by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-16 15:28:35+00:00
I've been on that journey. When I decided to lose weight I started by just tracking and I was at about 3200 calories daily. The trackers aren't perfect, of course, but given my height, weight and (nonexistent) activity level my maintenance calories hovered around 2500. Now it's down to 2200, 50 pounds later after two years of hard cutting and recomp (1800 cals/day).

>Basically, once you're on a diet, you're always on a diet for the rest of your life

If your diet is maintenance? Yeah, sorta. People get this idea that they'll get getting fit out of the way and then it's done and they stay fit forever and can go right back to the lifestyle that gave them a body other than what they want. Fit has to be what you do, esp because we live in a society where more is more and the average person is wildly overconsuming from a raw calorie perspective. That's why I hate weight loss as a goal even though that's precisely the goal that started me into the fitness lifestyle. People think that you set the goal, hit the goal, and then you're done forever and that's just not a mindset that will bring success in this.

>There are things I can do to speed it back up, like going to the gym and putting on as much muscle as possible, but that also takes time and effort and work and it requires overeating and gaining weight at the same time.

First off, cardio will do more for you boosting your base metabolism than lifting and it doesn't cause weight gain. It not only boosts your base metabolism but it burns calories immediately.

Second, I think you're a bit too focused on weight as the metric. This is a Goodhart's law problem ('when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric') and one that I had to overcome. For the first six months or so I was eating very little, working out twice/day (20 minutes resistance in the AM, then 20 minutes on the exercise bike in the early afternoon), and I wasn't losing weight. It sucked. Until I tried on a pair of pants that hadn't fit in years and they slid right on no problem. Turns out that I had naively discovered what the bodybuilding community calls a recomposition or "recomp". That's when you maintain a calorie deficit but still train to gain muscle. You won't lose weight as a number on a scale as quickly, and muscle growth is noticeably slower when you're in a calorie deficit (though not non-existent as long as you sleep well and get your protein), but your shape changes. Fat gets replaced by muscle. I also figured out that I wasn't winded when I went up a flight of stairs anymore and was even able to finish my first 5k having not really lost any weight. I did eventually drop from 210 to about 160 at 5'6" which is more than modest but less than a miracle, but honestly I reached a point in the 170s where I stopped caring about my weight and started caring about my abilities instead.

> my BMR was at 1,836 Calories/day....I was eating 500 calories a day under what my calculator said I should be eating

Holy shit dude 1300 cal/day is absurd. I'm 40, 5'6" and was 210 when I started and 1800 cal/day was a hard cut for me. 20%ish, right near what they say is the max you can maintain long-term. Even losing almost a quarter of my body weight now my daily only dropped to 1700. I'm not here to tell you about your life but those numbers just don't jive with my experience at all. You're bigger than me and younger, it would be an outlier if your BMR was less than mine all other things being equal like level of exercise

FWIW given the data you posted and assuming no exercise the mayo clinic puts your BMR at 2350, which means a hard cut would come in between 1800 and 1900 cals/day. Idk precisely how they define "somewhat active" but if you meet that measure it increases to 2500 and 2000 for a hard cut. Can I ask how you arrived at the figure of 1800 cal/day for your BMR given that the tests you had done set it at 2100?