I don't eat that much!

I had a family friend come to visit the other day and she wanted help to lose weight.

When I looked into her diet, I started to see the main problem. She claimed that she hardly ate because she only had 2 meals in a day; breakfast and evening dinner. My calories must be less than I require, she told me.

She informed me of what was eaten the day before:

Breakfast was 1 large bowl of cereals. 400 calories

Dinner was a packaged meal of chicken Tikka with rice and half nan bread. 1040 calories

However, when I worked out the calorie content of the 2 meals it came to almost the same amount of energy that she required for the day! No wonder she wasn't losing weight. This was mainly because activity level was fairly low so her daily energy needs was way below 2000 calories.

Plus, she failed to calculate the intake from all the drinks during the day, this would be fine if she drank just water but she had teas, coffees and juices to account for.

This added another 400 calories. The total came to 1800 calories from a diet that she felt was making her feel constantly hungry. The metabolic rate for her was around 1850. There was not enough negative calorie intake to cause sufficient weight loss.

I believed she needed to exercise more and have smaller portions to help cut calories even more. Plus she needed to spread out the meals throughout the day to limit hunger.