Video by alexisbushfield

If you're eating 1200 calories a day, doing cardio six days a week, and still not losing weight, maybe the problem isn't that you need to eat less, maybe the problem is actually that you should be eating more food. And before the calorie police show up in the comments, yes, a calorie deficit is required for fat loss, but that doesn't mean that eating as little as possible

is the smartest approach. Your body isn't stupid. When you've chronically been under eating, it starts adapting. You subconsciously move less throughout the day. Your training performance drops, your recovery gets worse, and your hunger increases. Your body is trying to conserve energy because it thinks that food is scarce. I've had clients come to me eating 12 to 1400 calories

saying, I don't understand why I'm not losing weight. Meanwhile, they're getting 6,000 subs a day, barely pushing themselves in the gym because they have no energy and spending half of their day thinking about their next meal. And then they're shocked when eating more actually helps because when we increase calories, they train harder, they recover better,

they maintain more muscle and they move more throughout the day and their deficit actually becomes something sustainable. Fat loss is not just about eating less. It's about creating a deficit while keeping your energy expenditure as high as possible. And starving yourself is a great way to do the opposite. Most people don't fail because they weren't in a deficit.

They fail because they created a deficit so aggressive that they could not sustain it. Eat enough to train hard, eat enough to recover, eat enough to maintain muscle, and watch what happens.