So, a bit of background before I get into what’s been bothering me. 5 months ago I was at my heaviest, 117 Kg. At 175cm that put me dangerously close to grade 3 obesity, I knew people that were in a less dire scenario that even had to have gastric bypass surgery.
Wanting to change things as I was pre-diabetic and only 26 at the time I decided to shed the weight and started counting calories and exercising. I have been eating 1500 cals and exercising 6 days/week doing cardio all of the 6 days and strength training on 4. By my calculations this would leave me in a 700 cal deficit even without relying on whatever else I burned with the exercise.
Fortunately everything worked out and here I am 30 Kg lighter at 87 Kg with ~20% body fat. (To estimate body fat I’ve measured it with a bathroom scale, a 3-point caliper method and a tape measure method and averaged then out. I think that’s the best I can do without checking in with a professional.)
My goal weight right now would be 83Kg at 15% BF, which means I still need to lose about 4-5Kg of fat. I’ve adjusted my diet and exercise a bit so as to not lose the weight too fast as I’m concerned about shedding the muscle I gained while resistance training and I’m hoping to get there in about 4-6 weeks. At 83 Kg I’d still be considered overweight by BMI standards, but honestly I’m pretty happy with my body right now and I think most of the extra weight is lean mass. I’m confident that this is the right target.
With that extremely long intro out of the way let’s addres the problem here. I’m kinda stumped as to how to adjust my diet and exercise to maintenance levels once I hit my goal.
From using calculators online I get numbers that range from 2800-3200 cal and that just seems too high.
I also use an Apple Watch to estimate calories burned in a day and it frequently reports 3200-3300 cals/day for active days. I usually didn’t pay any mind to those values because I know that these trackers tend to overestimate but the number seems somewhat close to what the online calculators give.
The last thing I did was estimate my average caloric deficit for the last 5 months. Assuming that a deficit of 7,700 cal makes me lose 1Kg of Fat. Then 30 Kg * 7,700 cal= 231,000 cal deficit. In 153 days that’s 231,000/153=1,510 cal deficit/day. If I add this to my current intake of 1500 cal I get 3010 cal as maintenance.
All this is telling me that my maintenance should be at ~3000 cal, but this doesn’t seem right. How can my maintenance be double what I’m eating right now? I can’t even imagine doubling my intake after hitting my goal weight, I don’t even think I can manage 3000 cal/day anymore.
What’s on my mind right now is progressively increasing my intake week to week by about 250 cal until I gain a bit of weight. Then dialing it back down a bit and assume that’s maintenance. Is that reasonable?
If anyone could help me out here I’d appreciate it. Getting to the end of my weight loss journey is a bit scary because I don’t want to mess up my maintenance and having to do it all over again or end up losing more weight than I should.
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