Eating at maintenance calories and upping exercise

n_green_l wrote: »

Hello, ive been eating really over my maintenance calories last week because of christmas and have put weight on, about 8lb which might be mostly water weight.

My maintenance calories are 1850 and I have put that as sendentary on mfp as I work from home. Exercise this week I'm doing 10,000 steps a day and a 45 min HIIT workout 6 days this week. Will I lose weight or will it keep me at maintaining? I'm planning to cut my calories to 1/2 pound a week loss which puts me at 1500 after new years...

There is no way for us to know, unfortunately.

You haven't mentioned your size, or told us much about your activity level (if the 10k steps are daily life, not logged exercise, that's not sedentary . . . very few people are actually sedentary, which in MFP terms is roughly something below 4-5k steps daily, maybe lower. Even knowing more about you, it's important to recognize that MFP and other calculators only give estimates (basically the average calorie need for people similar to us), and each of us is individual. For most people, the calculators will be close, but they can be a bit off for some (high or low), and way off for a rare few people.

In order to gain 8 pounds of fat, you'd need to have eaten something like 28,000 calories over maintenance. I guess that's possible in theory in one week (4000 calories over maintenance every day of a week, on average), but it doesn't seem likely. Therefore, it's probable that some amount of the 8 pounds is water weight. For me, a week or two usually sorts things out on the scale. (Timing differs by person, though. If you're premenopausal, it might take a whole menstrual cycle to be sure.)

Is that amount of steps and the frequency/intensity of exercise something you've been doing often, or is it a big increase for you? If the latter, watch out for two things: Increased exercise can *increase* scale weight temporarily (water retention for muscle repair, so NBD, but scary if you don't expect it); and sudden high levels of activity/exercise (especially things like HIIT) can cause cumulative fatigue, which tends to counter-productively bleed calorie expenditure out of daily life (basically, from dragging around and resting more, in subtle ways).

How long have you been calorie counting? If you have a multi week/month experience, that should tell you how close you usually are to the MFP (or other calculator) calorie estimates, and give you better insight to what may happen now. If not, then unfortunately "wait and see" may be the best answer, since I don't think anyone else can accurately answer.

Don't let that 8 pounds make you over-react, in the short run, though. Sensible calorie intake is good, manageably increased exercise is good . . . but no need to panic because of the scale, and go beyond that.

All the best!