Calories, and how to count them

 I didn't want to call this one Drama 3, since the actual interaction went just fine. I have hypothyroidism, and half of it was removed when I was 14. I've been taking hormones since.

This monday I went to an endocrinologist, to get results, a prescription and... dunno, a shoulder to cry on. She did look at my results, said they were okay and that I should keep my current dosage, which I will definitely will do, and was glad to hear. Then she asked if I had any problems at all - yes, this turned into a discussion about periods. So now I have an appointment with a gynecologist, and will have to do blood tests too.

We did talk a little about my weight - first she only asked if there had been any changes to my weight in the past year. I told her I gained 25 kilos in 2020 and was now trying to lose that. I had lost 10 kilos in the past two months. We carried on for a while, but then returned to this and she said she'd calculate my BMI. I said it would be around 38. She asked me if I had calculated it - I said no, my scale does, and I just remembered. But I track muscle and fat percentage, and not the BMI. She said that's useful for sportspeople, to which I said "I wouldn't say I'm a sportsman per se, but I have been doing martial arts for five years, and these past two months I have been working out every day."

Then she gave me the prescriptions, medical letter, all the good stuff.

She recommends that I eat many fruits and vegetables, less fried foods, the usual thing. She also recommends I have 1500 calories a day. This froze my blood. My scale also tries to calculate some calories whenever I stand on it - I'm not sure whether that's my BMR, but it is over 2000 calories. Still, I went to the TDEE calculator, entered my numbers and found out that my BMR is around 1700 calories, while with the amount of working out I do, I can need up to 3000 in a day. Which, as we can easily notice, is double the amount I was told to eat. So, this put me in a bit of a shock, but I tried to move past it.

The implications, however, are much worse for me. I cannot do calorie counting. I don't have the energy to analyze what I eat, to weigh it and yada yada. I don't trust the apps to get the count right, be it the amount I burn or the amount I eat. Besides, counting what I eat always feels so restrictive. I just end up looking at the other piece of food and wish I could eat it. Then I say, why can't I eat it? So I do, and then I feel bad about not sticking to the count.

With the utmost honesty, just allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted has been the best decision of my life. I am aware that the intense exercise is doing a lot in the department of me losing weight, and yes, we do say that you can't out-exercise a bad diet, but frankly, I'm not trying to out-exercise anything. I know I'll need to be more intensive with my training as I lose weight, but another aspect that I don't know how to describe is... I'm wanting different foods now. I don't want to eat everything in sight, I have fullness cues, and my emotions don't tell me to disregard them.

All in all, frankly, I am insulted with that 1500 calorie recommendation. I will be going back to this doctor, because she was genuinely helpful, but I wish there was some way to just avoid this. 1500 seems so arbitrary - not only is it barely higher than the horrible 1200 we get from weightloss apps, it's basically the number of calories people in a starvation experiment were fed. If I wanted to be dramatic, I could say mine is lower, since I was told to work within the interval of 1400 and 1500, while (as the Methods section suggests) the participants were eating 1560 calories. I'm genuinely considering going back to this doctor with that wikipedia page open. And yes, these were cis men in the experiment, whose metabolism is a bit faster than cis women's, so it might not have as drastic of an effect on me as it did on these guys. But I'm also not gonna touch calorie counting, ever.