How big a deficit can I have?

leesey147 wrote: »

tdeecalculator.net estimates 1659 for maintenance so I’m using that as a starting point.
I am listening and really appreciate your advice. I want to do it right and be successful.

Experience is a better guide than any calculator. Calculators spit out population averages. You're an individual.

Your experiece - strictly speaking - is a little on the too-short side to be a good guide.

But even 3 weeks experience suggests - not weakly! - that your maintenance calories are not 1600.

Just for fun, I went to TDEEcalculator.net, and put in my data, at sedentary. It says my sedentary maintenance is 1369. Nearly 5 years of careful logging experience tells me that I maintain around 2000 calories (before exercise - up or down a bit seasonally, but around that). It's wrong by 600 calories, more or less - around 30% low. And I'm truly sedentary. (I suspect you aren't, so your light exercise calories from that calculator would be more like 1900.)

If I ate what that calculator recommends (which I wouldn't, and quite probably couldn't), I'd lose much more rapidly than any sensible person should at my current size. That would be - frankly - a risky and therefore dumb thing for me to do.

I suggested you could eat 500 more calories daily and still lose a pound a week because your (too-short) experience is suggesting you could actually eat 1000 calories more daily, and still lose a pound a week.

Your TDEE is very unlikely, based on your experience, to be 1600. Possible? Sure. Anything is possible. Really not likely.

@Duck_Puddle is right.