When you get to your goal weight

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rikkejanell2014
rikkejanell2014 Posts: 312 Member
in Goal: Maintaining Weight
when you get to your goal weight will you still have to eat at a low calorie deficit or will that go up to maintain your weight?

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  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,565 Member
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    If you continue to eat in a deficit, you'll continue to lose weight. So yes, you'll have to move to maintenance.
  • BlessedBeyondMsr
    BlessedBeyondMsr Posts: 65 Member
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    Hi... I reached my goal a few months back and want to continue on MFP with a maintenance program. Anyone know of a good group to join on here for maintainers, that might be of help to me? TIA and Happy New Year!
  • everher
    everher Posts: 909 Member
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    I'll try to explain this plainly.

    At a lower weight, your body will need fewer calories to maintain said weight than at a higher weight.

    So even once you hit your goal weight you will still have to eat fewer calories than you did before losing weight.
  • kkress92
    kkress92 Posts: 118 Member
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    Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the number of calories needed to maintain your body weight and provide enough energy for all activities of daily life. This is what is often referred to around here as "maintenance " calories.

    Eating at a calorie deficit means eating less than your TDEE - hence causing you to lose weight.

    Eating at a calorie surplus means eating more calories than your TDEE. This would cause a weight gain.

    So, to answer your question, once you have arrived at your goal weight, you generally want to increase your caloric intake to eat at TDEE. There are many online calculators that can give you a general sense of what your TDEE is. Just google TDEE calculator. The caveat is that you may need to adjust up or down a wee bit as there are variations across the population.
  • Rocknut53
    Rocknut53 Posts: 1,794 Member
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    I'm at maintenance and have found I have a really disappointingly narrow window for calorie intake. Finding the right balance is sometimes a little frustrating.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,868 Member
    edited January 2017
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    rikkejanell2014 wrote: »
    when you get to your goal weight will you still have to eat at a low calorie deficit or will that go up to maintain your weight?

    If you were still eating a deficit, you'd still lose weight...do you understand what a deficit is?

    You will be smaller, so your maintenance will be lower than it was when you were bigger...but actually eating a deficit would cause further weight loss simply by definition of an energy deficiency.
  • neldabg
    neldabg Posts: 1,452 Member
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    In addition to what everyone has written, when you reach maintenance, it's a good idea to slowly add back calories to adjust better.
  • leanjogreen18
    leanjogreen18 Posts: 2,492 Member
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    This might help...

    http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/

    You have a certain amount of calories you can eat to maintain your weight loss. The TDEE calculator will help give you a general idea of what you can eat when you get to your goal weight (enter your goal weight instead of current weight).
  • GottaBurnEmAll
    GottaBurnEmAll Posts: 7,722 Member
    edited January 2017
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    OP, do you understand that different sized bodies require different calorie amounts to maintain their weight? Numerous other factors go into that weight maintenance including gender (which influences muscle mass), age, and overall activity levels.

    Your weight at maintenance will require a different amount of calories to maintain than your weight before you experienced weight loss did. As such, you'll have to eat at a possibly different calorie level. It might be the same calorie level if you were sedentary before losing weight and have now become active (in my case, this will be true).

    What you won't be doing is eating at a deficit, which implies eating less calories than you burn. What you can't do is go back to your old habits, or you'll just regain all the weight you lost.
  • nowine4me
    nowine4me Posts: 3,985 Member
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    Plug your current stats into MFP with a goal of Maintain. Do what it says for 30 days and adjust accordingly.
  • lorrpb
    lorrpb Posts: 11,464 Member
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    Some people eat a slight deficit, like 250 per day, to allow for estimation errors and a few extra treats as desired.

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