Nervous About Increased Calorie Budget

Cindy01Louisiana

Since October 2021, I've lost nearly 25 pounds. Two of those pounds were lost in the last week. I read here a lot and I suspect I'm not eating enough even though I don't ever feel starved.

I only have 15ish pounds to go, so this morning, I upped my calories by 100 because I'd rather be losing between 1/2 and 3/4 of a pound per week than 1-2 pounds per week.

I am SO nervous about adding those calories and can envision myself staying under the original lower goal for fear of the graph trending UP instead of down.

sijomial

100 cals a day really isn't enough but hopefully doing it will start to take away the anxiety if that's all you are willing to try.

A suggestion would be to do the maths between your recent average rate of weight loss (over the last month rather just once week's results) and your desired rate of loss and at least halve that difference and then make smaller incremental increases over the following weeks.

Logically you know that if you trusted calorie counting to lose weight it also works to maintain weight or simply change your rate of loss. It's a battle between logic and emotion and numbers need to sit in the logical domain.

AnnPT77

If you've been losing at a good rate, there's no way that adding 100 calories daily will lead to fat regain, unless you retreat to your bed and stay there 24x7 or something extreme like that alongside. Activity level being constant, even if you went 100 calories over your weight-maintenance calories, it would take over a month to gain a pound of fat. Since you've been losing substantially faster than a pound a month, you'll continue to lose, just a teensy bit slower (around 0.2 pounds per week slower!).

At that small a difference, you're unlikely even to see any scale impact from slightly increased water retention (normal with food intake increase) and slightly higher average amounts food residue in your digestive system on the way to becoming waste. Those things will happen, but will tend to shyly hide behind routine daily weight fluctuations on your bodyweight scale.

If you do see any scale impact at all - which is unlikely - it can't possibly be fat regain, in your scenario, with all other routines and habits held constant.

I don't think you're in this situation, but we do occasionally see people here who can't bring themselves to go to maintenance calories when they reach goal weight, because when they try it, they see a tiny meaningless water weight fluctuation, think it's fat regain, over-react, and cut calories again . . . so they keep losing. That's not healthy either.

You're not at goal weight yet, so you're not in that scenario now, but I think you're doing a good thing now, training yourself to understand that increasing calories can be a health-promoting decision (because losing the last pounds really slowly is a good plan), and that small increases can't possibly cause big fat regain over short time horizons.

Also, starting to practice your maintenance habits - if you haven't already been eating in generally the ways you plan to use in maintenance - is a good thing to do now, while you still have just a small calorie deficit going. Then, once you get to a happy goal weight, there are no revolutionary changes needed, just that next small increment of calories to add, and maintenance habits are already in place.

You can do this: Wishing you much success in this phase of the process!