How long until i have to reduce calories more?

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Graciecandance
Graciecandance Posts: 11 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
When in a calorie defict, how many weeks until your metabolism catches up and you stop losing weight? If i was in a 1000 daily calorie deficit (still eating 1500 calories a day), how long until my body adapts?

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  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,335 Member
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    A smaller body consumes less energy, your daily calorie goal should go down as you lose weight, not based on how many weeks you have been in a deficit.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,925 Member
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    There exists no real answer. Maybe never?

    1000 Cal, especially if your TDEE is only 2500, represents a 40% deficit which is exceptionally aggressive even for an obese person who would probably be best off to limit their deficit to no more than 25% of TDEE (or an overweight or normal weight person where 20% is already aggressive).

    As you lose weight (and assuming you don't increase activity which is something that most people would naturally do when losing weight) your 1000 Cal deficit will grow smaller. But it unlikely to become zero anytime soon if ever.

    The closest to a scientific answer you will get is to use the body weight planner based on Kevin Hall's research (switch to expert mode and look at the actual simulation data): https://www.niddk.nih.gov/bwp
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
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    Graciecandance wrote: »
    When in a calorie defict, how many weeks until your metabolism catches up and you stop losing weight? If i was in a 1000 daily calorie deficit (still eating 1500 calories a day), how long until my body adapts?

    If it happens at all it is an answer that would be given in months not weeks.

    Your weight loss will slow as you get smaller and your energy demands drop however there are too many variables for it to be an easy answer. Your adherence, accuracy, stats, and changes in activity level all play a part.

    Thanks to an increase in activity my maintenance is only currently about 100 calories less than when I started 2 years and over 200 pounds ago. Because I am reasonably close to a goal range my 500 calorie deficit means I am eating more food than when I began too.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,838 Member
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    I'm a now-quite-small li'l ol' lady, age 64, 5'5", 131.4 pounds this morning, sedentary outside of intentional exercise, and hypothyroid if you believe that matters (IMO it doesn't).

    If I ate 1500 net calories, plus all my carefully-estimated exercise calories, I'd still lose weight at around 1.4 pounds per week, way faster than anyone my size has any rational reason to lose weight. I'd give decent odds that if I kept that up (I wouldn't, and probably couldn't stick to it), I'd probably keep losing weight until they had to hospitalize me.

    I admit I'm mysteriously a pretty good li'l ol' calorie burner, compared to others in my demographic, but the point is this: There's no magical point where your body stops losing weight, unless you reach that point where the calories you're eating are the number of calories you burn doing whatever you do each day. Whatever number that is, that would be your maintenance calories, and there you'll stop losing weight. (Many factors affect your maintenance calories, including subtle ones like potentially undereating so extremely that fatigue reduces your daily calorie expenditure.)

    Without knowing anything about you, we can't remotely predict what number that is, for you. MFP will predict that number for your current body weight (on a before-exercise basis), if you set your profile to "maintain weight", but that's only an estimate. TDEE calculators outside MFP will predict that for you (on an including-exercise basis) for any weight you might choose to input (that's an estimate, too)

    If you conscientiously count calories for a couple of months, you'll see how close the "calculator" estimates are for you, and you can adjust accordingly. In my personal experience, the percentage by which the calculators mis-estimate has been fairly consistent for me throughout weight loss and weight maintenance

    Many, many women of many sizes and ages would lose weight (rapidly or slowly) on 1500 gross calories daily. A minority percentage - most of them smallish, oldish, less active, or a combination - would maintain or gain on 1500 calories.

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