Eating at a deicit

grandma107

How much of eating at a deficit is acceptable. Put another way, how much of eating at a deficit is too much.

grandma107

Typo on the subject....Eating at a deficit

usmcmp

That's going to depend on a variety of things. Like:

-Getting adequate macro and micro nutrients
-Providing enough fuel for brain and metabolic activity
-Type of exercise you do
-Adherence

More is not always better. It's going to be harder to meet your bodies needs on a small number of calories. You may also see metabolic adaptations depending on how long you maintain a deficit. You could also lose lean body mass, which would impact your maintenance intake in the end (as well as body composition).

A great starting point for most people is eating 20% below what they would maintain weight at.

atypicalsmith

I eat at a deficit every day, but what I do eat is good. I exercise a lot (today I did nearly an hour of Zumba and 40 minutes on a stationery bicycle while watching, of all things, Food Network). I love bananas and other fruits, salmon, avocadoes, pistachios and other nuts, Greek yogurt, rye bread, pastrami, salad, and cheese, but even so, I can almost always keep my calorie count just below 1,200 by sticking to these basic core meals. I also eat Greek yogurt most days, and easily lost seven pounds in less than a month. Of course, during February, I hibernated because of the weather and gained back a couple, but I'm going to kill it in March!

Unknown

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ana3067

TDEE-20% as stated, good place to start. Although so far IME if you are near your goal weight (10-20lbs) then a 10%, maybe 15% deficit is far more reasonable. Although it was nice losing over 2lbs in the last 2 weeks, it also meant slightly poorer performance at the gym and I didn't really have the energy to do my extra cardio workout. Just upped my calories for that reason to TDEE-10%.

AmyRhubarb

My goal has been to eat as many calories as I can while still losing. For me, this started with a 20% cut from TDEE, and then dropping to about a 10% cut. It's been a successful and sustainable plan, as I've reached "goal weight" and maintained the loss for over three years now.

Vailara

I don't think there's a blanket figure. Somebody who is very heavy, with very high maintenance calories, can probably support a bigger deficit than somebody lower on the spectrum.