Calorie limits and days off?

Keep the same calorie goal on your days off. It's fine.

I have a similar disconnect between my work days (twelve hours constantly moving on my feet and lifting patients) and days off (fairly sedentary despite workouts).

I split the difference by selecting "lightly active"- I'm probably slightly undershooting my real expenditure on work days and slightly overshooting on off days, but it seems to all pan out in the end, as I'm still losing steadily.

Unless you're very very short, very close to a normal weight for that very short height, and almost totally sedentary, it's highly unlikely that you were truly eating 1200-1400 calories a day and not losing. If all of these things are true for you- if you are very short with very little weight to lose- then 1.5 lbs/week is much too aggressive a goal for you.

It's extremely easy and common to underestimate calories in food. Tightening up your food weighing (weighing, not measuring) and logging should show you improved results.

Undereating, while it can make it hard for you to stick to the plan and while it carries other potential health risks over time, will not stop weight loss. If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. If you eat a lot less than you burn, you will lose a lot of weight*. If you believe you're eating many fewer calories than you burn and you're not losing weight, the answer is nearly always that you are not, in fact, burning more calories than you eat and you need to reexamine your assumptions about intake and output closely.



*disclaimer: don't do this, it's a bad idea on several levels and does not lead to long-term success.

The "starvation effect" is a wildly misunderstood concept that does not work the way you think it does.

If eating too few calories caused weight loss to stop, nobody would ever starve to death. Sufferers of anorexia nervosa would be pudgy, stomach cancer patients who can't eat would be rotund, countries in famine would be full of people with fat to lose. None of those things are true. People on starvation diets lose weight up up until the point their bodies cannot catabolize anything further without dying and then they die, because eating too few calories to maintain your weight causes weight loss. There is no magic by which a body that requires, say, 2000 calories to maintain, if given only 1500 calories a day, manages to retain all its fat for long. A body is a entity that runs on chemistry and physics, and while their are slight changes to your metabolism and composition that can make the precise numbers needed for a deficit change over time, meaning it's certainly possible to believe you're eating at a deficit when you are not, which will stall weight loss. But ultimately it does come down to eating fewer calories than you burn, full stop. First world dieters are not subject to some kind of exceptional rules of physiology that don't affect any other humans.

There are minor changes in metabolism- adaptive thermogenesis- while eating at a deficit- but the changes are proportional to the size of the deficit and are not enough to stop weight loss- they're just one more consideration in how you calculate your deficit over time. Starvation experiments a. saw huge weight loss despite slightly lowered metabolism and b. saw a rebound of metabolism in patients as soon as refeeding started.

AT *is* part of the reason that there's a daily minimum- that if you restrict too much, you'll see large amounts of weight loss, but will struggle to maintain that level of intake, and will have nowhere to go down within healthy, sustainable intake as a decrease in your size leads to a lower BMD and ongoing calorie restriction leads to mild adaptive thermogenesis- to maintain a rate of loss. Not because eating less won't cause weight loss while you're doing it. It certainly will- that's part of the cycle that keeps crash dieters doing it- they DO see weight loss. They just don't maintain it.

There are all kind of negative health effects from VLCD, they aren't sustainable, and I don't recommend them, but it's not because they stop weight loss.

There are things like medications that can make eating at a deficit much more challenging, usually because they increase hunger, making sticking to the diet more challenging, cause potentially huge fluid retention, masking loss for a long period and decreasing motivation, or cause decreasing energy levels and consequently a decrease in one's movement and TDEE. These are real issues that can affect your ability, practically speaking, to lose weight. But none of this comes down to "not losing weight because I ate too few calories." It just doesn't work that way.

Virtually always, the explanation for not losing on a deficit is that the deficit is not what the person believes it is.

This isn't a dig at you. Most people are bad at estimating calories in and calories out even with fairly close attention. That's why we're all here- for help with that.

Could you get an activity tracker that syncs and wear that to work. Then keep your activity level at sedentary and let it adjust for you?