Losing weight faster than expected - eat back more exercise calories?

alleolala

I spent a few months adjusting my diet and increasing my exercise, in which time I lost almost a stone. I had 15lb of vanity weight left to lose when I joined MFP - I felt I needed to get a more accurate grip on what I was eating and spot any patterns, so that I could grind away the last of the weight and then find a maintenance that I could comfortably maintain.

I set my profile to drop 0.5lb a week; this is more about understanding my diet than blitzing the pounds! As a 26 year old female, 5'7" tall, with a real desk job this gave me 1550kcal per day. I have mostly used this as a weekly average, as I have a tendency to be ravenous the day after going to the gym, and so need more to eat those days. I've also noticed that once I start eating something I don't stop, regardless of serving size - this is something I'm working on.

So far I have lost between 1 and 2 pounds each week, for the last 4 weeks. I don't believe that this is all water weight as I haven't made any drastic changes to my diet or exercise; merely reduced some portions. Clearly I need to be eating more if I want to keep to 0.5lb per week.

Would you recommend that I eat back more of the exercise calories? I have been manually adjusting the MFP suggested burn down to 50% for every exercise; should I maybe log 75% and eat that back? Or do you have another recommendation?

Many thanks for any help!

allaboutthefood

You could start by 75% see how that goes and up is or decrease it as you need to? Congrats on your weight loss so far.

alleolala

Thank you very much! I'll give a go.

xcalygrl

Yep, bumping it up to 75% is spot on. Like allaboutthefood said, watch what your weight does for 2-4 weeks and then readjust (up or down) if you need to.

Good luck!

SLLRunner

Bumping up the calories is a good idea. Have you thought of bumping up your activity level to lightly active?

I too had this problem early at some point in my weight loss journey and was eating my exercise calories back. I have a desk job and had my settings to sedentary. What I did was increase to lightly active, which still had me losing weight quicker than I wanted, so I went to active and have been at this setting ever since.

I do move a lot outside of work too, so that, with any unintentional errors in logging, is probably why it works for me.

alleolala

Thanks for the advice, both.

I think I'll start with increasing to 75%, see what happens over the next few weeks then look at increasing my activity level if I'm still losing faster than I want.

Many thanks!