Am I really ready to switch to maintenance?

Womona wrote: »

I was only over my weight goal of 115 by about 3 pounds (weight creep due to a new medication - had to nip it in the bud!). However, I had a colonoscopy and the prep for it got me back down to 115. So, I switched my goals to maintenance and MFP upped my calories to 1600 from 1200. I think 1600 is a much more realistic amount of food to ingest - 1200 was nearly impossible even if I didn't pork out on snacks and a huge dinner. However, if I stick with maintenance cals of 1600, will the weight just come right back on? Or should I stay with weight loss goal and keep myself at 1200 cals?

BTW this scene from "The Devil Wears Prada" is pretty memorable:

Anne Hathaway "Emily, you look so.......thin!"
Emily Blunt "Really? ... I'm only one stomach flu away from my goal weight."

Many people find a slow transition up to their maintenance calories helpful to avoid scale rebound. If your recent weight loss was due to a colonoscopy prep (ick - hope the results were good) then you likely lost a lot of water weight which could come back on anyway.

A lot of people also find that maintenance is a range of maybe 5 pounds that they hover between - if you are happy with going back up a little and having a range of 115-120 then yes, it might be a good time to start transitioning to maintenance.

I would probably do 1400 for a couple weeks, then go up to 1600 though, if it were me.

Also, if you're relying on MFP to calculate your maintenance calories, you may find that it won't be exact. Adding increments of calories more slowly will give you more opportunity to figure that out.

I hope you've already realized that if your food, weight & activity logging is accurate, you can use your MFP data to get your own customized maintenance calorie estimate.

If you were eating 1200, and 1600 is truly your maintenance calories, you should've been losing about 0.8 pounds a week recently. If that's not what's been happening, then multiply your recent average weekly loss in pounds by 3500 (3500 calories, approximately, to a pound). Divide that by 7 to get a daily deficit estimate. Add that daily deficit estimate onto the 1200 you've been eating, and that should be a rough estimate of your maintenance calories.

Note that I've simplified: This assumes net calorie approach throughout, or TDEE with consistent exercise throughout, but you can do the arithmetic to adjust that assumption, too.

MFP's vanilla calculations are pretty close for most people, but can be noticeably off for a few folks.