Calorie cycling

There is some evidence that suggests calorie cycling mitigates our bodies natural compensatory metabolic responses that occur during long term calorie restriction:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5803575/

There are both mental and physical adaptations that occur to reduce energy expenditure when you follow a traditional calorie restricted diet where you just eat less and less as you lose. Increasing your calorie intake with calorie cycling or increasing exercise and eating back those calories might help.

I have always calorie cycled during weight loss. Not intentionally, just they way it worked out. I tend to eat below budget during the week and over budget on the weekends. I manage to a weekly budget and not a daily budget.

I used this approach 10 years ago and I lost my last pound at the same rate I lost the first one. It wasn't until I had reached my goal and maintained for a while that I learned the benefits.

If you eat the same weekly calories you are eating now but distribute them differently you will not gain weight, so there is no harm in trying and there is science behind the technique.

FitAgainBy55 wrote: »

There is some evidence that suggests calorie cycling mitigates our bodies natural compensatory metabolic responses that occur during long term calorie restriction:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5803575/

There are both mental and physical adaptations that occur to reduce energy expenditure when you follow a traditional calorie restricted diet where you just eat less and less as you lose. Increasing your calorie intake with calorie cycling or increasing exercise and eating back those calories might help.

I have always calorie cycled during weight loss. Not intentionally, just they way it worked out. I tend to eat below budget during the week and over budget on the weekends. I manage to a weekly budget and not a daily budget.

I used this approach 10 years ago and I lost my last pound at the same rate I lost the first one. It wasn't until I had reached my goal and maintained for a while that I learned the benefits.

If you eat the same weekly calories you are eating now but distribute them differently you will not gain weight, so there is no harm in trying and there is science behind the technique.

Please don't take this as a criticism, because I think that's good advice. This is more like a footnote.

I too tend to eat unevenly, i.e., calorie bank and occasionally eat indulgently, though it's not as tightly patterned as what you do, FitAgainBy55. (I'm retired: There are no weekends. 😉)

Someone who is very anxious about scale fluctuations, or very worried about fat regain with small weight changes, needs to be very aware that uneven calorie levels *may* result in more scale fluctuation, and potentially some fake stalls or even fake regains.

These are not "fat regain" as long as calories are in a sensible range. They are water weight changes. When we eat extra carbs, we tie up a little water in our bodies to metabolize those carbs (about 4g water per g or carbs, IMU), and the same if extra sodium (to balance electrolyte levels). There can also be a bit more food in digestive transit, on its way to becoming waste.

These are not fat gain, they're just what a healthy body does to keep us heathy. They're not worth a moment's worry . . . but that can be difficult for people who are especially scale sensitive.

(I know you know this stuff, FitAgainBy55. 🙂)

These same effects can happen if one goes to maintenance calories, as a helpful break. In that case, the scale jump may be bigger. It's still not fat regain. Generally, if the scale is up noticeably overnight, that's water weight. Unless there's a truly huge change in calorie intake (thousands of calories per day, or many hundreds over many days), fat regain tends to be a slow, creeping increase of scale weight over weeks, not an overnight jump. Abrupt changes are water and digestive contents, generally.

OP, what I wrote is NOT a reason not to take a maintenance break, NOT a reason to avoid varying calories. Those are both IMO good strategies. I'm just trying to make clear that if you do these things, you should anticipate that the scale may roller-coaster a bit for up to two or three weeks, perhaps more (in the case of a two-week maintenance break).

That would be natural, normal, if it happens . . . if you continue weighing, you can learn from it, about what your personal water weight patterns are, which can be very powerful and useful in evaluating progress in the future.

Please do try these strategies (varying calories, maintenance break), give them a fair shot, and commit to riding out any scale weirdness that may occur. It'll be fine, really.

Best wishes!