Has anyone eaten at maintenance calorie level of goal weight, to lose weight?

Great approach. You can always pick a month or two here and there to drop your calories if you want to kick it up a notch. FYI - at 5-7” and 135, my maintenance is closer to 2100.

I think there is a fallacy in the logic of this approach but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe because it doesn’t account for variation in maintenance cals over long term. Age? Activities level? Etc. I looked into it once years ago but it seemed like I would have had to have the patience of job.

By happenstance I lost weight on the calories I got for maintenance.

(Happenstance because I never thought to look at my maintenance cals until I was close to it)

Sedentary, 5’1, 130lbs, 54yo 1200 cals to lose 1lbs a week.

Maintenance, sedentary, 5’1, 105lbs, 55yo, 1200 cals to maintain.

It worked, it just slowed as my weight decreased. In fact, I just glided into maintenance because I stopped losing at 1200 and 105lbs. Ideal really.

NB: I ate all my exercise cals until the last 5 lbs when I shaved 25% off.

NB2: my NEAT has increased over 9yr of maintenance but, if I was ever totally sedentary again, 1200 would probably be accurate, but it is 10yr later.

Cheers, h.

That method probably only works if someone has a lot of weight to lose..I'm pretty sure I've seen other threads on this and people saying it did work for them.
At the end of the day losing weight happens when we take in less calories than we burn.