Coming Out of Calorie Deficit

Hi all,

 

I've been eating an 800-1,000 calorie deficit every day for the past six months. I'm approaching my target weight (woohoo!), so it's time to start planning a diet to maintain my target weight.

 

My RMR is about 1,950cal/day, which coincidentally is what I'm eating at the moment. However, I create an est. deficit of 600cal running + 400cal F1&H1. Which means I will need to add 1,000cal to my diet - shifting from 2,000cal to 3,000cal per day. (Numbers rounded up for simplicity.)

 

My question is - that's a pretty big change in food intake - would it be a good idea to build up to 3,000cal/day gradually? I was thinking about making the diet change overnight, until I realised my body would be pretty used to 2,000cal/day after six months of it. Maybe a more gradual change would be kinder to my body metabolically. Perhaps I could add 200cal/day every 5 days, so I transition from 2,000cal/day to 3,000cal/day over 25 days.

 

What do you think?

I'm no expert but I've read several times that when switching between deficit/balance/surplus it should not be done overnight. Perhaps something like a week or so? I can't remember any potential side-effects of switching cold turkey but apparently it's not recommended.

Do it very gradually, a hundred calories every few weeks or so, otherwise you will just rocket back up. I have no scientific basis for this other than just sudden changes for your body can be hard to cope with. Might have something to do with hormone balance or something but I dunno

spinelli: adding 100cal every 3 weeks means it would take me 7 months to transition. Even if I started now, I'd drop down to 130lb just building up calories!

.... maybe it can be slightly accelerated. Give it a go. Add in a few hundred one week, wait a week or so if you gain fat. If you don't gain add some more calories back in the next week. Repeat until you start gaining fat, when you do gain fat reduce calories slightly until you're back to ideal bf% then increase again.

Let us know how it goes! 

i think u dont need time to go from 2000cal to 3000cal id say just start eating more or if u want add 250cal every week than ull get there in 1 month because i dont think ur body need 7months to go from 2000cal per day to 3000cal just think about it it looks a bit stupid.ive made big changes on my diet in short amount of time  and my body is healthy .just make sure to workout so u can use those extra calories and dont let them to get stored as fat

Thanks DiTi. I think I'll make the transition in about a month. 200cal/day every 5 days seems like good timing to me.

 

Great idea spinelli. I'll food-log the gradual increase and weigh myself every 1-2 weeks.

Depending on how thorough you wanna be it's best to weigh yourself everyday. That way you can see the difference for each week.