Maintenance for the long weekend?

When we know zero about your demographic details, it's hard to know whether 2600 is reasonable, or not. If you know from personal experience - not MFP, a calorie calculator or even fitness tracker - that 2000 calories is 1.5 pounds of loss per week, then 2600 isn't maintenance. Maintenance would be around 2750 (500 daily calories per pound change per week, roughly, so 750 calories + 2000 in your case).

MFP's estimate for me is 25-30% too low (compared with 9+ years of quite consistent logging experience). My good brand/model fitness tracker - one that gives reasonably accurate estimates for others who've talked about it here - is equally far off. It can happen, and personal experience tells the truer story.

I'm not as active as Springlering62 above, but I'm closer to "old as dirt" than she is (I'm 69), plus severely hypothyroid (medicated). I maintain in the lower 130s pounds at 5'5" on 2000-2100 calories, as a retired woman with a mostly sedentary life, and that's before adding exercise calories and eating all of those, too. With the exercise, it's more like 2300-2500.

2600 is not crazy high. If a calculator/tracker gives you that estimate, I'd say try it. If personal experience over many weeks of logging gives you that estimate, definitely eat it. The idea that all women need to eat like tiny little birds is a destructive myth. (Yes, some older, less active, more petite women will need to eat that little, maybe even a bit less, to lose weight, but way far from all of us.)

Remember, though, as you quite rationally enjoy your holiday: Eating more will add a bit of scale weight temporarily - maybe up to a few pounds - from additional amounts of waste in the digestive tract, on the way to the exit. Eating more and differently will add some water weight, very likely several pounds, from water retention needed to digest/metabolize those foods. Neither of those scale-distorters is fat gain, so it's not worth a moment's worry. It'll drop off in a few days to a couple of weeks, without doing anything special except going back to your more usual healthy routine. If you still have menstrual cycles, it could even take until the same relative point in the next cycle for that scale distortion to end . . . but it's still a water/waste issue, not a fat issue. Don't panic or catastrophize, just get back on a sensibly moderate loss plan, be patient, and the clouds will clear.

Good plan to go to maintenance calories for the holiday: I like it. I'm in maintenance now (year 8+, after decades of overweight/obesity), so I'm at more or less maintenance calories all the time. It's good. Enjoy it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Janellew86 wrote: »

Well, I'm over my maintenance. Evidently not hard to do on Thanksgiving. Back to the dieting tomorrow.

It's Thanksgiving. Sometimes life and enjoying it with your family is more important than a diet. It's just one day. You'll be back to it tomorrow!

While SafariGalNYC's post resonates with me - because it's easy to let a holiDAY slide into holiMONTHs - I feel that it is useful to recognize that one truly rare day is a drop in the ocean, and that the routine day-in, day-out habits are the ocean.

@Janellew86, if you're back on plan as soon as practical you'll be fine . . . even if you have a little bit of actual maintenance practice now and than in your overall plan. Maintenance breaks during loss can be a useful learning tool, too.