Anyone increase their calories for weight loss?

[mrmors]

Just for background, I started at around 120kg last year, took 2.5>5mg of Tirz over 6months and got down to 100kg. But, for the last couple of months I've been pretty hard stuck at 100kg and the weight wont budge, I'd ideally like to get down to the 90-95kg at the most.

I feel like I've been ballpark eating 2000-2500 calories a day, and I ate around that for the whole time I dropped the 20kg down to 100, my diet hasn't changed. I also eat 150-200g of protein a day included in that.

I decided to AI check my BMR today, and it calculates it our at around 3.3k calories. This is primarily boosted by me going to the gym 5x a week, doing strength training, and I run 5k on the other 2x days, and do 10k steps a day, have no energy/motivation issues.

I thought that if I ate in a deficit, whether it's 1000 calories, or 100, calories, it didn't matter and eventually weight would come off relative to the deficit - bigger the deficit, the more weight.

I'm wondering though, based on some reading that I've done, that wasn't exactly clear, that maybe I need to increase my calories(!!) to start losing weight again, and I might of 'crashed my metabolism'?! I that even a thing. I don't see how I could be defying physics or thermodynamics, surely, if you don't eat enough calories, your body has to eat something instead, and if I'm giving it enough protein, then it has to go after fat? Is 'crashing your metabolism' even a thing or is it made up nonsense? Should I up my calories?

Has anyone experienced anything like this or could offer any advice? Did anyone up their calories to lose weight? If this is a thing, and I do need to up my calories, how much do you think I should go up to, and for how long?

edit

Currently taking per week:

4mg reta

2.5 Tirz

3x 5mg mots-c

Cjc+Ipa

 

[CharmanderInDisguise]

I was in a 1000-1200cal/day deficit. I lost a bunch of weight doing that, but stalled at the start of month 3. I upped my intake to get to a 500-600cal/day deficit. After that, the weight kept coming off steadily, albeit in smaller daily amounts. I think the main thing is trying to meet your protein goals while also maintaining a caloric deficit. At least, that's what's been working for me so far.

Having too big a deficit for an extended period of time can make the body do weird things. I'm sure it's because it thinks I'm in need of nutrition, and my body is trying to hold on to as much stored energy as possible.

Current weekly:

2mg Tirz

1.5mg Reta

Next week:

1mg Tirz

2mg Reta

 

[tubby]

defying physics or thermodynamics

LOL, you're not defying anything until you get decently under 1,000 calories/day, at which point it would be very difficult for your body to utilize metabolic adaptations to conserve weight.

The most straightforward path to achieving your goal more rapidly would probably be to bump up reta and/or cjc.

 

[pilsnermagnus]

I bumped my daily calories to a minimum of 2300/day. I was eating to an old assumption of TDEE for loss. I now weigh 185lbs closer to 16% BF and have an estimated TDEE of between 2600-2800. I was eating at closer to 1800 give or take. Been at the increases calorie intake for two weeks and I feel my strength has improved in my workouts, and I haven’t gained any scale weight. I feel my fat level is the same or slightly less. I will give this a solid 6 weeks to see if I lean out any further. I did some pinch caliper measurements to reference against down the road.

 

[5byfive]

I decided to AI check my BMR today, and it calculates it our at around 3.3k calories. This is primarily boosted by me going to the gym 5x a week, doing strength training, and I run 5k on the other 2x days, and do 10k steps a day, have no energy/motivation

I think that BY FAR the biggest mistake people make when trying to lose weight is not tracking calories and determining what their maintenance calories are. At this point, you are totally guessing how many calories you eat amd how many you burn (and so is the AI) and that just isn't a recipe for long term success. For most people a 500-700 max calorie deficit is ideal. When people go beyond that, they tend to stall. Your body can't out conserve an aggressive deficit forever, but it is sure going to try. Plus (and I know @deleted.user.16 is going to disagree) with a bigger deficit, you are going to burn more muscle along with the fat. Increasing your dose isn't going to fix it.

GLPs make it much easier, but long term success still requires doing the basics. You seem to be doing a lot of things right, but without tracking and a plan for cutting, you're building your house on a foundation of sand.

 

[deleted.user.16]

Your body can't out conserve an aggressive deficit forever, but it is sure going to try. Plus (and I know @deleted.user.16 is going to disagree) with a bigger deficit, you are going to burn more muscle along with the fat. Increasing your dose isn't going to fix it.

Lol I have been summoned.

To be clear I can't guarantee that anyone won't lose more muscle (in ratio to fat) with a more aggressive deficit. It's just that it's a pet peeve of mine that this gets repeated by every pop science article and even a lot of very legitimate-sounding organizations without, in my opinion, anywhere near enough scientific evidence to justify it. And in fact a lot of the studies on this show the opposite or show no difference at all. This feels like one of those things like the food pyramid (you must eat 6-11 servings a day of bread and pasta!) that everyone is onboard with but nobody knows why.

But as for the original post, it's kinda wishful thinking that you can increase your calories to lose more weight. It's likely that 2000-2500 calories a day is your new maintenance calories. Yes "crashing your metabolism" is a real side and unfortunate side effect of weight loss and there is no way to avoid it (despite people claiming that losing slowly will lower your metabolism less, there is zero evidence to support this). I agree with tubby that it would be a lot more effective to up your Reta than to up your calories.

Edit: I better add some sources so I'm not just talking out of my ass. I don't believe the current literature supports "reverse dieting" as being a real thing. Though there's just not a lot of studies on it.

Participants who followed a reverse dieting approach experienced greater relative weight regain compared to those who ate ad libitum, though this did not reach a level of statistical significance.... These findings suggest that a gradual increase in calories through reverse dieting may not be more effective at minimizing weight regain than less structured approaches or immediately returning to newly estimated maintenance calories.

The effects of reverse dieting on mitigating weight regain after a caloric deficit: a preliminary analysis - PMC

Reverse dieting is a post-dieting strategy that involves the gradual increase of calories to slowly return to weight maintenance and mitigate weight regain. While a common strategy applied by coaches, minimal research has assessed how reverse ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[lessthanhalf]

There are several factors that could influence your current stall at 100kg.

One is that over 6 months of weight loss, your energy expenditure should have decreased mainly from the lost 20kg, but there may be some metabolic adaptation to lower calorie input, even though 6 months might be a bit early for that to be a big factor. Estimates of energy expenditure are estimates, individual differences can be large, so those estimates might not reflect reality accurately.

People are notoriously inaccurate at calorie counting, unless you weigh every single thing you eat, it might be inaccurate.

You are exercising so you could be gaining muscle and losing fat.

I think it makes no sense scientifically to claim that more calories in can cause greater weight loss, it is not consistent with every study ever measuring energy expenditure directly versus energy intake and resultant changes in weight.

If you want to continue to lose weight , why not increase the GLP dose?

 

[staffn1]

One example of your body changing overtime is with exercise and training. The number of calories you burn doing the same fixed exercise at the beginning can be much higher than the calories burned doing the same exercise after repeatedly doing it over time. Your body gets more efficient at doing the exercise as you train your muscles.

 

[mrmors]

Thanks for all your replies, but I think I'm now a bit more confused than before.

I'm pretty sure my calories are in the 2000-2500 range, it isn't a guess, its just what I'm eating on a day to day changes, so sometimes they're a little higher, some days lower.

Based on exercising 7days a week, I'm not surprised that my BMR could be higher than I thought, and could be 3.3k. Which in theory means I'm 800-1300 calorie deficit per day, but stalled.

From the replies, I've had:

Someone suggested that going up from a 1000>500 deficit helped them break through.

A couple of people say up my GLP dose.

Someone suggest that 2000-2500 has now become my maintenance/BMR, so I'd need to go even lower and create a deficit on that.

So 3 sort of options there, go up, go down, up GLP dose. I'm not sure I'm keen on the latter as I thought I was on a reasonable what of GLP being on 4+2.5, and my appetite is in check. I'm concerned if I go up, then I'll hit side effects, and my appetite suppression will be too strong and I'll struggle to get in the protein I'm currently getting at 15-200g.

 

[lessthanhalf]

I think there is an issue with your estimate of your energy expenditure.

Pretty much by definition if you are consuming 2000-2500 kcal/day and your weight is not changing, and it is over a few months rather than a few days or weeks, so cannot really be fluid balance shifts, then your energy expenditure is 2000-2500 kcal/day. Any calculation of predicted energy expenditure is just an estimate, and they are often a long way out. But the second law of thermodynamics is something that in the end cannot be wrong, if you are consuming less calories than you are using up then weight will go down. The most accurate possible method of estimating energy expenditure outside a lab measuring o2/co2 in and out is actually weight change. And for fat it is 7700kcal/kg of body fat. Do not know muscle numbers off the top of my head. Guess is 3000kcal/kg, likely to be in the right ballpark.

Even if you are gaining muscle and losing fat , this mostly still applies, fat has more energy per kilo than muscle or other lean tissues, but even an extra 2kg of muscle in exchange for fat is not going to get you more than 9400 kcal ( 7700-3000 x 2 ), or an extra 1000 calories for 10 days, not enough for months of stalling.

When my weight dropped from 145kg to 75kg, my calorie intake of 1600-1800 kcal per day never changed, but at the start I lost 6kg per month, which slowly dropped until I was losing zero kg per month at 75kg, and I stayed at that weight for nearly 2 years on the same calorie intake. This is just to indicate that the alterations in energy expenditure from weight loss can be much larger than you would expect. The calorie deficit matched exactly with the 7700kcal/kg of fat used up at the beginning of my diet, but not at the end as there is no calculator of post weight loss energy expenditure that exists.

My instinctive guess is that 2000-2500 kcal is just too many calories per day to lose weight. Regardless of how much exercise you are doing. It may have been enough initially, as energy expenditure can be extra high if eating a calorie surplus as is likely when you started, but the drop from the lost 20 kg is significant, and metabolic adaptation does not just apply to basal energy expenditure, it also modifies exercise induced energy expenditure, as under different metabolic conditions your body uses energy much more efficiently to do the same amount of physical work, and my guess is this is where the error in calculated energy expenditure arises. There is some research on this subject but I cannot say I know it well enough to know exactly how strong the effect is or to provide links to it, but the effect is real and often underappreciated. So while I do not think your base rate energy use has dropped drastically ( maybe 10% ), the increased energy efficiency during exercise is probably enough to make the 500-1000 kcal/day difference between what you expect energy consumption to be and what it really is.

Which in the end means you need to consume less calories per day to lose more weight , and given you are already taking GLP's, increasing the dose is the easy way to do that without unnecessary suffering with hunger. And assuming you are not having problematic side effects from reta or tirz, I would pick reta to increase the dose as you get a small extra boost to energy expenditure from the glucagon agonism of reta, which you don't from tirz.

In terms of health all of this is mostly irrelevant, once you get somewhere near healthy body weights fitness matters far more to long term health outcomes than fatness, but presumably you want to get to that target and with extra muscle I assume given you are taking cjc/ipa and doing training.

 

[Theneedle]

Thanks for all your replies, but I think I'm now a bit more confused than before.

I'm pretty sure my calories are in the 2000-2500 range, it isn't a guess, its just what I'm eating on a day to day changes, so sometimes they're a little higher, some days lower.

Based on exercising 7days a week, I'm not surprised that my BMR could be higher than I thought, and could be 3.3k. Which in theory means I'm 800-1300 calorie deficit per day, but stalled.

From the replies, I've had:

Someone suggested that going up from a 1000>500 deficit helped them break through.

A couple of people say up my GLP dose.

Someone suggest that 2000-2500 has now become my maintenance/BMR, so I'd need to go even lower and create a deficit on that.

So 3 sort of options there, go up, go down, up GLP dose. I'm not sure I'm keen on the latter as I thought I was on a reasonable what of GLP being on 4+2.5, and my appetite is in check. I'm concerned if I go up, then I'll hit side effects, and my appetite suppression will be too strong and I'll struggle to get in the protein I'm currently getting at 15-200g.

Most likely, your maintenance calories have become lower due to your body adapting to the fat loss. This is very common in a cut, and why it's important to have a good plan for a cut. Some people go extremely aggressive straight away, which hinders progress down the line, as they have to go even more extreme to reach their goals.

You could drop your calories even more, but with how active you are and eating a lower range of 2000-2500 (big range), dropping any lower could seriously affect your hormones and energy levels. If you are eating at the higher range, 2500, then dropping 200-500 calories off would be optimal, but anything below 2000, I wouldn't recommend.

Another option is to up your calories by 500-600 slowly and maintain your routine, and aim for the muscle growth & energy benefits of adding these calories, which will also restore metabolic rate, so when you cut again, your maintenance is higher than it would have been had you continued grinding through the deficit. The fat loss benefit comes from resetting the metabolism, not just the caloric input/output. After sustaining this for a month or 2, take these calories off slowly again and then once you're back at 2500, you drop it till 2000 and in that period, fat loss should be at good levels.

 

[mrmors]

Thanks for the detailed reply there @lessthanhalf I'm just thinking that a sedentary person at my height/weight/age would be circa 2k calories per day, but exercising 7days a week, eating the right amount of protein, and theoretically in a neigh on 1k deficit. I have accidentally not eaten the right amount of calories a few times before over the last 6months, e.g been too busy to eat at all, or not been hungry, forgotten etc, and had 1000-1500 in the day, and next day I pay for it, I'm completely lethargic and doing the workout or run is a real struggle.

I suppose I could test this in both directions. I could do a week on bang on 2k, and a week on bang on 3k.

I'm just at a loss for how active I am, eating the amount of calories and protein for my size that someone sedentary would eat for maintenance, that weight is stalled. And there's no way I'm losing 2lbs of fat a week and putting on 2lbs of muscle. I am reasonably muscular, but without anabolics and GH there's no way I'd be putting muscle on like that, I'd have to be juiced to my eyeballs.

 

[lessthanhalf]

I agree with your basic calculations, they make sense.

In the end I do not think the bit about energy expenditure being measurable by weight loss or lack of it is wrong.

Interestingly, when I was losing weight and I started off extremely inactive, I started walking and gradually built up from 5 minutes per day to eventually got to three hours per day on bush tracks. In theory there should have been some extra calories burnt by doing this, but I could not detect the slightest change in weight loss rates from walking or not, despite the calorie intake being constant the whole time.

I like the science approach of try 2000 or 3000 kcal/day for a week or so at a time and see what happens.

 

[5byfive]

You are still guessing. If you really want to know what's going on, get a good calorie tracking app and track everything as closely as possible. Eat a consistsnt amount of calories every day. Going up and down in calories isn't going to give you the information you need. Set a baseline and slowly add calories until you see it on the scale. If you have been at a deficit, you won't be adding fat, you'll just be refilling your glycogen stores at that point. Only then will you know what your total expenditure is.

 

[Jfrick11]

Just for background, I started at around 120kg last year, took 2.5>5mg of Tirz over 6months and got down to 100kg. But, for the last couple of months I've been pretty hard stuck at 100kg and the weight wont budge, I'd ideally like to get down to the 90-95kg at the most.

I feel like I've been ballpark eating 2000-2500 calories a day, and I ate around that for the whole time I dropped the 20kg down to 100, my diet hasn't changed. I also eat 150-200g of protein a day included in that.

I decided to AI check my BMR today, and it calculates it our at around 3.3k calories. This is primarily boosted by me going to the gym 5x a week, doing strength training, and I run 5k on the other 2x days, and do 10k steps a day, have no energy/motivation issues.

I thought that if I ate in a deficit, whether it's 1000 calories, or 100, calories, it didn't matter and eventually weight would come off relative to the deficit - bigger the deficit, the more weight.

I'm wondering though, based on some reading that I've done, that wasn't exactly clear, that maybe I need to increase my calories(!!) to start losing weight again, and I might of 'crashed my metabolism'?! I that even a thing. I don't see how I could be defying physics or thermodynamics, surely, if you don't eat enough calories, your body has to eat something instead, and if I'm giving it enough protein, then it has to go after fat? Is 'crashing your metabolism' even a thing or is it made up nonsense? Should I up my calories?

Has anyone experienced anything like this or could offer any advice? Did anyone up their calories to lose weight? If this is a thing, and I do need to up my calories, how much do you think I should go up to, and for how long?

edit

Currently taking per week:

4mg reta

2.5 Tirz

3x 5mg mots-c

Cjc+Ipa

You’re not defying thermodynamics .... but I do think a couple things are getting mixed up here.

If you’ve been sitting around 100kg for a couple months eating what you estimate is 2,000–2,500 calories, that’s actually the most useful data point you have. Whatever calculators or AI are telling you, your real-world maintenance is very likely somewhere in that range right now. The 3,300 number is almost certainly an overestimate, especially with activity factored in.

What likely happened is pretty simple: the intake that gave you a deficit at 120kg is now your maintenance at 100kg. As body weight drops, energy needs drop with it, and on top of that most people unconsciously move a bit less over time (even if they’re still training consistently).

“Crashing your metabolism” gets thrown around a lot. Metabolic adaptation is real, but it’s not large enough to turn a meaningful deficit into maintenance. It can make things slower and more frustrating, but it doesn’t override physics.

On the flip side, increasing calories doesn’t directly cause fat loss. The time that seems to work is when someone was really under eating.... to the point that their energy, movement, or training suffered, and bringing calories up improves those things. But that doesn’t sound like your situation, you said your energy and training are solid.

The biggest flag in your post is ballpark eating. At this stage, small inaccuracies matter a lot more than they did earlier on. A couple hundred calories either way is the difference between a deficit and maintenance.

If it were me, I’d:

tighten up tracking for 2–3 weeks (no estimating)

aim for a consistent 400–600 calorie deficit from your actual maintenance

keep protein where it is (you’re doing great there)

keep an eye on steps/overall movement, since that tends to drift down over time

You’ve already done the hard part dropping 20kg. This next phase is just less forgiving and requires a bit more precision, not a metabolism reset or a big calorie increase.

 

[tubby]

“Crashing your metabolism” gets thrown around a lot. Metabolic adaptation is real, but it’s not large enough to turn a meaningful deficit into maintenance. It can make things slower and more frustrating, but it doesn’t override physics.

I'd disagree. This can be true or false depending on context. Anybody who feels continually cold, lethargic, and unmotivated under conditions of extreme restriction directly observes it. I dislike the term "crashing your metabolism," as I think it's a stupid way of framing what is going on, although I understand why dieters use it. Calorie math works to an extent (and obviously if one could truly measure all outputs, the math would check out, since it's a truism), but hormonal influence is a major driver in weight loss outcomes. We have a well constructed study (on rodents) demonstrating that GLP rats lost more weight than non-GLP rats on the exact same calorie intake of the exact same food pellets. That doesn't violate CICO, but it demonstrates that CICO on its own can be a poor predictor of weight loss results when one is forced to rely on an estimate of CO (which is true of pretty much all of us, outside of highly controlled conditions).

 

[Jfrick11]

I'd disagree. This can be true or false depending on context. Anybody who feels continually cold, lethargic, and unmotivated under conditions of extreme restriction directly observes it. I dislike the term "crashing your metabolism," as I think it's a stupid way of framing what is going on, although I understand why dieters use it. Calorie math works to an extent (and obviously if one could truly measure all outputs, the math would check out, since it's a truism), but hormonal influence is a major driver in weight loss outcomes. We have a well constructed study (on rodents) demonstrating that GLP rats lost more weight than non-GLP rats on the exact same calorie intake of the exact same food pellets. That doesn't violate CICO, but it demonstrates that CICO on its own can be a poor predictor of weight loss results when one is forced to rely on an estimate of CO (which is true of pretty much all of us, outside of highly controlled conditions).

I don’t think we actually disagree as much as it sounds.

Being cold, lethargic, unmotivated under heavy restriction is absolutely real..... that’s metabolic adaptation. Energy expenditure drops, NEAT drops, hormones shift. No argument there.

But that’s not the same as the body being able to fully cancel out a meaningful deficit and maintain weight indefinitely. The adaptation can narrow the gap, not delete it.

The GLP example actually supports that point. Same intake, different weight loss = different energy expenditure (CO), not a violation of energy balance. It just shows how hard CO is to estimate in the real world.

So I think the practical takeaway is:

Yes, hormones and adaptation matter

Yes, calculators and expected deficits can be way off

But long term, body weight still reflects actual intake vs actual expenditure

In OP’s case, the most reliable data point we have is that 2,000–2,500 calories has held their weight steady for months. That’s their real world maintenance, regardless of what any estimate says.

 

[tubby]

So I think the practical takeaway is:

Yes, hormones and adaptation matter

Yes, calculators and expected deficits can be way off

But long term, body weight still reflects actual intake vs actual expenditure

In OP’s case, the most reliable data point we have is that 2,000–2,500 calories has held their weight steady for months. That’s their real world maintenance, regardless of what any estimate says.

I think the problem comes when we pretend that "calories" will be predictive. Yes, in the extreme scenario (e.g. fasting) they will most definitely be predictive. In a less extreme scenario where food composition is fairly constant they will be fairly predictive. In the most common scenario (eating X calories of varying food types per day) there are going to be so many correction factors necessary to apply in properly analyzing a single day that it can easily break down if meal composition is regularly being varied, that our analysis can only be applied post hoc. As you note for OP, by definition CO is roughly equal to CI (based on weight not changing recently), but that doesn't really tell OP anything deeper than confirming what they already knew (that their current approach isn't effective). We can also conclude that if OP were to "cut calories" (keep eating the same stuff but slightly less of it) that OP would likely start losing weight again, but that's hardly groundbreaking insight either.

So my critique isn't that calorie math is "wrong," just that it pretends to offer deeper insight into weight management than would be available if we had never heard of the concept. That's not to say that I have a better answer, just that other responses in this thread (not yours) where they're telling OP to track their calories with more precision are simply doubling down on the same flawed logic. By reducing food to "calories" we pretend that the specific foods a person chooses to eat are arbitrary and ignore the hormonal (and other) influences that such choices. It would be like reminding a friend walking from one city to another that their speed is ultimately a function of how quickly they move their legs, which while true is much less useful than offering to give them a ride in your car. LOL

 

[pilsnermagnus]

I use the Katch-Mcardle BMR calculator to get a good idea of my needs based on my height, weight, and estimate of body fat using accumeasure pinch calipers.

Then from a tracking perspective I use Nutritionix (free) and a basic scale when I feel the need to track/measure.

Also skewing to protein and fat is my normal way of eating going on 2.5 years now. A high carb day for me is like 100g and that’s not a regular occurrence, I tend to fall in the 40-60g range.

 

[Jfrick11]

I think the problem comes when we pretend that "calories" will be predictive. Yes, in the extreme scenario (e.g. fasting) they will most definitely be predictive. In a less extreme scenario where food composition is fairly constant they will be fairly predictive. In the most common scenario (eating X calories of varying food types per day) there are going to be so many correction factors necessary to apply in properly analyzing a single day that it can easily break down if meal composition is regularly being varied, that our analysis can only be applied post hoc. As you note for OP, by definition CO is roughly equal to CI (based on weight not changing recently), but that doesn't really tell OP anything deeper than confirming what they already knew (that their current approach isn't effective). We can also conclude that if OP were to "cut calories" (keep eating the same stuff but slightly less of it) that OP would likely start losing weight again, but that's hardly groundbreaking insight either.

So my critique isn't that calorie math is "wrong," just that it pretends to offer deeper insight into weight management than would be available if we had never heard of the concept. That's not to say that I have a better answer, just that other responses in this thread (not yours) where they're telling OP to track their calories with more precision are simply doubling down on the same flawed logic. By reducing food to "calories" we pretend that the specific foods a person chooses to eat are arbitrary and ignore the hormonal (and other) influences that such choices. It would be like reminding a friend walking from one city to another that their speed is ultimately a function of how quickly they move their legs, which while true is much less useful than offering to give them a ride in your car. LOL

I get what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree that food composition, hormones, and adaptation all affect energy expenditure and make things messy in the real world.

But I think that’s kind of the point… because we can’t directly measure CO, the only practical feedback we have is body weight over time.

So while calories aren’t perfectly predictive day to day, they’re still the most useful lever we can actually adjust. If someone’s weight has been stable for months, that already tells us their current intake is matching their real expenditure, regardless of how many variables are under the hood.

From a practical standpoint, the options don’t really change: eat a bit less, move a bit more or adjust something that helps create a deficit (like meds).

I do agree that how you get there matters (food choices, adherence, energy, etc.), but that’s more about making the deficit sustainable, not replacing it.