Week off - how much do you adjust?

HoneyBadger302

I've been working out pretty consistently since July, steadily increasing my intensity and slowly but steadily losing some weight.

I'm pet sitting for a friend this week, which is involving a significant hunk of my time (most of that driving back and forth), so I decided to take this as a good week to take a break from the gym. I'll still be doing some light cardio, but nothing compared to my normal workouts. My day job is sitting at a desk all day.

If/when you take a break, what or how much do you adjust your eating? Completely cut out the "exercise calories," slight adjustment, no adjustment?

My typical workouts are 17-35 minutes of relatively intense cardio followed by ~90 minutes of weight lifting (progressive overload, 45-60 sec rests between sets...pretty typical routine that way). 5x/week, 2 rest days.

I would like to keep my losses steady (~0.5 pound/week) and not lose ground this week, but also want to give my body a good chance to fully recover so I can 'hit the ground running' again next week.

I'm thinking I'll stick to the lower end of my "normal" calorie range, and try to accept slower losses for the week, but just curious what others typically do.

lorrpb

Keep it proportional to your exercise. If you normally eat back half your exercise calories, for example, then eat back half the exercise calories that you earn this week.

sardelsa

Your plan sounds good, slowing your losses down.

What I personally do, if I can't lift I eat at maintenace and take a diet break. I just eat more and use my trend weight and adjust.
Reason being I am already within a healthy weight so I would rather not risk any extra muscle loss. But if you have more to lose there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking your losses slow especially if you think you will lose momentum.

middlehaitch

Your exercise routine would be a 300 cal burn for me so I would drop that amount if I was wanting to keep my 0.5 lbs loss.

It being just a week, I’d take a total diet break if you haven’t had one recently.

What ever you choose to do I know you know it won’t have a great impact on your bigger picture.

Cheers, h.

Shortgirlrunning

I add in all my exercise so I would just eat whatever MFP tells me to before adding in any exercise.

HoneyBadger302

sardelsa wrote: »

Your plan sounds good, slowing your losses down.

What I personally do, if I can't lift I eat at maintenace and take a diet break. I just eat more and use my trend weight and adjust.
Reason being I am already within a healthy weight so I would rather not risk any extra muscle loss. But if you have more to lose there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking your losses slow especially if you think you will lose momentum.

I have very little left to lose - maybe 10 or so vanity pounds, but well within a healthy weight range (~143, 5'7"). I would rather have a couple pound uptick (which would mostly be water weight/replenishment) than risk losing muscle.

sardelsa

HoneyBadger155 wrote: »

sardelsa wrote: »

Your plan sounds good, slowing your losses down.

What I personally do, if I can't lift I eat at maintenace and take a diet break. I just eat more and use my trend weight and adjust.
Reason being I am already within a healthy weight so I would rather not risk any extra muscle loss. But if you have more to lose there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking your losses slow especially if you think you will lose momentum.

I have very little left to lose - maybe 10 or so vanity pounds, but well within a healthy weight range (~143, 5'7"). I would rather have a couple pound uptick (which would mostly be water weight/replenishment) than risk losing muscle.

Its really only one week I wouldn't worry too much. People get the flu all the time, and (provided it's not weeks or months) they lose very minimal (if any) muscle. I'm just so overly cautious because of how hard it was to put on during my bulks. If you haven't had a break in a while it will probably feel nice to have an increase in calories.

cupcakesandproteinshakes

For a week I wouldn’t change anything. It’s tiny in the grand scheme of things and you know what your long term plan is.