Struggling

AliceDark

Think back to when you first started losing weight. I'm sure it felt difficult or unfamiliar at first. Maintenance is no different; it relies on a slightly new set of behaviors that you haven't practiced yet. It might just take a little bit of time to recalibrate. You'll get used to it, and it'll feel normal to you (just like losing weight feels normal to you now).

bbell1985

It's not hard to add a couple hundred calories to your day. Cook with butter, have an extra snack, don't eat low fat dairy. Boom. 500-600 calories.

AnnPT77

Your own loss history is your best guide to maintenance calories:

* Look at your last 4 weeks (or around that) of loss.
* Average those weeks to get average weekly calories eaten, and average weekly pounds lost.
* Multiply average weekly pounds lost by 3500 (roughly 3500 calories in a pound) to get average weekly calorie deficit
* Add average weekly calories eaten to average weekly calorie deficit to get average weekly calories needed to maintain.
* Divide average weekly calories needed to maintain by 7 (days per week) to get estimated daily calories needed to maintain.

If you've been logging exercise separately and eating it back and want to continue that, use net calories eaten in the above arithmetic. Otherwise, use gross calories eaten.

Optionally, if you want to minimize visible (though irrelevant) scale jump from glycogen replenishment and/or increased average digestive system contents, and maybe ease your way into eating more, increase calories eaten gradually. To start, add 100-200 daily calories (depending on the size of your estimated total gap to be filled).

Eat that for a week, or until you satisfy yourself that you're not gaining fat (be reasonable - a weight-trending app and knowledge of your own fluctuation patterns will be helpful). Then add another 100 calories daily. Monitor again. Repeat until scale weight stabilizes.

If you use this approach, and keep your activity level more or less consistent, there's no possible way you'll gain a big bunch of weight suddenly. The worst that can happen is that you'll overshoot by 50-100 calories, which is less than a one-pound gain in a month's time. And it's likely that by increasing gradually, you'll have dropped a pound or two along the way from a tiny and shrinking deficit , so you'll be even up right around goal weight.

Then, set a goal weight range of a number of pounds that slightly exceeds your normal daily weight fluctuations. For example, if you rarely see more than a two pound daily fluctuation, set a range of goal weight plus/minus 3. If you go above the top of the range more than a day or three, cut back eating a little, or increase activity. If you drop below the low end, add a couple walnuts to your oatmeal.

Even if you don't have a way to estimate your maintenance calories all that accurately, you can do this "gradual add back" thing to find maintenance calories experimentally. You don't have to stress out about calculator estimates.