Calories for maintaining weight

[mtbc]

For my current diet I have a 13Mcal per week limit except for the occasional day off like when I attend an all-day symposium. Over the past six weeks I appear to have lost maybe three ounces which seems well within the margin of error of staying the same. As an average adult male doing around three hours of vigorous exercise each week and eating not much more than 1,800kcal per day I would have expected to lose more weight.

I did have a few days off my diet: we had my birthday, Thanksgiving, already a Christmas lunch at work, brief visits to England to resolve some matters, etc. I also skipped a few days' exercise after injuring my back and my performance has slowed back below twenty of the machine's calories per minute. So, my days off may have contributed but I don't anticipate many more such days in the first half of 2019.

If I continue to exercise then online calorie planners suggest that I should be able to maintain weight on 2,500kcal per day, far more than I actually eat. I have lost nearly a third of my weight so perhaps I should anticipate some of the controversial metabolic penalty that I read about but surely not that much.

Fortunately I do still have some breathing room to gain some weight over Christmas but in the New Year I had hoped to increase my daily limit by at least 50kcal per day. We will see how Christmas goes but I might increase my eating a little anyway to see what happens.

Comments

[aldabra]

Are you treating calories as interchangeable? I keep seeing people argue that calories from sugar and alcohol are much worse than calories from fat, because of [metabolic pathway stuff].

[mtbc]

Yes, interchangeable, though a fair few of yesterday's came from cheese and pâté! As with this metabolic penalty stuff, it's hard to find some coherent consensus: stuff like Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion: The DIETFITS Randomized Clinical Trial, Gardner, Trepanowski, Del Gobbo, et al. (2018) mostly just leaves me confused. While I don't have much of a sweet tooth, it doesn't take much Stollen over the Christmas period to provide me with plenty of the kind of carbs that at least some tell me to avoid! Perhaps research funding from the food industry helps to confound the story from the literature.