Upping calories works!

I've been dieting for about three and a half years now. I had great weight loss in the first year and I lost around 60lbs. The next 10-15 took a year. I went on a little diet break after that when I changed jobs and moved house and promptly put on 7lbs within the first two weeks. The next two years I seemed to lost that same 7lbs over and over again, and this past year I finished up at Christmas at exactly the same weight I was the Christmas before. So hey, at least I discovered how to maintain, but the frustration is I'd been eating at a deficit and exercising that whole time and getting nowhere.

I had a body composition scan done recently and had pretty good stats overall in terms of visceral fat, muscle mass etc, but my metabolic rate and BMR were lousy. Which I'd suspected anyway, given how hard I was trying and how little I was achieving - I figured I'd probably cut too low at the start of my diet, stayed too low for too long, and basically messed up my metabolism. I discovered with the body comp scan that my BMR was 1485, and I hadn't been netting that for a long long time.

I decided to try and reboot my metabolism. I started at 1400 and decided to up my calories each week by an average of 50, to take it slow and steady, until I reached the point where I gained a little, and then I'd drop back to the nearest 'safe' calorie level and stay there for a couple of months. I'd eat back all my exercise calories, all my FitBit adjustment, eat more protein, and I'd aim to be as near my goal as I could and not consider it an achievement being 200 or 300 calories under it.

So what happened? I started losing again! I'm currently up to 1600 calories net (usually around 2000 or more gross with exercise calories and FitBit adjustment) and the past month I've lost a pound a week. Since I started upping my calories I've lost 6 lbs. That'll slow and probably stop, because I'm still planning on working back up to maintenance and staying there for a while. But it's reassuring to know that it does work, that I can lose, and that once I decide to get back on the weight loss track I now know the healthy level to eat at and still lose.

So for all those like me who were worried about upping calories and gaining weight - here's a success story! Slow and steady and boom, the weight's coming off again, after literally almost two years of plateau and two steps forward, two steps back.