Hey, Heybales, thanks for replying.

As to your questions, my cardio is 30 minutes of my Leslie Sansone 5-mile fat-burning DVD (think walking with aerobics thrown in). I only do up to the 3-mile mark and my HRM says I burn 300 to 325 calories a session.

Weights is 1 hour sessions. It's not very much weight right now since I just started a month ago, but I curl 20 lbs an arm, bench press 40 lbs and do other exercises for arms with the same amount of weight. I also squat and do lunges with 40 lb dumbells and deadlift 50 lbs. Sets and reps are all 5x5 (like Strong Lifts). I do my own variation of the program. Definitely heavy for me. I go to failure.

I will bump up to BMR and follow the rest of what your instructions and see how things pan out. Thanks so much for the advice. :flowerforyou:

I noticed you said three meals a day from your scooby stats. I have no idea what your schedule is, but when I upped my calories, I would get really hungry, really quickly, so I am now eating about every 3 hours with more like 5-6 meals a day.
I am nowhere near the expert on EM2WL that heybales is, but I think if you are trying to speed up your metabolism, it makes sense to eat more often, not just more.
Good luck and if you start freaking out seeing weight gain, browse through the threads of everyone before you doing the same thing

The calories expended to digest food (metabolism increase you might say) is the same whether you eat 1 or 6 meals a day, if the food content and calories is the same.

Then comes personal preference, how much can you hold, how much to eat at once. Super stretched out stomach from fewer meals might have you feeling empty for longer periods. May make it harder to eat only the allowed amount for next meal.
If smaller makes the next meal reasonable, go for it.

Then comes personal effect on blood sugar. If big meals of similar macros cause big insulin hit, and your body drops blood sugar, likely will feel hungry early from that. If small meals do the same thing always keeping you in fat storage mode because system never recovers to normal insulin levels, not good either.
But smaller meals with enough protein and fat eaten first may not, so nice and steady.
While you do indeed burn first what you just ate, if you ate a huge breakfast and immediately went to desk job and sat - you didn't use up much energy, and by 3-4 hrs later depending on insulin response, excess is stored as fat. Then big lunch, sit more, store more.
But many smaller meals with same total calorie value that also goes unused because you are sitting all day - same effect.

Not really your metabolism, basal or resting, that deals with digesting food. That's part of TDEE. It's actually a part of TDEE not usually taken into account when folks do BMR plus exercise calories, because there is other daily activity burn and food digestion burn in there too.

So eating schedule doesn't really speed up metabolism like so many think. But eating enough on whatever schedule works for you consistently surely keeps it running as fast as it can.

The only thing about meal timing is size, and are you going into an inactive period where you won't use up the energy from the meal before it's stored as fat, and it wasn't replenishing glucose stores already used up.