Only 1200 a day?

I've still been counting calories and I find it a bit helpful. I mean, it's good to know what I'm putting in my mouth all the time, but it's difficult sometimes to stay on track anyway.

I read in the newspaper today that the average woman only needs 1200 calories a day. Seriously! That would be half of what I eat in a day so I've been keeping it to below 2000/day. Mostly. Restaurants are the most difficult - their portion sizes are huge! I ate at Red Robin recently and my burger alone was over 1100 calories. That's just ridiculously big. Good burger though :)

The other problem I have is, of course, emotional eating. I ate a slice of cake today even though I wasn't really hungry for it. Actually, I liked the first bit that I had. It satisfied my want of chocolate. But I didn't need to eat the rest of the slice just because it was sitting in front of me. I totally Polar-beared it, according to Martha Beck. I ate the cake too fast to see what I really wanted. My mind was on auto pilot and even though I told myself I could walk away from it, I still ate it. So I still need to work on that. Sigh.