Losing weight by eating at your goal maintenance

teamholderhh1913

Has anyone tried the approach of choosing your goal weight and eating at that maintenance to lose weight?

Here I am again needing to lose 40 pounds at 41 years old.

I can get obsessive about counting calories, weighing food , and using my Fitbit to record every calorie. I want to take a more relaxed approach this time for my mental health even if it takes awhile to get there.

88olds

Have you crunched the numbers? Your maintenance number at 40 lbs less might start you off at a pretty aggressive deficit. Few people want to hear this kind of talk but losing 40 lbs in a year that gets you to goal weight is pretty ambitious. How does a year sound to you?

I lost the last 35 lbs of 100 on Weight Watchers. WW is just calorie counting dressed up for copyright protection. I found the ever shrinking points allowance helpful. I didn’t have to make any big changes all at once. But I had made some pretty big changes by the end. It seemed to work like a puzzle game. How am I going to get enough tasty food this week with fewer WW points?

To lose we need to eat in a calorie deficit and we have to live with it. There’s a tendency to go all in on the deficit and try to beat ourselves into living with it. I think a go slow approach is a wise one. It will help when you get to goal weight. But the ever shrinking target provides time to make adjustments. Good luck.

But wait, there’s more. I think the calculators and gadgets provide guidelines, not answers. You can set everything to lose 1 lb in a week, hit every target and lose 1/2 or 1 1/2. Or maybe 0, or gain. The calculators are based on statistics and averages, but no one is exactly average. We really don’t know how many calories we are using unless hooked up in a lab. Add to this the fact that calorie counting involves a lot of gray areas. And unless we are making everything from scratch in our own kitchen, we are relying on others to give us accurate info. Calorie counting is mostly learned through trial and error. What works for me might not work for you. That includes the calorie targets. It drives a lot of people to quit.

AnnPT77

I tried it for a while, during which I was rough-counting calories on paper, not logging meticulously.

Two things happened:

(1.) I realized that it was going too slowly to be satisfying for me. (That, even though what 88olds says about speed is accurate: It can be too fast or too slow, depending on starting point among other things.)
(2) I started stalling out, i.e., loss slowing even more. That's when I joined MFP, started logging accurately, and started losing faster. (Too fast for a while, unintentionally - long irrelevant story.)

But I don't think that's much help for you.

If you do the math, using a TDEE calculator or MFP to estimate your current and future maintenance calories, you can get a rough estimate of how it might work for you (subject to what 88olds said about the calculators giving you a statistical average for people similar to you, which may or may not be individually accurate . . . but you'll figure out in a month or so of trial whether you're average or not).

If it looks like you wouldn't be losing too fast at first based on the theory, why not give it a try?

What is "too fast"? Common rule of thumb around here is to lose at most 0.5-1% of current body weight per week, with a bias toward the lower end of that if your current weight isn't in itself a health threat, and if you aren't under close medical supervision for deficiencies, complications, and what not - fast loss can be risky. Slower than that is fine, too, just will take longer to show up on the scale amidst routine daily multi-pound water weight and digestive contents fluctuations.

Seems like I've read some posts here on rare occasions from people trying or succeeding with that strategy, but it doesn't seem super common.

There are other maybe more relaxed approaches that could work too:

If logging/counting itself isn't too stressful, maybe just go for half a pound a week loss. (That will also take multiple weeks to show up on the scale, but otherwise is easier than going fast.)

If counting itself is part of the problem, maybe try revising habits gradually without counting, see what happens: Gradually eat smaller portions, eat less often, reduce frequency of things you know are calorie dense (fried foods, baked goods), eat more veggies, cut out/down soda pop or sweet coffee/tea if you drink those, move more in daily life or add a little manageable exercise, etc. (Not all of that at once: Gradual, step at a time!) My dad lost a bunch of weight intentionally, pretty much this way, late in life.

Some people find that eating fewer meals (like skipping breakfast) works well for them without spiking appetite, but others find the opposite. You might have an inkling of what could work for you, or you could experiment, if timing of eating seems like something you could play with without getting stressed.

There are options. Don't be afraid to experiment: I'm betting you can find an approach that will work for you, and a manageable stress level.

Best wishes!

cwolfman13

I looked into it when I started working on my COVID weight. The difference in my calorie needs at 200 and 180 is only about 140 calories per day, so it would be way too slow for me and leave very little room for any kind of error. Our of curiosity I looked at what that would be if I had 40 Lbs to lose and the difference is only about 280 calories...still pretty slow. I tried 1/2 Lb per week once upon a time and it's pretty frustrating and it takes about 6 weeks just to be able to start seeing a trend.

nossmf

The concept of "eat as you want to eventually be" is based around the concept of making a single change to eating habits, from current to desired, and then never having to change again.

In one sense it's helpful as it avoids a scenario where somebody makes drastic wholesale changes to a "diet" of denial, then upon reaching goal weight make a second drastic change to "normal" and overshooting, resulting in regaining weight.

The downside, as noted above, it will be slower to reach goal weight than if you actively try to lose the weight. Comparing a couple years to the rest of your life, slow and steady may be just fine. Others may have medical (or vanity) reasons to accelerate the process.

While it ultimately is a perfectly viable strategy of living, it's not particularly practical, as pointed out by the numbers @cwolfman13 identified: the difference in daily calories between weights is quite small, so small that simple logging errors can easily make up that difference (estimating a quarter cup when reality is a third for example).