Calorie Intake for Weight Loss

Lietchi got it right: You're looking at too-small time chunks. IMO, because you have a lot to lose, you're thinking "faster is better". No. "Fast enough but not too fast" is best.

Look at your whole time between 3/7 and today. In that time, you had one roughly 3-week period in May when you lost nothing in scale weight. Water retention weirdness can do that.

Before that, 3/7-5/4, you lost 27 pounds in roughly 8 weeks, i.e., about 3.4 pounds per week, which is quite fast, even at your weight. You were eating such low calories that we'd expect some adaptive thermogenesis, which is our body slowing down what it can to avoid dying in what it can't tell from a famine. That's not an optimally healthy, thriving state. PP is right, there could be muscle loss, among other down-sides.

Since the short stall in May, you've lost 34.6 pounds from 5/28 to 6/19, roughly 3 weeks, so around 11.5 pounds per week. For sure, some of that was the drop of water retention that caused the scale stall.

But you say of those 3 weeks "This is clearly where I've seen the biggest drop and is why I can't make sense of eating more than I am."

There is a middle ground. Find that middle ground. Please. For the sake of your health.

Over the whole time period, 3/7 to 6/19, you've lost 61.6 pounds. That's roughly 14 weeks, more or less, if I do my arithmetic right. You've averaged 4.4 pounds a week. A bog chunk of that time you're eating calories so low that you can't possibly be getting adequate nutrition. In the recent weeks, you've lost health-threateningly fast, IMO.

A common rule of thumb around here is to lose no more than 0.5-1% of current body weight per week, with a bias toward the lower end of that range unless severely obese and under pretty close medical supervision for nutritional deficiencies or health complications. For you, that range would be about 1.5-3.1 pounds per week. BMI isn't perfect at an individual level, but is a good rough guide. At 311 and 6'3", you're at BMI 38.9, which is still obese but not technically extremely obese any more. Maybe you could be losing 3 pounds a week for a while yet, though I'd encourage slower as more health-promoting and sustainable.

As a woman, and as a woman of 50 particularly, muscle loss would be a really bad plan for long term thriving. (It's great that you exercise. Rowing and maybe swimming may be strength challenging to some extent, but I'd encourage you to add more strength training into the mix if you want to continue at the faster end of a maybe-sensible loss rate.) As older women (I'm 69), muscle loss usually also means bone loss. Osteoporosis is a major factor in earlier mortality (through broken bones, especially broken hips or spinal degradation). Don't increase those risks, I'd strongly advise.

Repeating myself: Faster loss isn't better loss. Faster loss can be riskier loss. There's middle ground between losing 11.5 pounds a week and "nothing". Lietchi explained how to personalize your calorie estimates. Do that. Shoot for maybe 2 pounds a week loss, maybe 3 at most for another few pounds. Use your history to estimate your actual calorie needs. A pound a week would be a 500 calorie cut from that, 1000 daily for 2 pounds a week, 1500 for 3 pounds . . . which is really super fast, skating on the edge, IMO.

Yes, lose the weight. But preserve your health while you do it. Look at weight trends over many weeks, not a small number of weeks.

Please.

I feel like a broken record. I lost weight too fast(accidentally). I lost hair. Big handfuls. Not just on the pillow and my brush, but on the living room floor, in the kitchen sink—it fell out everywhere. I lost skin. I lost energy. I lost muscle. I lost way too much.

I also lost bone mass during that time, but since the tests were 2 years apart, I can't be sure how much to attribute to too fast weight loss.

Please don't try to lose too fast.

First of all, sorry for your loss.

I’d like to point out that your loss must have been fairly recent, since holiday plans changed radically.

And then you got sick enough to need care for an entire month.

And then your caregiver cooked as they knew and wanted to cook. Out of your control.

And, if I had to stay with my sister, the fur would fly. Blood pressure would shoot up. Hell, I might shoot her.

You’ve presumably had to deal with paperwork, lawyers, wills, life insurance, all fairly recently.

Stress can manifest as increased cortisol which can do really weird things to your weight and water retention.

Hopefully, things are settling down now, and you can breath, and any effect here will pass.

This is all to say, it’s not always totally calorie driven. Don’t discount stress.

My stress level goes through the roof just imagining life without Mr. S. I can’t imagine living the real deal.

Hugs to you.