Keeping it off
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GloriaBJN
Posts: 78 Member
I reached my 60 lb weight loss goal and added an extra 130 calories to my daily intake, in hopes of just maintaining the goal instead of continued weight loss. I gained an instant weight gain, not sinificant, but not sure what my intake should be now. I had a super fast weight loss, losing 60 lbs from Aug 17th, 2022. Where do I go from here? I was at 1430 calories and tried 1600 right after I reached my goal, but decided to cut back to 1500.
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Replies
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How long have you been at 1600? A few days, a few weeks, a few months? How much did you gain? A few ounces, a few pounds, more? If it has been a few days, have patience. Could easily be water weight from a number of sources. If it has been months and you've noticed a trend of weight gain since that would be a different situation.
Has anything else changed? Such as did you cut back on your activity/exercise when you reached goal weight? Are you still logging with the same level of accuracy?
Looked at your discussion history and on Mar 4 you posted/mentioned that you had 6 pounds left on your 60 pound goal. So it would seem you reached that 60 pound loss a week or so ago? In which case, try to have patience. Perhaps give yourself a range for maintenance of +/- 2 pounds. Because staying at one exact # on the scale is not likely to happen and can drive one mad trying.
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How long have you been at 1600? A few days, a few weeks, a few months? How much did you gain? A few ounces, a few pounds, more? If it has been a few days, have patience. Could easily be water weight from a number of sources. If it has been months and you've noticed a trend of weight gain since that would be a different situation.
Has anything else changed? Such as did you cut back on your activity/exercise when you reached goal weight? Are you still logging with the same level of accuracy?
Looked at your discussion history and on Mar 4 you posted/mentioned that you had 6 pounds left on your 60 pound goal. So it would seem you reached that 60 pound loss a week or so ago? In which case, try to have patience. Perhaps give yourself a range for maintenance of +/- 2 pounds. Because staying at one exact # on the scale is not likely to happen and can drive one mad trying.
I have a cold so my physical activities are down only slightly. I've always leaned towards sedentary. I know I'm a swift reactor to weight gain, but want to correct error instead of it becoming a setback. Do you know what my calories should be now?0 -
I've spent a large part of my dieting being hungry. Just eat when I'm hungry and keep weighing in but keep logging to stay on track?1
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If you've been logging food then you should already have some idea of your calorie needs. 3500 calories is generally accepted as equivalent to one pound, so use that and your past calorie intake to calculate according to your past weight loss.
There is a forum for "Maintaining Weight" where you can read about others' experiences, but this is truly your experiment and your numbers.
Here is a handful of threads from the top of the maintaining forum, these are the pinned/sticky threads called "Most Helpful" at the top:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10300324/most-helpful-posts-goal-maintaining-weight-must-reads#latest2 -
Congrats on the loss.
You're doing the right thing, raising calories slowly. 130 would only add at most about one pound per month if you were previously at maintenance, so if you're seeing more gain, it's just water and to be expected.
Keep raising slowly by 100 or so every few weeks until you find your maintenance level. Then maintain a range, not a weight. If you reach the high end of the range, reduce a little for a while.
And be less sedentary. It should be easier with 60 pounds off.
I lost 60 pounds a couple of years ago, and have since maintained at that lowest weight +5 pounds, in a +/- 5 range around there. I wouldn't expect to maintain at my lowest weight, because of water.2 -
About a month ago I ate GMO corn and my stomach has been unsettled ever since. I kind of stopped eating my allowed calories because nothing felt good, plus I was chomping at the bit to reach my goal.0
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Retroguy2000 wrote: »Congrats on the loss.
You're doing the right thing, raising calories slowly. 130 would only add at most about one pound per month if you were previously at maintenance, so if you're seeing more gain, it's just water and to be expected.
Keep raising slowly by 100 or so every few weeks until you find your maintenance level. Then maintain a range, not a weight. If you reach the high end of the range, reduce a little for a while.
And be less sedentary. It should be easier with 60 pounds off.
I lost 60 pounds a couple of years ago, and have since maintained at that lowest weight +5 pounds, in a +/- 5 range around there. I wouldn't expect to maintain at my lowest weight, because of water.
Thanks Retroguy. In that case, maybe my goal should have been 160. lol. I actually have a size 16 goal rather than the magic 165 I was allowing for my age, but I haven't pulled my size 16 clothing out yet. That'll have to wait til Spring when I feel like going into storage, and then I'll have to reassess again.0 -
cmriverside wrote: »If you've been logging food then you should already have some idea of your calorie needs. 3500 calories is generally accepted as equivalent to one pound, so use that and your past calorie intake to calculate according to your past weight loss.
There is a forum for "Maintaining Weight" where you can read about others' experiences, but this is truly your experiment and your numbers.
Here is a handful of threads from the top of the maintaining forum, these are the pinned/sticky threads called "Most Helpful" at the top:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10300324/most-helpful-posts-goal-maintaining-weight-must-reads#latest
Thanks. I'll delve into those posts.0 -
Okay so you have to ignore my math. I started with adding 170 calories, not 130.0
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What's done is done. I say that as someone who would no go about things as you have. But you are you and what works for you won't necessarily work for me.
With a fast loss and losing on willpower while permanently hungry it is way too early to be talking about eating based on hunger cues.
Maintain for a year plus and then let's have that talk.
In the meanwhile out doesn't sound like you have been using a weight trend app. Could be useful.
Do you know at what point of your monthly cycle you gain and lose weight? You might not have been able to see this losing rapidly. You will when losing slowly or at maintenance. It's good info.
On what do you base your 1600? If the last month is not representative of logged calories and loss, the one before can act as a starting point. Or the average of any logged time period where you have info on calories in, out, and weight change.
If you have no info, then there's sailrabbit to get a population level generic estimate
If you were low(er) carb, part of your initial loss was borrowed water weight which will come back when you're eating a sufficient amount of carbs for your body to replace glycogen. The same would apply to a degree if you cut calories a lot.
At 130 Cal a day over maintenance it will take a good month for your weight to go up by a lb. Any weight increase that was faster and larger is non stored fat change related, i.e. water weight.
If you have not been eating anything because of upset stomach (I do hear that many grandmothers and even pharmacies and doctors have remedies to fixing diet upsets as opposed to using them as weight loss opportunities) then it would be expected that you would gain some non fat scale weight when you start eating more normally.
My one day of upset tummy a few weeks back resulted in an atypical 3lb drop that was not seen since.... which makes sense once you truly realize that the scale measures more than just fat and fat change, hence again the concept of weight LEVEL and weight trend over time.
Without knowing your stats unless you're very small and of a fairly advanced age and truly sedentary 1600 is probably still a slower weight loss level.
As to being sedentary if your body is capable of not being... as someone else mentioned: don't be.
There is more to health than just weight and a little bit of movement doesn't hurt anyone without physical impediments.
Please note that a proxy for sedentary is about 3500 steps a day. By the time you hit 5000 you're entering lightly active. This represents less than an hour a day of the negative of not moving. So how about saying no to not moving twice a day for 15 minutes a day to start... you'll be "active" in no time
Eating more and losing slowly in the end is a good strategy.
If you want to maintain your loss you will have to continue working on this. For even longer than you have been already. Time to realize that this dance requires some effort yes, but it does not require white knuckles all the time. Time to discover the power of small changes multiplied by time instead of all or nothing thinking.
You may have interpreted your goal as just getting to goal weight. It's time to build a structure and things you like to do at maintenance and while weight reduced and figure out a way to exist that doesn't require white knuckles.... just small changes again and again7 -
Congratulations @GloriaBJN ! Wow, what an effort!
Just about everyone who uses this web site and, in particular, spends time reading these chat boards has some difficulty maintaining their weight. (Usually, they tend heavier, but some tend lighter.) And, "weight maintenance" means that your average weight is stable. You probably know now that your daily weight can vary +/- 2lbs easily. It's hard to stay frosty about daily variations, but that's exactly what we all need to learn to do.
You lost 60lbs in 31 weeks, which is close to 2lbs/week. That is pretty fast. In general, it means you had a net deficit close to 1000kcals, giving a weekly deficit of close to 7000kcals. How do we know that? Because there is about ~3500kcals in a pound of body fat when utilized by your body. This would imply that you can eat around 1000kcals more per day on maintenance.
Now, I assume some of your deficit was due to exercise. I find that I need rest days, particularly as I get older. This means you need to account for days where you don't burn as many calories. I always shoot to eat on the lower side during the week so I can eat a little more on the weekends.
I wish you the best of luck with all this. It really helps to keep tracking and weigh every day in the morning after the toilet in minimal clothing. When you indulge at a party or elsewhere, "just" balance it by cutting back for the next few days. Yes, it's all a big challenge for us all or we wouldn't spend so much time talking about it!
Best of luck!4 -
How long have you been at 1600? A few days, a few weeks, a few months? How much did you gain? A few ounces, a few pounds, more? If it has been a few days, have patience. Could easily be water weight from a number of sources. If it has been months and you've noticed a trend of weight gain since that would be a different situation.
Has anything else changed? Such as did you cut back on your activity/exercise when you reached goal weight? Are you still logging with the same level of accuracy?
Looked at your discussion history and on Mar 4 you posted/mentioned that you had 6 pounds left on your 60 pound goal. So it would seem you reached that 60 pound loss a week or so ago? In which case, try to have patience. Perhaps give yourself a range for maintenance of +/- 2 pounds. Because staying at one exact # on the scale is not likely to happen and can drive one mad trying.
I have a cold so my physical activities are down only slightly. I've always leaned towards sedentary. I know I'm a swift reactor to weight gain, but want to correct error instead of it becoming a setback. Do you know what my calories should be now?
If you have a cold, probably you have sinus or chest congestion. If you're ill (in almost any way, even if mild), you almost certainly have inflammation. (In this case, inflammation is a good thing, part of the healing process.)
Guess what? The gunk that is congestion has a weight, and it includes some water. Inflammation increases water retention, too.
Those things, among many, many others, add water weight on the scale. It's mathematically impossible for you to gain even a pound from an extra 170 calories daily of food (or that much less movement, or a combination) in anything less than around 50 days. Nearly inescapable conclusion: Your weight gain isn't fat. If you'd been losing weight at a reasonable clip (more than half a pound a week) pretty reliably right before that, it's even more inescapable a conclusion.
On another thread, it was suggested that you read this:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations/p1
Or maybe it was suggested that you read the article linked in the first post of that. That was excellent advice. Read both.
I understand being somewhat anxious at the end of weight loss, heading into maintenance. It's gonna be OK. Really. You can figure this out. It may take a few weeks, but please try not to stress too much during those weeks. A bit of scale roller-coaster is normal. And guess what's another thing that increase water retention? Stress.
You've done a great job losing. You can do maintenance, too. I'm cheering for you!6 -
What's done is done. I say that as someone who would no go about things as you have. But you are you and what works for you won't necessarily work for me.
With a fast loss and losing on willpower while permanently hungry it is way too early to be talking about eating based on hunger cues.
Maintain for a year plus and then let's have that talk.
In the meanwhile out doesn't sound like you have been using a weight trend app. Could be useful.
Do you know at what point of your monthly cycle you gain and lose weight? You might not have been able to see this losing rapidly. You will when losing slowly or at maintenance. It's good info.
On what do you base your 1600? If the last month is not representative of logged calories and loss, the one before can act as a starting point. Or the average of any logged time period where you have info on calories in, out, and weight change.
If you have no info, then there's sailrabbit to get a population level generic estimate
If you were low(er) carb, part of your initial loss was borrowed water weight which will come back when you're eating a sufficient amount of carbs for your body to replace glycogen. The same would apply to a degree if you cut calories a lot.
At 130 Cal a day over maintenance it will take a good month for your weight to go up by a lb. Any weight increase that was faster and larger is non stored fat change related, i.e. water weight.
If you have not been eating anything because of upset stomach (I do hear that many grandmothers and even pharmacies and doctors have remedies to fixing diet upsets as opposed to using them as weight loss opportunities) then it would be expected that you would gain some non fat scale weight when you start eating more normally.
My one day of upset tummy a few weeks back resulted in an atypical 3lb drop that was not seen since.... which makes sense once you truly realize that the scale measures more than just fat and fat change, hence again the concept of weight LEVEL and weight trend over time.
Without knowing your stats unless you're very small and of a fairly advanced age and truly sedentary 1600 is probably still a slower weight loss level.
As to being sedentary if your body is capable of not being... as someone else mentioned: don't be.
There is more to health than just weight and a little bit of movement doesn't hurt anyone without physical impediments.
Please note that a proxy for sedentary is about 3500 steps a day. By the time you hit 5000 you're entering lightly active. This represents less than an hour a day of the negative of not moving. So how about saying no to not moving twice a day for 15 minutes a day to start... you'll be "active" in no time
Eating more and losing slowly in the end is a good strategy.
If you want to maintain your loss you will have to continue working on this. For even longer than you have been already. Time to realize that this dance requires some effort yes, but it does not require white knuckles all the time. Time to discover the power of small changes multiplied by time instead of all or nothing thinking.
You may have interpreted your goal as just getting to goal weight. It's time to build a structure and things you like to do at maintenance and while weight reduced and figure out a way to exist that doesn't require white knuckles.... just small changes again and again
Actually I wasn't trying to rush to a fast weight loss. I stayed strictly within the 1430 calorie limitation plus exercise calories that MFP tallied for me at the start of my diet, and have logged virtually everything. I realize that I'll have to stay on the program for an extended length of time beyond my goal weight. I've also decided that I don't mind continuing to lose while I try to find my balance, as long as I'm not "always hungry"; but even before I gained the weight, I had to control my appetite, so restricting my intake isn't anything new or foreign to me. I just abandoned that somewhere along the way. Thanks for your response.1 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Congratulations @GloriaBJN ! Wow, what an effort!
Just about everyone who uses this web site and, in particular, spends time reading these chat boards has some difficulty maintaining their weight. (Usually, they tend heavier, but some tend lighter.) And, "weight maintenance" means that your average weight is stable. You probably know now that your daily weight can vary +/- 2lbs easily. It's hard to stay frosty about daily variations, but that's exactly what we all need to learn to do.
You lost 60lbs in 31 weeks, which is close to 2lbs/week. That is pretty fast. In general, it means you had a net deficit close to 1000kcals, giving a weekly deficit of close to 7000kcals. How do we know that? Because there is about ~3500kcals in a pound of body fat when utilized by your body. This would imply that you can eat around 1000kcals more per day on maintenance.
Now, I assume some of your deficit was due to exercise. I find that I need rest days, particularly as I get older. This means you need to account for days where you don't burn as many calories. I always shoot to eat on the lower side during the week so I can eat a little more on the weekends.
I wish you the best of luck with all this. It really helps to keep tracking and weigh every day in the morning after the toilet in minimal clothing. When you indulge at a party or elsewhere, "just" balance it by cutting back for the next few days. Yes, it's all a big challenge for us all or we wouldn't spend so much time talking about it!
Best of luck!
Are you saying I could eat 2400 calories per day for maintenance, but work my way up to that? I used a calculator that suggested 1700-1800 calories for a wide weight range. My stomach is so shrunk.0 -
Raise calories slowly. Give your body time to adjust. You'll figure out your maintenance level and sustainable weight range along the way.1
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I always gain weight when I am ill even when I'm not really eating. I think AnnPT77 is right on point.1
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Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Congratulations @GloriaBJN ! Wow, what an effort!
Just about everyone who uses this web site and, in particular, spends time reading these chat boards has some difficulty maintaining their weight. (Usually, they tend heavier, but some tend lighter.) And, "weight maintenance" means that your average weight is stable. You probably know now that your daily weight can vary +/- 2lbs easily. It's hard to stay frosty about daily variations, but that's exactly what we all need to learn to do.
You lost 60lbs in 31 weeks, which is close to 2lbs/week. That is pretty fast. In general, it means you had a net deficit close to 1000kcals, giving a weekly deficit of close to 7000kcals. How do we know that? Because there is about ~3500kcals in a pound of body fat when utilized by your body. This would imply that you can eat around 1000kcals more per day on maintenance.
Now, I assume some of your deficit was due to exercise. I find that I need rest days, particularly as I get older. This means you need to account for days where you don't burn as many calories. I always shoot to eat on the lower side during the week so I can eat a little more on the weekends.
I wish you the best of luck with all this. It really helps to keep tracking and weigh every day in the morning after the toilet in minimal clothing. When you indulge at a party or elsewhere, "just" balance it by cutting back for the next few days. Yes, it's all a big challenge for us all or we wouldn't spend so much time talking about it!
Best of luck!
Are you saying I could eat 2400 calories per day for maintenance, but work my way up to that? I used a calculator that suggested 1700-1800 calories for a wide weight range. My stomach is so shrunk.
It's possible, but no one else knows the answer. You can figure out the answer by sticking to a sensibly increased calorie goal for 4-6 weeks, then looking at the average weekly result over that time.
If you tweak calories or your activity routine extremely often, you're less likely to figure it out. (If you have menstrual cycles, compare body weight at the same relative point in each of two or more different monthly cycles to assess whether you're likely gaining, maintaining, or losing.)
It sounds like you may've lost faster than expected on the calorie goal MFP gave you, but it's unclear to me whether that was because you tried to eat even less a lot of the time.
MFP gives you a calorie goal that's the statistical average amount needed for people like you to lose at the requested rate (or maintain, if that's what you ask it for). But you're not a statistical average, you're an individual. Most people are close to average, a few may be noticeably high or low, and a rare few may be quite surprisingly much higher or lower. It may not be obvious why it's so, but it's a thing a person can figure out, if they monitor their own eating, activity, and body weight over multi-week periods. It's like a fun science fair experiment with a potentially great payoff.
The implication is that no calculator, fitness tracker, or other individual human's experience can tell you for sure how many calories you need to eat. But you can figure it out, and it's not super difficult.
4 -
Just to add to some of the excellent posts. In addition to 'water', adding more food can easily result in minor changes to bowel movement, meaning there is just more undigested food in the GI. Definitely do not panic if you see the scale weight go up a bit. Just as CMRiverside mentioned, ~3500 calories surplus will be approximately 1 lb of fat gain. It sounds like you are doing some resistance training, so its possible some of this could also go to muscle protein synthesis.1
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Are you saying I could eat 2400 calories per day for maintenance, but work my way up to that? I used a calculator that suggested 1700-1800 calories for a wide weight range. My stomach is so shrunk.
@AnnPT77 gave some important caveats above.
The important point is that an individual loses 2lbs/week at a certain amount of calories per day (including accounting for activities and exercise), then that individual will maintain at about 1000kcals/day more at the same level of activity.
There are important assumptions in that statement: 1) you are measuring your intake accurately, 2) you account accurately for exercise.
Your plan of 1400kcals/day plus exercise calories would make me lose just slightly more than a pound a week. I don't know your stats, so I can't comment on how it led you to lose 2 pounds per week, but I take it at face value. I assume exercise calories contributed to your deficit.
As @AnnPT77 suggests, it makes sense to add ~500kcals to your plan for a month and see what happens. This brings you close to my base maintenance plan. (I'm an average sized male geezer.)
My basic suggestion after a loss is KEEP WEIGHING AND LOGGING AS LONG AS YOU CAN. The job is never over.
Best of luck!3 -
I suggest go slower than that, or she may gain weight. Her body is used to current calorie levels, so raise slowly, and hopefully increase activity over time too, both intentional and NEAT. i.e. reverse dieting. Keep raising slowly until the scale shows it's too much.Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »it makes sense to add ~500kcals to your plan for a month and see what happens. This brings you close to my base maintenance plan. (I'm an average sized male geezer.)1
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