Determining maintanance calories

If you're losing weight as a general trend, you're not eating at maintenance. You'll know if you upped it too much because you'll gain weight as a general trend.

This is trial and error. You are loosing weight because you are still in a deficit. There is no other explanation other than you are not eating enough to maintain the weight yet or you need a doctor to rule out any medical related issues.

Not everyone will be the same, so if you are loosing, UP the calories again. Why not use the three week rule as the same as for eating at the deficit. If you need a shorter period, then try two weeks out.

ConicalFern wrote: »

How long do people normally use as their 'sample' period for determining maintenance calories? Can my weight loss explained by something other than not eating enough calories?

I normally wait 3-4 weeks before making any changes. Considering you've lost almost 2 lbs in 12 days, I would raise your calories now and than monitor for a few weeks.

ConicalFern wrote: »

cwolfman13 wrote: »

If you're losing weight as a general trend, you're not eating at maintenance. You'll know if you upped it too much because you'll gain weight as a general trend.

Thanks, but I'm aware of the basic logic, but what I'm wondering is:

ConicalFern wrote: »

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How long do people normally use as their 'sample' period for determining maintenance calories? Can my weight loss explained by something other than not eating enough calories?

I guess I don't know what you mean by "sample period". When I went to maintenance I just let my calories creep up until, as a general trend, I was maintaining weight. Also be aware that you'll likely have a higher calorie amount than you think you would...just as your metabolism slows when you diet, it speeds up when you "reverse diet".

When I went to maintenance, given my rate of loss, I thought it would be somewhere around 2500 calories because I had started losing so slowly at 2300...my maintenance (three years now) is somewhere around 2800-3000...as I started eating more, everything just started firing on all cylinders. I think also my workouts got better because I simply had more energy to really go so I'm sure that played a roll as well.

How large a deficit were you running before you started trying to maintain? If it was more than 250, you are hungry during the day and want to eat more, and you are still losing weight rapidly, I don't see any reason to only add 100 every few weeks. You have your data, including trendweight, which tells you your current level of calories is too low. Has trendweight been pretty accurate for you so far? If so, and it says you are eating 300+ under maintenance, unless you are trying to lose a few more pounds before actually maintaining, why not eat more now?

I think the advice to wait a few weeks on a partcular calorie level is more relevant when you are very close to maintenance calories and you are monitoring as you continue on and less so if you are coming off a larger deficit and trying to find maintenance calories.

I actually do it a little differently these days and just leave my goal as 2000 + exercise calories all the time and simply under or overeat depending on what I'm seeking to achieve.
I don't bother with analysis of trends. I just weigh myself daily and go on what I feel is the underlying long term trend. It makes it relaxed and flexible which suits me better.

To me a long term trend is at least three weeks, my weight follows my calorie balance over time but can take weeks to even out fluctuations.

StealthHealth wrote: »

I think you need at least a 2 week period to identify a real trend or plateau. More for any women reading this (OP is male) where TOTM occurs in that window.

I used to work in a manufacturing environment and we used process control charts to identify trends, step changes, and outliers. I've often wondered if the PCC equations would be suitable for weight monitoring. If I remember rightly you needed 10 consecutive points on one side of the moving average line to identify a step change (such as weight loss or gain). Does anyone have any experience of this technique?

That's interesting. I remember using these charts in several classes as I was getting my MBA, but I've never thought about them in terms of weight loss. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you could control all the factors that go into weight fluctuations (water retention, for example), so I'm not sure if it would work as well as you're suggesting.

StealthHealth wrote: »

@5stringjeff Yeah I think you're right: I think that you would end up making nearly every point an outlier - never getting a stable enough data set to say "this is a trend".

Interesting was that, when I used them in industry, with experience, you could just look at the plotted data (without all the trend lines and data point markers etc) and identify set points and outliers. In other words, they were really used as a way of formalizing/standardizing/quantifying what people do naturally: Spot trends and patterns.

I think that's the idea behind people using a trailing 28-day average weight, and then comparing their daily weigh-ins to that average. The outliers point to days when *something* significant happened; the process is to then figure out what and why, so they can implement some sort of change.