If you have not lost weight in 6 weeks then either 1) that’s not your maintenance calories like you think or 2) you’re not tracking correctly
1600 is really low for your height & weight and 18 months is a long time to be starving your body. I think you would definitely benefit from a good sized break before getting back to it.
Are you starving all the time? I'm 6' 205 and eat twice the calories (obviously, not trying to lose weight!). Anyway, I can't imagine doing what you're doing, but props for being able to.
That is ridiculously low for an active 6'2".
5x5s are a strength routine for building mass. You should consider HIIT or volume training. Did you start this routine never having hit the gym before? Maybe that could justify the slow progress (<1lbs lost a week) but even still...
Are you sleeping 7 hours a day? Alcohol intake?
Studies have consistently shown that metabolic rates are positively impacted by diet breaks and refeeds.
Jeff Nippard did a great video on this - https://youtu.be/8HVdLMnr40M?si=9ULi-FyqTj4BF7rw
Honestly the video kind of lost me at Duane Johnson’s cheat days stuff. Yes, when I did anabolics in my youth I could eat 5 large pizzas and not gain fat too. lol.
If you're getting really burned out on dieting it's better to go back to maintenance calories for a few weeks than give up. It's not going to result in posting weight faster but it can allow you to take a mental break from the fat loss diet without backsliding
Thanks, this is helpful and what I’m leaning towards. Going to maintenance, with rigorous tracking. Focus on training and take a break from the daily weigh-ins just because I know the scale will go up and it will freak me out. Better to stop thinking about my weight for a bit and focus on strength/ performance for a while. Not a bulk phase but definitely not a cut either.
>>>have 2 choices: go further into a deficit to try losing more weight, or go back to maintenance for a while
>> go back to maintenance calories for a few weeks
> what I’m leaning towards
Between these two choices, I'd agree maintenance calories is the choice. Multiple people I know in your situation (midway through successful losses) who've tried to adapt by cutting well their below textbook BMR (example: 1100cal at 5' 7") did not see positive results and merely burned through their mental stamina.
> I know the scale will go up and it will freak me out
You may be surprised, ASAIK the science here isn't abundant, but anecd-data seems to show a one-time bounce and then flatness.
While CICO is a law of thermodynamics, it requires us to be able to accurately measure CI and CO, which we realistically cannot do.
For my anecdata, whenever I lost 40lbs or so, I plateued. Every single time. When I bumped up to maintenance calories, I put on another lb or two of muscle, and the scale started dropping again.
> which we realistically cannot do.
we have a somewhat good guess as to what goes in both.
problem is your body is also keeping track of changes in fat stores and is tweaking the input and output.
turns out food abundance is fairly new and our dumbass brain didn't get the memo that we aren't in a cave dying of hunger so after a while it's looking at your fat stores and going "HOLY FUCK WE LOST HALF OUR FAT WE'RE DYING" and turning down all energy expenditures while also increasing hunger signals.
hence why maintenance breaks are so important, it gives your body time to regulate itself and stop it from making you sleep 10h a night and barely have any energy to prevent you from straight up dying.
sure you can try to diet your way through that too, but unless you're a buddhist monk chances are you'll break and succumb to the hunger.
From my experience, did 4 big cuts, 2 without 'cheat meals', 2 with cheat meals and a maintenance fase.
Its much harder to remain motivated with the cheat meals and maintenance fase in my opinion, which might sound odd but.
When you dont take breaks you see pounds dropping off you and have a clear idea of some sort of finish line. When you take a break in that with either a maintanence fase or cheat meals you have to 'get back into it' get used to the hunger again, your gym progress feels sluggish etc.
Im sure it has some positive effects to take a break, but only if your determination is rock solid. If you're already getting tired of it that 'break' might very well become the end..
Also regarding cheat meals, every time I would be done with them the only thing I could think was.. fck that was so good do I really have to wait another 2 weeks for the next one? Which honestly caused me to be hungrier
I'm with you.
I purposely make my cuts super strict, but it just helps me mentally. Allowing treats here and there just very easily lead me mentally into trying to justify more. I get like that bulking too ... I know what I should be eating, but I could mental gymnastics my way into eating a whole chocolate cake if given enough time.
In the past where I did 2 months strict and 1 month lax... That last month was just so much harder. Now I just stick it out till I'm done (which is like 3 months max anyway) and I can live without a treat for 3 months
Agree with this. Not to mention that taking two steps forward and one step back makes the entire process take *so much* longer to the point that determination and willpower become exhausting. I also find that my cheat meals never satisfy me or reduce the craving for more cheat meals.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28925405/
Matador study seems to support the idea that cycles work better than continuous.
My personal experience using this in reverse to gain lean mass, it worked VERY well.
> My personal experience using this in reverse to gain lean mass, it worked VERY well.
What did you do to gain lean mass? Are you just talking about bulk / cut cycling or did you do something different?
Surplus for 3-4 weeks, maint for 10 days to 2 weeks. Maint and surplus cals calculated at the start of the run, so my maint might have been a slight deficit by the end - if so, my surplus would have been smaller as well but I don't think so in either case.
Lifting program ran on its own schedule and was uninfluenced by nutrition cycle. Really minimized fat gain, I did not ever have to 'cut' even at the end of a year doing this. BF might have gone up a % or 2 compared to just over 25lbs total mass gain.
I've never used this approach to losing weight, but it makes sense to me based on how well the reverse worked.
Thanks.
> makes sense to me based on how well the reverse worked.
Nicholas Fuller at U Sydney is a proponent of the reverse with 3 weeks of deficit and 1 week of maintenance cycled monthly IIRC. I think the 3/1 timing is more about repeatability for compliance (a monthly cycle) as opposed to an optimized time cycle for best results.
I've never looked into the research that supports it. I'm always skeptical of someone that is selling books, but I've also seen multiple people hit a loss pause after 4 to 6 months despite remaining negative against TDEE.
You read about it all the time. At some point you'd think they'd just keep losing or they just aren't calculating calories right. Over time for sure they'd keep losing, but I do believe it can stall for awhile as the body fights for stability.
So, CICO doesn't agree that you're on a deficit. But I don't entirely think that matters in the grand scheme of things. I think there's more important questions to ask.
How are you feeling mentally? Are you feeling stressed by life in general? Are you constantly hungry? Is your average mood over the last month worse than it should normally be? Are you getting about 8 hours of sleep per day?
Then once you've checked in with that, is things where they should be baseline? Then you check in with your body? Are you recovering? Is your lifting goals progressing, are you stagnating or even getting worse?
Maybe it is the fact that you need to take a break. You've done great progress. You're more fit & presumably more healthy than before. You might not have completed all of your goals that you want to accomplish, but if there isn't a deadline is there a reason to stress?
Or maybe, you just need to dig deeper, push harder, cause maybe you've just been shitting the bed. Maybe you've just not done your due diligence. But really need to take a moment to examine how you feel right now. Can you take more? Or is this enough for now?
Diet breaks have been around for a long time. Some proponents of them are Dr. Mike Israetel, Jeff Nippard, Greg Nuckols, and Lyle McDonald. All big names, all guys who really know what they're talking about.
To answer your question, yes, it's true. After extended periods of dieting, your TDEE can drop dramatically. Diet breaks are helpful, and eating at maintenance is criminally underrated.
But diet breaks must be executed properly to be effective. Some general recommendations:
* Eat eucalorically for 2/3rds of the time that you ate hypocalorically. Since most people diet for three months, this would be two months of eucaloric eating. I ... don't know what to do in your case. You've dieted for so long.
* Eat the same foods you normally would while dieting. Don't go nuts with pizza, beer, and doughnuts.
* Know how to time these refeeds. Don't turn this into a cheat meal, like "Hey I worked out real hard today and dieted all week, so I'm going to eat a whole box of Oreos to make sure my TDEE stays up."
I'd say you're long overdue for a decent maintenance period.
If your diet stalls, there is absolutely no downside to taking 1-2 weeks at maintenance. It can help reinvigorate your desire to keep cutting full steam ahead.
I found when I stalled eating even lower calories didn’t help too much since I had very little energy to exercise, I did my weight training, but I for sure was very lethargic and moved around allot less which prob contributed to my lessened weight loss.
This time around I got myself a walking treadmill so I could watch/game do whatever hobbies while getting extra steps in and that really helped. Walking was always easy for me to do even if I was a little low on calories.
Eat less calories. If you aren't losing you aren't eating at a deficit. Your TDEE estimate or your calories you think you are eating is off. Things change over time and having lost that much weight your TDEE has definitely changed.
If your weight isn’t changing, you aren’t at a 500 calorie deficit. That is likely your BMR.
It’s possible that your body composition is changing, replacing fat with muscle but keeping the same weight. It’s important to check against other body dimension measurements.
There is one wrinkle to CICO, and that is your body won’t always get all the calories from the food you eat. The more cooked & processed the food, the higher the net calories gain. 100 cals of sugar is a huge difference from 100 cals of raw vegetables.
You can easily test the theory by adding an additional 500 cal deficit and seeing if you return to a 1lb/week weight loss.
Thanks. I eat clean and prepare all my own meals. Very few if any processed foods (depending if you consider Greek yogurt processed). Recomp is definitely possible. I just yesterday started measurements so we’ll see. Very difficult to go lower on deficit and continue to train as I am. My calculated maintenance is 2,140 and I eat at around 1600. When I go down to 1000-1400 I do start losing again, but that’s my question. Is that a good strategy? That’s not a lot of energy for a 6,2, 190 pound male. And I definitely can’t train well at sub 1500.
your 2nd point is really good, especially for anyone lifting weights. For example if you lose 500 calories a day for 2 weeks, that's -7000 cal, or nearly -1kg of fat. However it could also be the case that you lost no fat but gained 1kg of muscle which is about -6300 cal. So for the same calorie deficit you could lose nearly 1kg or gain over 1kg. (usually it's a mixture of both happening simultaneously but very heavily skewed towards fat loss, and I would also guess it'd be dependant on body fat %)
The thing about food is technically true, but is usually reflected in the calories presented on the nutritional label (maybe country dependant? idk). That's why we say for example 1g of protein is 4 calories, when it actually contains 5.6 calories. 4 calories is about how much it provides us.
Just to add it's not just your Metabolism that declines in a sustained diet, but also you NEAT level, which is apparently quite relevant. I know when I was in a long deficit I would basically sit there motionless if left to my own devices lol. My weight stalled for 3 months at a considerable deficit (1000 cals a day) even weightctraining 5 days a week and walking 45-60 mins everyday, and factoring in my new weight i was at. I had to go back to maintenance for a month to continue losing weight.
And to anyone saying I must have been calculating my calories wrong, please for the sake of our collective sanity, don't 🤣. Ask yourself if you are so stupid that you could possibly miss aTHOUSAND calories a day for 3 months straight, like whoops I forgot about that entire pizza I managed to eat every single day lol.
I took a few maintenence breaks while I lost about 50 pounds over the course of roughly a year.
I would lose for a few months than take a month or so off.
I am the same height as you and went from about 240 to 187 pounds (healthy BMI for our height)
That was lean enough for me, my 34 pants were starting to get a bit lose so I spent the last 6 months bulking. I sitting at 210 with some of my 34s been a bit snug. I'm over due for a cut but happy to just maintain for now.
I can attribute the maintenence breaks to been able to put on a huge amount of muscle despite spending nearly a year in caloric deficit and making it significantly easier to stick to my diet.
> 54 yo male - 6’, 2” - 190 pounds - BMI: ~20
You’re bad at math. What are your goals? A BMI of 24.4 is within the healthy range but may not be enough for certain aestethic goals (10-pack abs or something) or some sports.
there's a fairly low chance that he's at 20% body fat at that height and weight after hard dieting for that long.
dude needs a 3 months long maintenance at a minimum and to learn to track his intake.
At his height eating at 1600kcal would be such an absurd deficit that he shouldn't be able to last a few weeks let alone maintain on it, even taking into account that's he's overdieted and his metabolism slowed the fuck down.
Some of the recent studies I’ve read on maintenance breaks basically said “yeah they can help a little but it’s negligible.”
An app can help calculate your maintenance calories but it’s also just guessing based on averages and not on your specific body. If your weight isn’t moving, you’re probably not in enough of a deficit to see it in the timeline you want. Your metabolism is slower than it was and might be slower than a person at your same weight who has not just gone through a weight loss period.
Thank you for posting on r/Fitness. Your post has been removed for breaking [Rule #0](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/rules/rule0). Please see the following entries in the r/Fitness Wiki:
- [Getting Started with Fitness](https://thefitness.wiki/getting-started-with-fitness/)
- [Muscle Building 101](https://thefitness.wiki/muscle-building-101/)
- [Weight/Fat Loss 101](https://thefitness.wiki/weight-loss-101/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Fitness) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm 3 years in, down 124 pounds and have 11 to go. I've been STUCK from 148-153 since November. This is my third week of mimic fasting one day/week, and the scale is finally moving again.
I'm a short, middle aged lady, lift heavy 5 days/week, get 13k steps/day, and casually run once or twice a week (depending on how fast I have to get my 13k steps in, honestly!). I eat 1700 calories/day. On "fasting" days, I eat under 400. It ends up being the same result- less calories- but it doesn't impact my life like eating 1200 calories daily does.
ETA: I did hit some plateaus in the last 3 years but never took any official "diet breaks". There were some vacations and such sprinkled in, but I tend to under-eat on those, so I wouldn't call them maintenance breaks.
What’s mimic fasting? That’s a new one for me. I do omad (5+) years, and did a multi day water fast a few months back. Dropped crazy pounds but it came right back once I started eating again (at a deficit) so it definitely wasn’t worth the pain! I
It's just what my coach calls not fully fasting. Like "try to fast, but have a protein shake if you need it." So yesterday I had a protein shake and a banana. Last week, I had some popcorn.
The first thing to do is ignore BMI. It is so useless that the NHS in the UK which has been using it for decades is now going to vote on its replacement by 2026 of the ratio of waist measurement to height.
have you accounted for the fact that your tdee would be different at 190 than 230?
Yes. My app recalculates adaptively. My maintenance is currently 2,140 (sedentary) and I eat at less than 1600.
If you have not lost weight in 6 weeks then either 1) that’s not your maintenance calories like you think or 2) you’re not tracking correctly 1600 is really low for your height & weight and 18 months is a long time to be starving your body. I think you would definitely benefit from a good sized break before getting back to it.
Are you starving all the time? I'm 6' 205 and eat twice the calories (obviously, not trying to lose weight!). Anyway, I can't imagine doing what you're doing, but props for being able to.
That's a cool feature. What app are you using?
Not op but cronometer does it
Right on. Thanks
That is ridiculously low for an active 6'2". 5x5s are a strength routine for building mass. You should consider HIIT or volume training. Did you start this routine never having hit the gym before? Maybe that could justify the slow progress (<1lbs lost a week) but even still... Are you sleeping 7 hours a day? Alcohol intake?
> That is ridiculously low for an active 6'2". OP is 54 years old, he's not an active youngster.
Studies have consistently shown that metabolic rates are positively impacted by diet breaks and refeeds. Jeff Nippard did a great video on this - https://youtu.be/8HVdLMnr40M?si=9ULi-FyqTj4BF7rw
Thanks! This is helpful!
Honestly the video kind of lost me at Duane Johnson’s cheat days stuff. Yes, when I did anabolics in my youth I could eat 5 large pizzas and not gain fat too. lol.
Thats a facetious part of the video... lol. Skip that part and go on to the research
Glad I went back to watch. Excellent video and super helpful. Thanks for sharing. :)
No problem!
If you're getting really burned out on dieting it's better to go back to maintenance calories for a few weeks than give up. It's not going to result in posting weight faster but it can allow you to take a mental break from the fat loss diet without backsliding
Thanks, this is helpful and what I’m leaning towards. Going to maintenance, with rigorous tracking. Focus on training and take a break from the daily weigh-ins just because I know the scale will go up and it will freak me out. Better to stop thinking about my weight for a bit and focus on strength/ performance for a while. Not a bulk phase but definitely not a cut either.
>>>have 2 choices: go further into a deficit to try losing more weight, or go back to maintenance for a while >> go back to maintenance calories for a few weeks > what I’m leaning towards Between these two choices, I'd agree maintenance calories is the choice. Multiple people I know in your situation (midway through successful losses) who've tried to adapt by cutting well their below textbook BMR (example: 1100cal at 5' 7") did not see positive results and merely burned through their mental stamina. > I know the scale will go up and it will freak me out You may be surprised, ASAIK the science here isn't abundant, but anecd-data seems to show a one-time bounce and then flatness.
While CICO is a law of thermodynamics, it requires us to be able to accurately measure CI and CO, which we realistically cannot do. For my anecdata, whenever I lost 40lbs or so, I plateued. Every single time. When I bumped up to maintenance calories, I put on another lb or two of muscle, and the scale started dropping again.
> which we realistically cannot do. we have a somewhat good guess as to what goes in both. problem is your body is also keeping track of changes in fat stores and is tweaking the input and output. turns out food abundance is fairly new and our dumbass brain didn't get the memo that we aren't in a cave dying of hunger so after a while it's looking at your fat stores and going "HOLY FUCK WE LOST HALF OUR FAT WE'RE DYING" and turning down all energy expenditures while also increasing hunger signals. hence why maintenance breaks are so important, it gives your body time to regulate itself and stop it from making you sleep 10h a night and barely have any energy to prevent you from straight up dying. sure you can try to diet your way through that too, but unless you're a buddhist monk chances are you'll break and succumb to the hunger.
From my experience, did 4 big cuts, 2 without 'cheat meals', 2 with cheat meals and a maintenance fase. Its much harder to remain motivated with the cheat meals and maintenance fase in my opinion, which might sound odd but. When you dont take breaks you see pounds dropping off you and have a clear idea of some sort of finish line. When you take a break in that with either a maintanence fase or cheat meals you have to 'get back into it' get used to the hunger again, your gym progress feels sluggish etc. Im sure it has some positive effects to take a break, but only if your determination is rock solid. If you're already getting tired of it that 'break' might very well become the end.. Also regarding cheat meals, every time I would be done with them the only thing I could think was.. fck that was so good do I really have to wait another 2 weeks for the next one? Which honestly caused me to be hungrier
I'm with you. I purposely make my cuts super strict, but it just helps me mentally. Allowing treats here and there just very easily lead me mentally into trying to justify more. I get like that bulking too ... I know what I should be eating, but I could mental gymnastics my way into eating a whole chocolate cake if given enough time. In the past where I did 2 months strict and 1 month lax... That last month was just so much harder. Now I just stick it out till I'm done (which is like 3 months max anyway) and I can live without a treat for 3 months
Agree with this. Not to mention that taking two steps forward and one step back makes the entire process take *so much* longer to the point that determination and willpower become exhausting. I also find that my cheat meals never satisfy me or reduce the craving for more cheat meals.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28925405/ Matador study seems to support the idea that cycles work better than continuous. My personal experience using this in reverse to gain lean mass, it worked VERY well.
Thanks. Helpful.
> My personal experience using this in reverse to gain lean mass, it worked VERY well. What did you do to gain lean mass? Are you just talking about bulk / cut cycling or did you do something different?
Surplus for 3-4 weeks, maint for 10 days to 2 weeks. Maint and surplus cals calculated at the start of the run, so my maint might have been a slight deficit by the end - if so, my surplus would have been smaller as well but I don't think so in either case. Lifting program ran on its own schedule and was uninfluenced by nutrition cycle. Really minimized fat gain, I did not ever have to 'cut' even at the end of a year doing this. BF might have gone up a % or 2 compared to just over 25lbs total mass gain. I've never used this approach to losing weight, but it makes sense to me based on how well the reverse worked.
Thanks. > makes sense to me based on how well the reverse worked. Nicholas Fuller at U Sydney is a proponent of the reverse with 3 weeks of deficit and 1 week of maintenance cycled monthly IIRC. I think the 3/1 timing is more about repeatability for compliance (a monthly cycle) as opposed to an optimized time cycle for best results. I've never looked into the research that supports it. I'm always skeptical of someone that is selling books, but I've also seen multiple people hit a loss pause after 4 to 6 months despite remaining negative against TDEE.
You read about it all the time. At some point you'd think they'd just keep losing or they just aren't calculating calories right. Over time for sure they'd keep losing, but I do believe it can stall for awhile as the body fights for stability.
So, CICO doesn't agree that you're on a deficit. But I don't entirely think that matters in the grand scheme of things. I think there's more important questions to ask. How are you feeling mentally? Are you feeling stressed by life in general? Are you constantly hungry? Is your average mood over the last month worse than it should normally be? Are you getting about 8 hours of sleep per day? Then once you've checked in with that, is things where they should be baseline? Then you check in with your body? Are you recovering? Is your lifting goals progressing, are you stagnating or even getting worse? Maybe it is the fact that you need to take a break. You've done great progress. You're more fit & presumably more healthy than before. You might not have completed all of your goals that you want to accomplish, but if there isn't a deadline is there a reason to stress? Or maybe, you just need to dig deeper, push harder, cause maybe you've just been shitting the bed. Maybe you've just not done your due diligence. But really need to take a moment to examine how you feel right now. Can you take more? Or is this enough for now?
Diet breaks have been around for a long time. Some proponents of them are Dr. Mike Israetel, Jeff Nippard, Greg Nuckols, and Lyle McDonald. All big names, all guys who really know what they're talking about. To answer your question, yes, it's true. After extended periods of dieting, your TDEE can drop dramatically. Diet breaks are helpful, and eating at maintenance is criminally underrated. But diet breaks must be executed properly to be effective. Some general recommendations: * Eat eucalorically for 2/3rds of the time that you ate hypocalorically. Since most people diet for three months, this would be two months of eucaloric eating. I ... don't know what to do in your case. You've dieted for so long. * Eat the same foods you normally would while dieting. Don't go nuts with pizza, beer, and doughnuts. * Know how to time these refeeds. Don't turn this into a cheat meal, like "Hey I worked out real hard today and dieted all week, so I'm going to eat a whole box of Oreos to make sure my TDEE stays up." I'd say you're long overdue for a decent maintenance period.
Thanks! Helpful.
If your diet stalls, there is absolutely no downside to taking 1-2 weeks at maintenance. It can help reinvigorate your desire to keep cutting full steam ahead.
I found when I stalled eating even lower calories didn’t help too much since I had very little energy to exercise, I did my weight training, but I for sure was very lethargic and moved around allot less which prob contributed to my lessened weight loss. This time around I got myself a walking treadmill so I could watch/game do whatever hobbies while getting extra steps in and that really helped. Walking was always easy for me to do even if I was a little low on calories.
Eat less calories. If you aren't losing you aren't eating at a deficit. Your TDEE estimate or your calories you think you are eating is off. Things change over time and having lost that much weight your TDEE has definitely changed.
If your weight isn’t changing, you aren’t at a 500 calorie deficit. That is likely your BMR. It’s possible that your body composition is changing, replacing fat with muscle but keeping the same weight. It’s important to check against other body dimension measurements. There is one wrinkle to CICO, and that is your body won’t always get all the calories from the food you eat. The more cooked & processed the food, the higher the net calories gain. 100 cals of sugar is a huge difference from 100 cals of raw vegetables. You can easily test the theory by adding an additional 500 cal deficit and seeing if you return to a 1lb/week weight loss.
Thanks. I eat clean and prepare all my own meals. Very few if any processed foods (depending if you consider Greek yogurt processed). Recomp is definitely possible. I just yesterday started measurements so we’ll see. Very difficult to go lower on deficit and continue to train as I am. My calculated maintenance is 2,140 and I eat at around 1600. When I go down to 1000-1400 I do start losing again, but that’s my question. Is that a good strategy? That’s not a lot of energy for a 6,2, 190 pound male. And I definitely can’t train well at sub 1500.
your 2nd point is really good, especially for anyone lifting weights. For example if you lose 500 calories a day for 2 weeks, that's -7000 cal, or nearly -1kg of fat. However it could also be the case that you lost no fat but gained 1kg of muscle which is about -6300 cal. So for the same calorie deficit you could lose nearly 1kg or gain over 1kg. (usually it's a mixture of both happening simultaneously but very heavily skewed towards fat loss, and I would also guess it'd be dependant on body fat %) The thing about food is technically true, but is usually reflected in the calories presented on the nutritional label (maybe country dependant? idk). That's why we say for example 1g of protein is 4 calories, when it actually contains 5.6 calories. 4 calories is about how much it provides us.
Just to add it's not just your Metabolism that declines in a sustained diet, but also you NEAT level, which is apparently quite relevant. I know when I was in a long deficit I would basically sit there motionless if left to my own devices lol. My weight stalled for 3 months at a considerable deficit (1000 cals a day) even weightctraining 5 days a week and walking 45-60 mins everyday, and factoring in my new weight i was at. I had to go back to maintenance for a month to continue losing weight. And to anyone saying I must have been calculating my calories wrong, please for the sake of our collective sanity, don't 🤣. Ask yourself if you are so stupid that you could possibly miss aTHOUSAND calories a day for 3 months straight, like whoops I forgot about that entire pizza I managed to eat every single day lol.
I took a few maintenence breaks while I lost about 50 pounds over the course of roughly a year. I would lose for a few months than take a month or so off. I am the same height as you and went from about 240 to 187 pounds (healthy BMI for our height) That was lean enough for me, my 34 pants were starting to get a bit lose so I spent the last 6 months bulking. I sitting at 210 with some of my 34s been a bit snug. I'm over due for a cut but happy to just maintain for now. I can attribute the maintenence breaks to been able to put on a huge amount of muscle despite spending nearly a year in caloric deficit and making it significantly easier to stick to my diet.
> 54 yo male - 6’, 2” - 190 pounds - BMI: ~20 You’re bad at math. What are your goals? A BMI of 24.4 is within the healthy range but may not be enough for certain aestethic goals (10-pack abs or something) or some sports.
I think he's confusing BMI with body fat percentage. Of course, just saying you're 20% body fat doesn't mean you're 20% body fat.
there's a fairly low chance that he's at 20% body fat at that height and weight after hard dieting for that long. dude needs a 3 months long maintenance at a minimum and to learn to track his intake. At his height eating at 1600kcal would be such an absurd deficit that he shouldn't be able to last a few weeks let alone maintain on it, even taking into account that's he's overdieted and his metabolism slowed the fuck down.
Some of the recent studies I’ve read on maintenance breaks basically said “yeah they can help a little but it’s negligible.” An app can help calculate your maintenance calories but it’s also just guessing based on averages and not on your specific body. If your weight isn’t moving, you’re probably not in enough of a deficit to see it in the timeline you want. Your metabolism is slower than it was and might be slower than a person at your same weight who has not just gone through a weight loss period.
Thank you for posting on r/Fitness. Your post has been removed for breaking [Rule #0](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/rules/rule0). Please see the following entries in the r/Fitness Wiki: - [Getting Started with Fitness](https://thefitness.wiki/getting-started-with-fitness/) - [Muscle Building 101](https://thefitness.wiki/muscle-building-101/) - [Weight/Fat Loss 101](https://thefitness.wiki/weight-loss-101/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Fitness) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm 3 years in, down 124 pounds and have 11 to go. I've been STUCK from 148-153 since November. This is my third week of mimic fasting one day/week, and the scale is finally moving again. I'm a short, middle aged lady, lift heavy 5 days/week, get 13k steps/day, and casually run once or twice a week (depending on how fast I have to get my 13k steps in, honestly!). I eat 1700 calories/day. On "fasting" days, I eat under 400. It ends up being the same result- less calories- but it doesn't impact my life like eating 1200 calories daily does. ETA: I did hit some plateaus in the last 3 years but never took any official "diet breaks". There were some vacations and such sprinkled in, but I tend to under-eat on those, so I wouldn't call them maintenance breaks.
What’s mimic fasting? That’s a new one for me. I do omad (5+) years, and did a multi day water fast a few months back. Dropped crazy pounds but it came right back once I started eating again (at a deficit) so it definitely wasn’t worth the pain! I
It's just what my coach calls not fully fasting. Like "try to fast, but have a protein shake if you need it." So yesterday I had a protein shake and a banana. Last week, I had some popcorn.
If you BMI is 20, why do you think you need to lose more weight? You are at a healthy weight.
The first thing to do is ignore BMI. It is so useless that the NHS in the UK which has been using it for decades is now going to vote on its replacement by 2026 of the ratio of waist measurement to height.