Maintance Calories & exercise..

I am 5'7 and started MFP at 175 pounds. When I hit just under 150 pounds, I plateaued. All of September, October, and part of November, I plateaued. I was frustrated and said "Screw it!" just for the holiday season. Between Thanksgiving and New Years, I had MFP set at maintenance. Once January came, I backed MFP down to a 0.5 lb/week loss and BAM! Suddenly my long plateau was broken. Mind you my goal weight was 145 so I didn't have much to go.

Bottom line: eating maintenance didn't seem to hurt me any for that 1.5 month period. If anything, it may have helped to break my plateau!

So are you saying that right now you are eating the maintenance level of cals plus your exercise cals? and 350-550 does sound high for burned cals i know 30DS is no joke but it is relatively short, right? llke 30 mins? I am right around the same as you as far as body parameters... 5'6" and 154#s and I would like to maybe get down just below 150...my suggestions to you (certainly they are only that...suggestions, you do what in your heart feels best for you, thats what this journey is about) would be reduce cals even if by only 200/day, and check your tracking sometimes we get slacking and dont track as diligently as we once did and that can cause added cals that we dont even see. And increase your weights in the workouts, which may mean just using weights for zumba and increasing for 30DS. I dont know how you are calculating your exercise cals but if you are using a calculator like on this site I would estimate that as only about 75-80% correct, their numbers always seem to be a bit inflated...You are not at a size where you will so easily burn that amount of cals in a half hour to an hour. make sure you are getting your water and take a day or two or three to watch your sodium, you may be surprised at what you find, or not...but at least you'll know where you stand with that. and how long has it been since you have reduced your cal allowance, with your weight loss you are surely going to need less cal than when you started. i am sure you know that but it is just one thing i thought about and wanted to put out there...Also, what i have seen on the forums that some folks are doing to get a couple more miles out of 30DS is butting the workouts up to each other, like doing level 1 and 3 in the same workout, just omit level 1s cool down and level 3s warm up. even doing this just once a week could be a good little jolt to the system, get you burning cals on high again. If all of this is just too much or you cant bear to change things now then, yes, maintain for a bit...there is somethning called your set point and some literature suggests that it is beneficial to lose like 10% of your body weight then maintain for a couple weeks or months so your body can adjust to its new set point then restart with losing again, another 10% then maintain....til you get where you wanna be. look it up maybe you can draw technique from this idea. Either way I feel like you can be successful, but also feel like you have had some success already and may be able to draw energy from that success and forge through...Generally a plateau is really just a case of cals in, cals out needing to be recalibrated.....Good luck and keep being great, pls let me know if this was at all helpful

Courtney

I dont think you should set your goals to maintain, if you have days you are going over.
I would try to start tracking on the weekends too. It should help.
Maybe try also doing 20 minutes of zumba on 30ds days.