[ncuneo]

Just planning ahead

1. When did you start eating "maitenance" calories? At your goal weight? Before? A few lbs after?

2. Did you just start adding 100 cals a day gradually or did you use some calculator to find out your maitenance calories and jump up immediately. My maitenance calories are only slightly higher than my current calorie intake but quite a bit higher than what I'll be at in another 30-40 lbs...so I'm wondering as long as I continue to lose if I should just stay at this level so it's not a shock to my metabolism when I hit maitenance and I end up gaining some back.

[aneleh]

If I could still lose and eat more calories I'd do it!

[grrrkgrrrl]

people are following both ways, depends on what you really want to do!

i went straight to maintenance calories but keep checking as i am not sure i've calculated correctly.

others feel it's safer to keep adding, though imo it takes away a bit of the glory from meeting your goal.

edit: as for the other question, at first my goal was 68kilos, when i reached that i went for 66.5 and when i made it there for 1-2 days i jumped into maintenance calories.

time will show if i done it correctly, today i weighed in at 65.9 so a bit more tweaking might be needed

[Glory87]

I don't think there's a set right or wrong answer.

For me, I started by upping my daily calories by 100 per day and then following that new level for 1-2 weeks. Then, I raised the daily amount again for a couple of weeks.

I also used Fitday to carefully record my intake and watched the scale like a hawk. Eating more calories was pretty nerve wracking, but it worked out.

I was also careful make sure that my extra calories were just more of the same healthy calories I was already eating. I didn't say "woo, woo 100 calories, that's a snickers bar!" I did stuff like start eating peanut butter and adding cashews to my stir fries.

Adding treats actually came much later in my maintenance plan! Everybody's different.

[paperclippy]

Check out this thread, it has a lot of good discussion on the same topic: http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/livi...intenance.html