too little calories?

[Vitticeps]

Ok, here's my background...

I'm a 33 year old man. I'm currently about 220lbs. I've worn a size 34 waist for about the last 18 years. Recently my pants have become too tight and I was forced to buy 36's. This made me realize that it's time to make some changes. I'm getting older and my metabolism is slowing down.

I've never really eaten healthy. Fast food was 75% of my diet and the other 25% wasn't much better. I very seldom do any exercise activity. I do however work on my feet for 9+ hours a day.

About two weeks ago I decided to change my eating habits. The first change was to eliminate soft drinks. The second change was to start eating smaller, more frequent meals and healthy ones at that.

I'm only two weeks into this new routine but so far the transition has really been effortless.

I started using fitday.com to track my calorie intake. I am eating right at 2100 calories per day now. Even at that level, I'm never really hungry because I'm eating every few hours.

I also used fitday.com to plug in a few average days prior to making these changes to see what my calorie intake was before. I was eating/drinking 4500-5000 and sometimes up to 6000 calories per day if my sweet tooth was in full effect.

This brings me to my question:

I have been 210-220lbs for the last 15-18 years and I would estimate based on what I know now that I was averaging about 5000 calories a day to maintain that weight. So would a 2500+ calorie reduction be too extreme? I'm not sure how I would get more calories than the 2100 i've been averaging without eating at least some "junk" food.

I'm just worried that cutting my intake in half may be extreme.

 

[Dallen]

Typically in fast food, the calories are fairly high for low amount of food. For example, a single Big Mac is roughly 550-600 cals, and that isn't a whole lot of food, especially if it's your only meal of the day. Since you said you ate a lot of fast food in the past, it is very likely that the 5000 calories simply came from fast food and junk food. If you ate three meals (or even just 1 or 2) solely on fast food, you can easily top it at 4000-5000 cals without any effort or even you knowing about it.

With that said, I think it's perfectly fine to reduce your cals by that much. In my opinion if you start eating like a healthy person of your size, age, and sex, then it wouldn't matter if you were eating 10,000 cals per day in the past, because your body only needs so many calories to live, which you seem to have found.

Oh and you seem to have hit a stump in your age. Typically, eating just 100 excess calories per day, will make you fairly obese later in your life. So if you ate just 100-200 excess calories 18 years ago, then now in your middle age (almost middle age'd), you're starting to see the progress of this small, but significant excess.

Good luck and come back with your progress.