Me again 🙃

Egotrapped wrote: »

I reached my goal weight August 14. I started December 28, 22 quite by accident. My husband passed away and I started losing from grief.
After some time passed I found I liked being thinner so I joined MyFitnessPal.
Now I am 5 pounds below my goal weight I don’t want lose anymore. I keep adding calories yet the the weight is continuing to go down.
Normally, this would not worry me, however, I am going to be having spinal fusion surgery as I mentioned in a previous post .
October 5 is the day- 3 weeks away. I will be in the hospital 3 to 4 days and then looking at a 5 to 6 month recovery at home.
I have learned that I need twice as many calories while I am recovering. I don’t want gain but I do want to recover.
I don’t know what to do. Maybe I do need to accept that I will need to eat a lot more and then worry about it when it’s all over, but I’d rather not if there’s a way to manage this without too much weight gain.
I don’t know where to set the post op calorie goal.
I’m eating 18,000 cal a day and still losing. I’m 5 feet tall. I started at 136 - now I am 113. (goal 118/ I am 69 years)

Do you mean 1800 calories? 18,000 calories doesn't seem possible.

Where did you get the estimate that you need twice as many calories while recovering? That seems very high to me (speaking as a 67-year-old woman with some personal experience with surgical recovery while calorie counting).

I think your best option will be to estimate your maintenance calorie needs without exercise based on your personal logging history as best you can, then eat slightly above that - maybe 100-250 calories above daily, and see how that goes. To the extent that you do need more calories while healing, I'd expect that to be more true in the first month or so, less so once you're past the most acute phase of healing.

You can fine tune your eating level as you go along: Eat more if you seem to be losing, hold steady if weight stable, eat less if you've gained at an unacceptable rate. (I'm thinking you might be OK with regaining a little bit, slowly, while healing.)

You can manually update your calorie goal in MFP to any number you want. (I do that. It's possible even in free MFP.)

Realistically, you may find that you lose some muscle mass while recovering, since you'll be much less able to continue challenging your strength during recovery from a surgery like that. That may begin to depress your calorie needs slightly. Getting plenty of protein will mitigate that potential to the extent possible, and I'm sure you'll be trying to get excellent nutrition in other ways overall as well, for best healing.