Expenditure keeps going up in what was supposed to be a maintenance break - almost back to where I started 14kg ago
I’m not complaining (so I’ll tag this as progress since I’m actually pretty pleased), but I am curious if anyone else noticed something similar.
I started in June last year. I’ve always been active, lifting weights 2-3 times a week. Walking and cycling everyday. My weight just crept up over the years because I was eating just a little too much, only about 200 calories a day probably, but still too much. I ended up at 92kg and was just really sick of it.
MacroFactor helped me so much to get a grip on how much I actually need to fuel my body. I stuck to a pretty small deficit (about -300 calories) and changed my lifting regime to 3 full body workouts a week instead of doing splits. I wasn’t lifting consistently enough to make splits work.
Around 80kg/176lbs has always been a comfortable weight for me. I’m 180cm/5’11 with a relatively large frame and a decent amount of muscle mass. I also have lipedema so some of my fat is just extremely stubborn. So when I hit 80kg at the beginning of this year, I increased my calories to maintenance. But I kept losing weight. Slowly, but still kinda steadily. I hit 77.2 on the scale this morning.
I’m almost back at the same expenditure I had when I started 14kgs ago. My NEAT is very similar to a year ago. It’s just the lifting that changed. So I probably managed to gain some muscle mass in the last three months while eating around maintenance. Another guess is that my inflammation went down because of the weight loss. Or maybe my metabolism is just temporarily very happy with the extra food. Not sure!
Has anyone else seen a similar trend?
Anyway thanks for reading! And if the developers read this: thank you SO much for such an amazing app. I have a history of disordered eating (and mostly: overcompensating with exercise) so I was very wary of calorie tracking again. MF appealed to me because it just sticks to the facts and gives results based advice. I did ask a friend to be my accountability buddy for the first few months but it all went really well. MF gives me all the data but zero stress. I’m just really happy with the app and will probably continue using it indefinitely!