The 1200-calorie diet can be healthy and effective if you design a plan that works best for your body type and hunger levels. It's best not to restrict yourself, so choosing foods you enjoy that make you feel full is a great first step to making this diet work for you.
If 1,200 calories a day is more than 500 calories lower than your weight-maintenance calories, you can expect to lose more than 1 to 2 pounds per week. If it's less, then you might lose fewer pounds a week.
Whilst the 1200 calorie diet can get you fast results, extending it past 2-4 weeks can often result in more harm than good. Over-restricting and under-nourishing yourself can often leave you feeling depleted of energy, fatigued and unable to get through your day.
Most adults need a minimum of 2000 calories to sustain metabolism, muscle activity, and brain function. However, too many calories can lead to weight gain and a variety of diseases.
For weight maintenance, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025 suggest a range of 1,600–2,400 calories for women and 2,200–3,000 for men — so you could consider anything below these numbers a low-calorie diet.
So, if you're eating 1,200 calories and not losing weight, it could be that your body is really struggling to function on so little fuel and your metabolism is not functioning well enough to respond to a deficit in the way you'd like.
Consuming at least 1,200 calories per day has often been touted as the minimum for basic bodily functions and to stay out of starvation mode, but the amount is actually too low. A healthy amount of calories for adult women ranges from 1,800 to 2,400 calories per day and for men it's 2,000 to 3,200 calories per day.
But the average weight loss that most people see on the 1200 calorie diet is about one to two pounds per week.”
Although the total number of calories can vary from diet to diet, eating fewer than 1200 calories is risky. When you limit your diet and eat fewer than 1200 calories per day, you usually do not get enough nutrients. You are not getting enough carbohydrates, proteins or fats.
When you eat less than you need for basic biological function (about 1,200 calories for most women), your body throws the brakes on your metabolism. It also begins to break down precious, calorie-burning muscle tissue for energy, says Benardot.
The 1200-calorie diet is geared toward women. Men's bodies require a higher caloric intake. This means that a typical woman can eat between 1200 and 1500 calories a day to lose weight. A typical male body needs about 1500 to 1800 calories daily to lose weight.
In a study of more than 2000 people with obesity, it was found that 1200 calories per day helped patients lose an average of 4.7% fat in 1 year. A year of dieting with 1200 - 1500 calories you can lose up to 7 kg of weight.
However, other studies show that while consuming 1,000 calories a day may result in significant weight loss, most people cannot sustain it and often experience significant weight regain . The reasons include regaining lost muscle mass and increased appetite. Also worth noting is that the human body can adapt.
Experts believe that 1500-calorie diet, which is 500 calories less than 2000-calorie diet, is enough to shed 0.45 kgs in a week. Reducing your overall calorie intake can help you lose weight with ease, but make sure it doesn't cause any more health problems like fatigue, headache, etc.
In other words, if you stick to the calorie intake recommended by WLR, you can be sure your body won't go into starvation mode. As a general rule though, most nutrition experts recommend never going below 1,000-1,200 calories a day if you're dieting on your own.
No matter what type of diet you follow, to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you take in each day. For most people with overweight, cutting about 500 calories a day is a good place to start. If you can eat 500 fewer calories every day, you should lose about a pound (450 g) a week.
According to the National Institutes of Health, the average adult needs 1,600 to 3,000 calories per day. Although the exact number of calories needed vary based on age and physical activity, 700 is very low. A 2-year-old who engages in minimal physical activities needs at least 1000 calories in a day.
If you want to lose 1kg per week? You'd need to be in a calorie deficit of 1,100 calories per DAY for 7 x days.
If you've been consistently eating 1,200 calories and working out for at least a month, you may be trading fat for a bit of muscle weight. Check how your clothes fit -- you may notice that despite the lack of change on the scale, the waistband is looser and pant legs fit less snugly.
When you cut your food intake to 1000 calories and below, your body is forced to break down muscle so that it can provide your body with energy since your food intake does not provide it with enough energy. This results in a person losing their muscle and affects their metabolism as we've just highlighted above.
One of the main reasons that undereating can lead to weight gain is because consuming too few calories can cause your resting metabolic rate to slow down. This means you may burn fewer calories throughout the day.
Some people may choose to restrict their daily intake to 1,500 calories. While factors such as age, gender, and activity level can cause caloric needs to vary, a 1,500-calorie intake is typically less than the average person requires.