Eating 1200 Calories and Not Losing Weight? Here's Why

14 Dec 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:03

The speaker cites a New England Journal of Medicine study in which obese participants claimed to consume only 1,200 calories per day. When the participants later weighed and tracked their food, they were found to under‑report their intake by nearly 50%, effectively eating about twice the reported amount. This misestimation explains why many people do not lose weight despite believing they are in a calorie deficit. The speaker concludes by urging viewers to weigh and log their food for a week to discover the true caloric intake.

Chapters

If you're somebody who just eyeballs their portion size, then I have some bad news for you. There was a study done in the New England Journal of Medicine where researchers looked at obese patients who reported they were only eating 1,200 calories per day, which is crazy because how can you be obese only eating 1,200 calories per day? Well, that's where they found something interesting. The patients weren't actually weighing their food out and tracking their calories. They were just guesstimating. So when they went back and tracked their calories, they found they were underreporting their calories by almost 50%, meaning they were eating actually twice the amount of calories they thought they were, and that's why they weren't losing weight. So if you're someone who you eat pretty healthy and you think you're in a calorie deficit, I would challenge you to actually weigh out your food for the next week, and you might be shocked at the results.