Life after Optavia

Mikeems911

I started Optavia 11/10/19 at 246lbs, my goal was to give it a 2 month chance to do its thing and see where i was after, as a start-up to a better smaller be. I stopped the day after Christmas with a weight of 215lbs. Since then i have been trying to maintain a caloric intake of around 1,800 calories. I have been hovering around 219-220 for the last several weeks. I added exercise 2xwk, not every week and got back on my cycling trainer at least 2x week, more if i can. Each workout yeilds approx 250 to 450 caloric burn. My caloric intake does exceed 1,800 some days but i make pretty good choices when it does. I drink no added sugar drinks anymore, just water or coffee or unsweetened iced tea, no sugar in my coffee, just enough half and half to make it tanish. No white carbs, no candy, no milk, no cheese.
So for my age and height, 41 and 5'10 respectively, my caloric intake with moderate exercise should be around 2,300 calories.
My questions are:

What kind of effect did the diet have on my metabolism? I feel like i'm under eating for my daily requirements but my body is still used to the 1,000 calorie a day Optavia diet and is sort of holding on to my calories for fear of starving, lol.

I try and keep a 40% 40% 20% macro diet but is that what i should be doing?

Should i be eating more calories?

Help!

Thank you in advance
Mike

lgfrie

Sounds like you had a big weight loss success with Optavia, although obviously doing 1,000 cals a day for 6 weeks and losing 5 lbs/week is not sustainable (or advisable) over the long term, so managing it yourself going forward, as you are now doing, makes sense.

TDEEcalculator.net says your maintenance is around 2,200. So the 1,800 sounds right, just be patient and the weight will fall off. It is not unusual at all after a period of hard core dieting to see the scale graph level off for a while, but that is temporary. The laws of chemistry and physics will reassert themselves in due time. Keep doing what you're doing. Better yet, go to the MFP goals tab, bang in your numbers and goal, and whatever caloric number it gives you, just eat that everyday, no more or less. The MFP goals tool is pretty reliable as far as producing the desired weight loss rate over time.

Now to your questions. Your diet had no effect at all on your metabolism. Diets don't change a metabolism. The only thing that happens is that as you lose weight, the rate of fat loss slows down - approximately 5.5 calories/day for every pound you lose. So you've lost 26 pounds and therefore you are burning around 140 calories less per day than when you started in November.

Macros don't matter for weight loss. Nor does white carbs, candy, milk, or cheese. Of course these things do matter for general health, but not weight loss. You can eat 1800 calories of pound cake if you want and still lose weight.

If you eat more calories, you will lose less weight. It's chemistry and physics.

Final comment: just go to the MFP tool, get your daily calorie target, and hit it, and you will get results. It works for nearly everyone, and I only put "nearly" there because there are no guarantees in life. It basically works for everyone. But be patient. 6 weeks is the widely accepted amount of time that you have to just roll with the punches as far as scale fluctuations. A few weeks is not enough time to draw any conclusions.