Myself, I’m on Weight Watchers and I can earn 10 activity points by jogging/walking for an hour as long as my heart rate stays in a prescribed zone. I figured it out with their patented formula based on my weight, so it’s all “scientific” and stuff. My dirty secret is that I have never decreased my daily points from 30, even though I think my current weight should put me at 24 or 26. So, more dirty secrets: on a day I exercise, that puts my prescribed total at 40 and I am usually within 2-3 points over or under that. On a day I don’t exercise, I might go over my points allowance by as many as 5-10. I also use up my entire 35-point weekly allowance on the weekend, often plus a fair bit more. Even though I usually eat all my activity points, I’m usually anywhere from at my points allowance to 70 or even 100 points over it, total for a given week (average maybe 20-50 over). And I do lose weight. I could never admit that to the people in my meeting because some of them are fanatical about sticking to their points (and still gain or lose to about the degree I do, though most are a lot smaller than me) and I’m pretty sure they would kill me if they knew. I see this on the internet too; almost everyone who uses those intake calculators absolutely scoffs at the amount and apparently eats much less than the estimate, whereas for me I think it would be pretty true to life.

I’m not sure what the point of that was (certainly not to laud WW… I am still not sure I’m doing the right thing by dieting in the first place and am very conflicted about the whole issue, and I sort of believe that I will probably gain the weight back eventually once I lose the resolve I currently have), except to try and add a data point that different people’s bodies respond differently to food intake/exercise and not all of us gain on 1200 calorie/day rations. Or maybe to express sympathy for everyone who eats less than I do and still can’t lose. My psyche is fragile enough but at least I’ve always been able to believe that if I *did* get my compulsive eating under control, I’d lose weight accordingly. I like to think I’d handle it OK if that weren’t true, but I’m not sure. I feel guilty about how “lucky” I seem to be, but angry that I feel guilty. How screwed up is that?

My other observation is that in the past, I have found it WAY EASY to rack up 3,000 calories in a day without realizing it, even when I feel like I’m eating moderately. I swear I’m not doubting what anyone here says they eat; I know all of you are smart and I totally believe you. I’m just throwing it out there that in my personal case, I really do tend to eat more than I think I am.

I don’t know what any of this says, I just wanted to add my perspective and mainly to make the point about how I hate it when we feel we need to punish ourselves to a prescribed extent by restricting and exercising before we can feel OK about being ourselves. It’s nobody’s business whether I “eat right” (whatever that means) or exercise in the first place, and I have really enjoyed Kate’s writing on that topic.

But, I digress. The interesting point is that I think the lowest number of calories the volunteers of this experiment were put on was 1100 a day. This is just 100 calories short of the 1200 figure mentioned. That’s, what, like a can of sugared soda? Though the volunteers were all men, who tend to have higher needs than women, just because they’re usually bigger and have more muscles.

At these starvation levels, the volunteers, in addition to the expected metabolic consequences, suffered from obsession with food to the exclusion of all other thoughts, were disturbed by thoughts and dreams about cannabalism, and one volunteer cut off his own fingers with an ax during the course of the experiment. To some extent, they were almost driven crazy by lack of food.

And to think that women do this to themselves all the time. By choice.

I’ve always been too lazy to count calories. I’ve no idea how many I eat in a day nor what I “should” be eating. I know that in the chaos of moving, I’ve been eating more restaurant and takeout meals than I should and not enough nutritious vegetables and I kind of feel bad about that. But it always seemed to me to be a miserable existence to have to track numbers for every bit of something that passes into my mouth. The closest I’ve ever come to calorie counting is the one diet I’ve done in my life, which was a low carb/good carb kind of thing called the Schwarzbein principle. I was counting carbs, but let me tell you, eating sandwiches made with one slice of Ezekial bread got old real fast.

Coincidence or conspiracy?

I think what’s interesting is that it matters. I am a fat woman. Why must I justify how much or what I am eating? Why must I feel badly about putting food in my mouth?

Right now I’m eating 1400-1800 a day. Makes me think maybe that’s not quite enough.