed to be. Resturants add a lot of butter and sugar to foods to enhance the flavor (can you say Palua Dean, the butter queen?). I could go on and on about how much we adulterate our food in favor of taste and greed vs nutrition, but that would take a book.
So we must eat and exercise in a manner that maintains our lives, not consumes it. Eat less, less frequently, but eat foods that provide the nutrients we need. What we need is proteins and fat. Whole carbs found in vegetables and whole grains are also necessary for certain vitamines and minerals. In my opinion, the food pryamid should be turned upside down, but we have to go back to eating grassfed/pasture raised meats without the hormones and antibiotics. We cannot remain sedentary! I work with computers so I sit all day. Now I exercise early in the morning before work, at lunch and occassionally in the evening with weights. I fast everyday for 20 hours (intermittent fasting or IF). I track calories and consume less than I need.
I know there are folks here that disagree with me, but this year I've lost 42 lbs (13 of it twice when I stopped doing the right things) and I'm 57 years old. 16 lbs have come since I started IF on 6 Sep 15 (6 weeks or 2.67 lbs/wk). I'm loosing at the same rate I did when I was in my 20's and 30's, so in my opinion age is just an excuse. Do the things you need to do and you will succeed.
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
