RDA levels and Calories? Who Decided?

(KM) #21

Sometimes I think I look like I’m melting. Sure wish some of the extra skin would go away already!

(Geoffrey) #22

It is amazing and i was recently called skinny. I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before, crazy. I’ll find my sweet spot and if I get below 165 I’ll just have to go 2MAD.

(Geoffrey) #23

Same here. At my age the skin just doesn’t want to snap back.

(Robin) #24

Upper legs/arms, and lower belly. The usual suspects.
I guess we wore out the elastic. We need drawstring skin.
is it too late to put in a change order?

(julie) #25

I did a paper in college on this subject (many yers ago) during WWII, A certain German chancellor instructed his scientists to calculate what was needed to keep a human alive. Back then the list of vitamins and minerals was not as extensive as it is now. Also his calorie count was too low, it did not include how many calories a laborer needed.

(Kirk Wolak) #26

As someone who found the root cause of my inflammation was CIRS (mold exposure). I can attest: While diets can help inflammation. They mostly help with diet induced inflammation. Other types of inflammation (immune, etc). Will continue, there will just be a lot less of it.

That said. As I’ve gotten out of the environment. And healed. I can suddenly tolerate more foods without massive migraines, etc.

Unfortunately, gaining weight is still quite easy for me.

You do you. Also, try to add some muscle. I totally recommend either Dr. Ben Bo or Body By Science (Dr. McGuff). Their Time under Tension approach is awesome.

I have an 84 yr old friend who, after 2 yrs, is really starting to ENJOY the gym and the “Burn/Exhaustion” of the process. He does twice a week. He was dangerously frail when he started (Post Covid).

Adding muscle will bulk you up a bit. At my lows, I was getting a lot of the same feedback. The magic is that you really have to do some inroading (trying to move a weight that you simply cannot move any more… But pushing like you can! At the end of the set).

You are always kind and supportive. I hope you find your sweet spot!

(Central Florida Bob ) #27

This may sound contradictory, but while I wish I had that problem, I understand it could be rather concerning.

Back last December & January, I was preparing for my birthday bike ride (ride my age in miles) and so I was spending more time on the bike. Not like twice as far as I ride these days, but longer. I slipped down under 200, which has always been like a giant cast iron door I can’t get through. Only 195, but once the ride was done and I settled back to the kinds of rides I’m doing now, my weight slid back up. And now I’m back to perpetually looking at the smallest weight gains and getting concerned.

(Central Florida Bob ) #28

Calories are stupidest thing to put a number on, unless they say something more like calories per pound or calories per something else.

There’s some disaster preparation food company I hear advertising on the radio saying they provide 2500 calories per person per day. I’m 6’ and 205. My wife is 4’10 and (I won’t even ask). I like to stand next to her and say, “one size fits all.” The height difference is big enough to make the point. Now say it’s after the hurricane and I’m chopping branches off trees, hauling them around the yard and that kind of activity. She’s sweeping or raking or something. Why would anyone think the same number of calories is needed for all three extremes?

The requirements for other nutrients probably vary just as much, but it’s much harder to measure and determine if you’re getting enough of just about any of them.

#29

People love oversimplification. It may even somewhat work for a big number of mixed people (if they use extra)… Otherwise I find it as wrong as you do.
There are such crazy things. Like “a woman should eat 1200 kcal if she wants to lose fat”. It’s very common to hear and it’s totally crazy. I would STARVE and I am a short one with plenty fat to lose… And who says I am not fine with a sloooooooow fat-loss? :smiley: I have lost fat just fine (and it had a nice pace, 0.3kg per week, I was happy with that, it lasted for long) eating 2000 kcal.
I don’t like when it’s called calories when it’s kilocalories. In the “2500 per person” case, I know it’s the big one but I still don’t like when something means 2 different things. I don’t even like that many people’s billion is 1000 times smaller than my billion (as we have milliard here). It surely caused lots of confusion during history… I have learned it quickly so I know but it is still odd.

As far as I know, that’s right… Smokers need more Vitamin C, carnivores need less, there are huge factors. But the size of the human matters too, obviously.
And we ketoers need vastly different amount of sodium while it’s so vital for the body! Still, one needs 1 teaspoon, others 2 or 3 and some people just eat unsalted meat (I still don’t know how that works, we need our sodium and meat doesn’t have sooo much).

#30

Well it is for “disaster preparation” so I bet they are assuming that this would be sufficient for minimal survival needs per person when facing a disaster. Not necessarily live off it optimally indefinitely. Granted a 4’10” can survive on less. Possibly there’s an understanding that things will be shared? :rofl::woman_shrugging:t3:

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #31

Our perceptions of “healthy” have been altered over time. I have collected pictures of people, with dates ranging over the past 80 years or so, and the normal-weight people looked decidedly skinny back then. You can see this very clearly, for example, in soldiers from WW II with their shirts off. You can count their ribs. Whereas today, even the healthiest young men have a layer of sub-cutaneous fat that makes it harder to see their ribs and abdominal muscles.

I well remember watching the movie Houseboat on TV in the seventies, and remarking how good-looking Sophia Loren was, despite how very well-padded she was. In today’s terms she actually looks rather thin. The intervening sixty years have greatly affected our sense of what a healthy human being looks like.

(Edith) #32

My parents have caregivers who help take care of my mom. Most of them are very overweight. After one of my visits my mom called me almost crying because she thought I was too thin. I am a normal weight. I happened to be having a check-up right after that phone call, so I asked my doctor about my weight. He thought it was just fine. I considered having him write a note to my mom. I am 58 years old, so this is especially amusing since I am no spring chicken. :joy: I think she has gotten so used to her overweight caregivers that she is not used to seeing someone of normal weight. I do think our perceptions of what is normal and healthy have definitely changed.

(Robin) #33

My doctor calls my weight perfect right now. So I decided I will stick with my health, my diet, my doc, and carry one.

(KM) #34

I have an interesting opposite experience. My mother lives in a retirement community, when I visit I get to see what old-old looks like (I think that’s currently being defined as over 85, at least by them.) While the helpers and staff are consistently hefty, the seniors themselves are mostly somewhere between a bit gaunt and a little plump. I think it’s literal living proof that remaining at a moderate to slightly below average weight is linked to a longer life, whether it’s causative or concomitant.

(Geoffrey) #35

This is true and I have many pictures and books of the old west and you see very few chunky people. Even in the cities where they had high carb diets and good meat was scarce.
That’s why I mentioned hearing that the average person m, back in the day, Ahmad a substantially lower calorie intake than we have today. I wish I could remember where gears or read that the man only ate around 1500 cal a day on average. Food was not plentiful and had to be stretched out during the winter.
As food became more plentiful and available the calorie standards starting being raised to convince people that they needed to eat more for good health thereby buying more food which is good for the AG industry. As the decades went by the powers that be kept incrementally increasing the standards for what was a daily requirement for caloric intake.
I would still be curious to know how they came up with what is considered the optimal amount of calories per day.
I personally believe there is no set standard as we are all individuals with different lifestyles and physiology’s that have different needs.

(Alec) #36

I think once the war has been won, and as long as it is done with a clear head and very consciously, doing this is the right strategy. But you know the signs… you need to pull back if they appear…

#37

That’s way lower. I probably could survive for several decades on 1500 kcal, I don’t want my energy need to drop so much (I could keep a decent metabolism, probably but not much activity and muscle… not like I have those now… and I am guessing here. I know I easily could stay fat with 2000 kcal so 1500 for thin me sounds right? I am 5’4", some muscles but not much, okay metabolism, I don’t think it ever slowed down, I never ate at a big deficit for long enough and there were no symptoms) but I could survive quite well on that much, I suppose. I would miss food but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after some decades. As missing fat isn’t so bad after one decade though my diet changed, I have fat fast days sometimes and “I don’t really care” days too… So I can manage.
2500 is generous for many of us, too little for many others. Some people would gain fat very quickly on this amount, with a properly working metabolism.
As far as I know. But it seems so according to my readings.

Short term survival is different, of course. (I probably would survive for months without eating though that would be quite extreme…)

This is an interesting topic… Some people can survive on nearly anything, IDK how they do it, just the energy intake sounds insufficient, surely the body works not optimally there but we are big warm blooded land mammals, how…? Normal people would stop at some more believable level after fat and muscle loss and metabolism slowing. But that’s very minimal survival :frowning:

(KM) #38

This is an article I found about the history of the 2000 calorie RDA.

https://stvincents.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleId=45556&publicid=745#:~:text=The%202%2C000-calorie%20diet%20was,benchmark%20number%20for%20daily%20calories.

The 2,000-calorie diet was invented to simplify nutrition labels.

The history goes like this: In the 1990s, when the FDA was standardizing nutrition labels for U.S. food, they wanted to include a benchmark number for daily calories. Unfortunately, no such number existed. So they turned to data from public surveys, in which people had self-reported how many calories they ate per day. (Were these accurate reports? Fingers crossed.)

They got a wide range of answers, from 1,600 to 3,000 calories. But nutrition labels can only fit so much information! Ultimately, the committee decided to keep it simple, if not exactly accurate. They wanted just one number.

Technically, the survey average was about 2,400 daily calories — but 2,000 won the day. It was easier to remember, and proponents argued that it was better for people to eat too little than too much.

“It was essentially a compromise number that is nice and rounded,” says Dr. St. Pierre. “Which puts into perspective how badly we have managed calories and serving sizes as a society.”

If this is true, it was simply based on the self reported average (guess) of how many calories people were eating, further rounded down by 16% for no apparent reason, not how many calories they needed, and neither an upper limit nor a lower minimum.

LOL, can you say :woman_shrugging::man_shrugging::woman_shrugging::man_shrugging:

(Geoffrey) #39

That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. That confirmed what I had heard. So it’s basically just made up like most of the so called scientific data that’s published about diet and nutrition.
We get locked into what we are told all our lives that so often we don’t question it.
This is one of the reasons I like this community is that many people here are willing to break free of the norm and question the science.
So I believe the best way to determine proper calorie intake is to be your own N of 1.
Find what works best for you and then stick with it.