Increasing Calories

itsallgood11

If you’ve been undereating in terms of calories (800/900 a day) and suddenly increase to higher to maintain weight (1200-1600) will this cause weight gain?

harper16

800-900 calories a day is not healthy. Why would you be eating so little? 1200 is the min for a woman who is older or living a sedentary lifestyle. The min for a man is 1500.

When you enter your info into mfp what calories does it give?

Jackie9003

Unless you literally don't move all day and are very short you are not likely to maintain at 1200.
Put your stats into mfp and set it to maintain, this is your target.
You may see an initial gain when you up your calories as you'll have more food/waste in your system and you may retain extra water for your body to process it, ride this out for a few weeks and it should balance itself out.

itsallgood11

It says 1850 to maintain, 1350 to lose 1lb/week

deannalfisher

You’ll get some initial water weight increase but not fat

Also 1lb a week may be too agressive depending on how much you have to lose

GaryRuns

You'll gain weight if you eat more calories than you burn. MFP, and lots of other web sites, can estimate what your daily calorie burn is, based on age, weight, height, estimated activity level, etc., but it's all an estimate. If you're going to use the MFP value, and you want to gain weight, then take that 1850, add a couple of hundred calories and watch your weight trend. Note weight trend, not what you weigh on a specific day, but some type of average, because your day-to-day weight will vary depending on water retention, food digestion, hydration, etc. Use something like Libra or TrendWeight. If you're not gaining, or gaining too slowly after 2 or 3 weeks of that then add 200 or so more calories. Keep doing this until you're satisfied with the rate of weight gain.

slbbw

There will be a small spike as you adjust your calories up. This likely will come from the weight of the food and water weight. If you are still at a deficit it will continue to decrease after that. I started last year at an overly aggressive deficit which I icreased every month or so after the first two months. Each time I went up there was a slight shift.