Maintenance on weekends??

Kittyy1994

Hi everyone, has anyone had experience of eating maintenance on weekend and still lost weight? I’m not talking over eating just eating at maintenance for 2 days per week. Anyone do this?

paperpudding

Well, not exactly.

But, sure, if you eat at a deficit for 5 days and then at maitenance for 2 days you will still lose weight - but more slowly.

Many of us do view our calories as a weekly allownace -so as long as you eat to your weekly allowance - ie over 7 days you average your daily allowance but some days might be higher than others - then that would work too.

Kittyy1994

Forgot to add I am only looking to lose about 4kg/9lbs so am losing slowly on 1700 cal per day

jesspen91

Another approach that I've seen work is to save your exercise calories for the weekend so that you're still at the same weekly deficit but have a bit more to work with at weekends

CarvedTones

The biggest trouble I have with calorie cycles is mental. Having dessert a couple of days and then not for several days is hard for me. If you are just choosing the burger over the grilled chicken during the day of drinking socially (which I can't do), then it would be easier.

LivingtheLeanDream

Even in maintenance I eat at slight deficit during the week so I can eat more on the weekends. Same for losing, bank some cals during the week so you can eat at maintenance during the weekend and still lose.

BrettWithPKU

If you can succeed with the on-again/off-again, flopping back and forth between weight loss and maintenance--and provided you can keep the two separate and never blur those dividing lines--then go for it.
I would speculate that most people don't have that kind of self-control.

kshama2001

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Hi everyone, has anyone had experience of eating maintenance on weekend and still lost weight? I’m not talking over eating just eating at maintenance for 2 days per week. Anyone do this?

I don't do this, but sure, it would work.

I like to eat more on the weekends too, but I exercise more those days, not being chained to my desk for 8 hours.

SCoil123

When losing I always focused on my weekly total calories. It was less stressful for me and I knew if I was over goal one day it really wouldn’t derail my plans as long as my weekly average was good

Cassandraw3

There were a lot of weeks where I did this. I would be good at having a 500 calorie deficit during the week, then I would eat about my maintenance calories on the weekends. I had my goal set to lose 1 lb/week, and by doing this I averaged 3.5 lbs a month (there were about 3 months where I did this). It will slightly slow your rate, but you will still lose if you are in an overall deficit. I say, do it if it works for you.

cmriverside

I find that if I over-eat on two days it leads to a lot of hunger for a couple days when I try to drop back to the lower calories. YMMV

apullum

Mathematically and in theory, you can do this and it would work just fine.

For someone with so little weight to lose, I would caution that you need to be a) VERY confident that your logging is correct and b) okay with seeing even slower change on the scale than you otherwise would.

The reason why I say this is because for most people who are close to their goals, their calorie deficit is very small already. It's easy to accidentally wipe it out with a few logging errors. Eating more for two days per week could mean introducing more error, especially if "eating at maintenance" for you means going out to eat or otherwise eating things that can't be logged accurately. Many of us who are in maintenance find that MFP's maintenance calorie goal is not entirely accurate for us, and that it's not that much more than what we ate when we were losing. So you would definitely be intentionally decreasing your weekly deficit, and you could unintentionally decrease it even more than you had intended.

The other thing about eating more on the weekends is that it may make the scale go up due to extra undigested food and/or water weight. This can mask what many people already find to be very slow weight loss as they get close to their goal weights.

hesn92

I'm kind of a nerd and I am keeping a spreadsheet where I enter my daily calories in and out (according to fitbit) and then total up my weekly net calories. So doing what you've suggested would be really easy. I'd just aim for a target total deficit on a weekly basis.

brandigyrl81

jesspen91 wrote: »

Another approach that I've seen work is to save your exercise calories for the weekend so that you're still at the same weekly deficit but have a bit more to work with at weekends

This. I used to do this all the time. I would burn anywhere between 700-1000 calories during the week from exercising and would use those exercise calories on the weekend to eat whatever I wanted and I was still losing weight at a normal pace.