#89: Why 1200 calorie/day diets & cheat days don’t work & what to do instead

Have you been carefully sticking to a 1200-calorie per day diet during the week, only to reward yourself with a cheat day on the weekend?

While this approach might seem like a good balance, it could actually be sabotaging your progress!

In this episode of 40+ Fitness for Women, I break down why super low-calorie diets and cheat days aren’t as effective as you think—especially for women in perimenopause and menopause.

Tune in as I discuss:

• Why 1200-calorie per day diets leave you feeling exhausted and frustrated
• How cheat days often undo all your hard work
• Why you should think of your calories like a budget—and how to manage them better
• A smarter, more sustainable approach to fat loss
• My own experience with tracking and managing calories for consistent results

If you’ve been dieting and feel stuck, this episode will help you rethink your strategy for better, more sustainable progress.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to 40+ Fitness for Women
• 0:45 The Exhaustion of Constant Dieting
• 2:15 The Problem with Cheat Days
• 6:03 A Better Approach: Budgeting Calories
• 7:28 Understanding Your Calorie Budget
• 7:49 Personal Experience with Calorie Deficit
• 9:34 Managing Calorie Intake on Special Occasions
• 10:53 Successful Weight Loss Journey
• 12:11 Advice for Tracking and Analyzing Your Diet
• 14:03 Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

#89: Why 1200 calorie/day diets & cheat days don’t work

Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a Certified Menopause Fitness Coach, helping women in perimenopause and beyond build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. And today I'm going to talk a little bit about dieting again. And Because there is a lot of talk online about cheat days and 1200 calories a day calorie deficits. And I just wanted to share a few thoughts that I have on those that are good to keep in mind. If this is a strategy or a tactic that you are following.
So I think one of the big things about dieting that gets so exhausting for us is the constant tracking. It's the constant thinking about food. And of course, if you're thinking about food, you're going to want food and you're going to feel more hungry and all the things plus we have a desire to get. fast results. We want to get in there, want to do it, and then get out back to normal life. And I think that both of those are a little bit problematic in the sense that how are you going to get sustainable results if you're just doing it for a little while and then you stop.

I remember my parents went to a fat farm long ago, they were neither one of them fat, but they thought it would be fun to do some fitness stuff and get fed healthy food and all the rest.
And, they went there and somebody had really thought about. What you should be eating in a day to stay healthy, not gain weight and all the rest. And of course, that's great to do for a little while, but guess what happened when they got home? It was like back to normal life, right? And all of that was forgotten. But what is going to bring more sustainable results is if you start to actually incorporate new habits into your life. 

 I want to address this 1200 calories a day and cheat days Method, so I run across women as my clients as women I talked to who are really watching what they eat on the weekdays, they talk about having a 1200 calorie a day diet. And eating very little. And then the weekend comes around and it's really hard because you have parties, you're tired of life. I mean, you're tired on the weekends.
You're recovering from a full on week. And you're tired of monitoring and measuring and calculating everything. Plus, you're probably pretty darn tired from the fact that you've only been eating 1200 calories because your body just doesn't have energy for life when you're down that low. And so, they kind of loosen the reins, and a lot of the new diet theories are that you can have these cheat days.
But let me tell you why that ends up kind of shooting you in the foot. The thing is that on a cheat day, if you just say, Oh, now I can do whatever I want. First of all, you've been starving for the whole week. If you're at 1200 calories, especially
so you've been doing the 1200 calories a day, and then the weekend rolls around and you kind of give yourself free reign. You're allowed to have a cheat day. You deserve this cheat day. You've been working so hard all week and you're starving. So you go enjoy yourself.

 You have some bacon and eggs, uh, maybe you go shopping and you stop by Starbucks and you have one of their delicious lattes or maybe even their flavor of the month latte with some whipped cream on top because who doesn't love whipped cream? There's. Personally, my number one favorite food in the world whipped cream on just about anything and maybe one of the delicious, delicious Starbucks blueberry muffins, with it.
And then later in the evening, You're still out and about. You feel like treating yourself to something or you go hang out with your friends. Maybe there's a party. Maybe go out to dinner. You have a few drinks. Maybe there's some chips on the table. You're eating some of the chips because once you've had one, if you're anything like me, those chips, if you have one, you're going to have 10 or till the bottom of the bowl shows.

Then you're going to have another drink. Then you're eating and inhibitions kind of fail. You start to feel a little drunk. Maybe I should eat a little bit more so I don't start feeling badly or on the way home. You stop by to grab something to eat, maybe a kebab or a hamburger or something like that.

You can see how things. I mean, that's kind of normal life, right? I mean, that's not crazy. I used to do that all the time when I was younger, and I'd be able to get away with it. And maybe I can get away with it every now and again, even now today. But my point is that if you were trying to be in a calorie deficit and you have that kind of a Saturday, Then you most likely have brought into your week so many calories that you have negated kind of all of the good work that you have done all week.

I think a far better way to think about dieting is to think of it like a budget, you know, like a money budget. You have a certain budget for the week of calories, and then you can decide how you want to split up spending that budget, so if you know that on Saturday, you're going to go on a shopping trip and you want to go to the Starbucks or that you have a party coming up, then plan for that. The same way you would plan for that, if you actually had a monetary budget, if you had a food allowance, for this week of, 10 dollars a day, but you know that on Saturday, you want to go out to dinner with your friends, and that's going to be at least 20 bucks, if not 30, then you got to figure out how are you going to spend less over the course of the week? So that you have that 30 to spend on Saturday, same kind of logic with the dieting that if you know, you have something coming up on Saturday, then plan for it. And. Don't eat your maximum allotted calories Monday through Friday but plan that they'll be a little bit lower so that you have some budget to spare on Saturday.

Now, of course, If your budget per day is something as low as 1, 200 calories a day, you are not really going to be able to go much lower. And that's where I would say revisit what is a realistic amount of calories for you to be on. I'll give the example of myself when I went on my calorie deficit in the spring of 2023.

I wanted to drop some fat. I first got a handle on what are my maintenance calories and I did that through tracking what I was eating and I also used a few calculators where I put in, you know, what is my height and my weight, my activity level, which is sedentary. And then I, I underestimated how much exercise I did because the calorie counters, I didn't want them to, you know, be relying on the fact that I can make it to the gym or go running or whatever.

And then I came up with a number and my maintenance was about 2200 calories at that point. So then I went into a 500 calories a day deficit. So my diet calorie amount per day was 1700. Now 1700 may sound humongous to a lot of you listening, um, but that was my deficit calories. And I can tell you when I started really tracking, measuring, weighing, weighing, really weighing, that's the most accurate way to measure, weighing everything that I ate, then 1700 did feel very different from what I was normally doing.

And because I had the 1700 and It wasn't a starvation diet, right? It was lower than my maintenance. But it wasn't starvation. I could actually manage to even eat 1600 or 1500 in a day. If I knew that I wanted to save up for Saturday. But then on my Saturday, it wasn't like I just went to town. I really thought about what I am going to eat.
eat on that Saturday, what am I going to drink? So for example, you know, you, you can choose a dry white wine. That's going to have less calories than, you know, a beer or I love to drink gin and tonic. So I drank those. There's a gin drink that I don't think they have in the States. But actually they do have it in the States.

It's, it's basically a gin and tonic already mixed for you. And there is a lighter version of that. So I started drinking that then when I would go out to dinner. And for example, my birthday party was a really good example of this. We went to a tapas place and then I really, I just looked at the menu and I'm like, okay.

I know which foods have a lot of calories in them and which have a little bit less. So I chose tapas that had fewer calories. Certainly was not going to choose the potato chip tapas for example. So So in that way, it's a combination of being conscious all the time and working with this calorie budget.

And it was very successful for me. I lost about a pound a week consistently. So over the 10 weeks, I lost about 10 pounds of mostly body fat because I was strength training at the same time. So it was, Pretty wonderful because I've been doing the strength training for a year and a half. And then I went into the calorie deficit and it revealed the muscle that I had.

So I really looked nice and lean and toned and I was super happy with that. But anyway, so think about it as a calorie budget rather than going for these cheat days because the cheat days really are going to eat up what you've done, it's like if you had that budget of 10 dollars a day to spend on your food, so you have 70 for the whole week.

And then if you do one of those cheat days, then what you're actually doing is you're spending instead of 70 over the course of the week, you might be spending 170 over the course of the week. So what happens when you keep going over budget, over budget, over budget, week after week, after week, you know, it's not a good thing, right?

 In general, my advice for anyone who is trying to lose a little bit of fat, bring down their weight is start by really looking at what you are eating right now and analyze that. I'm working with a client right now who has for the past two weeks tracked everything that she eats. And she said it has been such an eye opener because she's just noticing particular patterns and that she thought she was making healthy choices, but actually healthy choices are not always low calorie choices, and she's not always making healthy choices.

So now the next steps for us is going to be to look at how does she want to be eating? And she has told me that she prefers to be more of a grazer. So not just one meal a day, which is great. I think that is a much easier way to get in. The protein amounts that you want to be getting is if you're eating five times a day, four times a day versus, you know, once a day, I mean, try to get in a hundred grams of protein eating once a day.

I, I, I don't know. I don't know if I could do that. Um, yeah, but tracking would be the first step. And the thing about the tracking also is that you can really honestly figure out what are your maintenance calories. So if your weight is about the same. right now, but you're just heavier than you want to be, or you have more fat on your body than you want to be, then it's a perfect time to track.

So you get a good idea of your maintenance calories. And I know it's very difficult to track and not have it affect what you are actually consuming. So that's always a little bit of a trick, but start with that. And then I have some earlier podcasts that go through how to do a calorie deficit. But the first step is going to be figuring out your maintenance calories, and that's best done through tracking.
Anyhow, I hope that this episode has been helpful and I will talk to you again next week. In the meanwhile, happy training.