Calorie Deficit

By now I should know not to I believe everything I read…especially online. This is especially true with fitness-related stuff, as you never know when the next training or dieting craze will emerge. One site that I at least semi-trusted before was AskMen.com. Most of their fitness stuff is low-level to mid-level, but generally speaking it’s usually pretty good. Today I started reading an article from that site that – get this – made note that the average adult male should consume at least 1,200 calories a day…meaning that some dudes out there are in fact at that minimum level, which seems absolutely crazy to me! I am not a huge guy by any means, but I am in decent shape, and at the very least I am a pretty active person. So, with that being said, maybe me daily caloric intake is slightly higher than the average dude. Still, I feel like I eat maybe 1,200 calories per meal (averaging snacks into meals), not a day. Krissy is constantly trying to lose a pound or two (despite my protests), and as a result one of the things she does is count her calories. Being extremely active as well, she normally burns between 2,600-2,800 calories a day, and consumes between 1,600-1,800. Even when she is at the high end of that, she is usually fighting herself from grabbing a late night snack because 1,800 calories (plain and simple) just isn’t a lot of food to eat in one day. If she only ate 1,200 calories, I would be worried about her passing out somewhere during the day. As a guy, I naturally have more overall body mass and muscle than her, and if I even ate the 1,800 calories a day that she does, I think I would look like a stick figure. At 1,200 calories, I think I would keel over. Now, if I wasn’t going to the gym and playing ball regularly, my metabolism probably wouldn’t be as high, and, therefore, I wouldn’t have to eat quite as many calories a day. Still, based on my sex, age, height, and weight my resting metabolic rate is a shade over 2,000 calories a day…meaning if I just lied in bed all day without moving a muscle, in theory I would still need to consume 2,000 calories a day just to maintain my current weight. By the end of the day, I will probably have eaten about 2,700 calories (and that doesn’t even factor in any type of post-dinner snack). I once read somewhere else (again, not sure how credible the source was) that the human body has to consume at least 1,000 calories a day just to keep from going into starvation mode…being that 1,200 isn’t that far off, I can’t see that being a healthy option for anyone, even if they are trying to drop a couple of pounds.