Don't make my mistake and eat too little to try and lose weight faster

Long time lurker here and have never posted so quick backstory. For stats I'm 5ft 10in male in my early twenties and currently weigh around 230 pounds (~33 BMI). About 2 years ago I got really sick of being fat and started my weight loss journey and I lost 20 pounds over 3 months. I didn't really notice much difference in how I looked but some of clothes fit better. Then my last year of school started and it was stressful so the stress eating began and by the end of the school year I was up 40 pounds! I was so disappointed in myself that I ruined all the progress I made.

Anyways that brings me back to around 2 weeks ago where I decided once again to get back on this journey. I ordered a smart scale (Wyze Scale for $20 has great reviews and it really is an impressive device). I didn't care much about how accurate the other stats were but what I did care about was the trend of the numbers. Is my body fat going up or down or is my muscle mass going up or down?

So anyway I've been doing intermittent fasting and here's where my problem began, I was overestimating my calories by too much. If I got to the point where I got to ~900 calories a day I would call that good as some of the stuff I ate probably had more calories than I thought it did. For the past couple of days I've been weighing myself and my weight was going down around a pound (sometimes 2) a day and I was really happy but I noticed that my body fat had actually started to go up and my muscle mass would down by around the same amount of weight I lost. This started to worry me and I realized that I've actually probably been eating too little. So for the past few days I've started to eat more around 1200-1300 calories and there has been small fluctuations in my weight which is more normal since you should only lose 1-2 pounds a week not a day. But my body fat numbers have started to come down again and my muscle mass is increasing back to where I began. Again I'm sure the actual numbers aren't too accurate but the trend between numbers should be.

TL;DR: Don't be dumb like me and try to lose weight fast be eating less than you should otherwise you're probably losing more muscle than fat. Also buy a smart scale they are way more useful than I expected.

submitted by /u/Hupro
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