I am so confuse. I read advice here all the time where people tell others they need to be eating at the top calorie range for their weight, then drop it down to continue to lose weight. Why? I don't really understand the concept. I have never maintained a weight loss successfully, so I am definitely no expert in this area, but it seems to me that it would be easier to add calories once you start to maintain rather than have to take more of them away.

Say I ate 1800 calories/day for a year or so and lost 100 pounds, but to get to my goal and maintain it will take my body 1500 calories a day...so after a year I would have to give up even more calories, vs. if I ate 1200 calories for a year or so and reached my goal and got to add a few back to maintain. It seems like more punishment to continually take calories away vs. add them back. Is it easier to restrict yourself more later?

There are several advantages to eating "as much as you can" while losing weight. For most people, smaller changes are generally easier to accomplish than larger ones. Cutting 500 calories from your usual day is a lot easier (both physically and mentally) than cutting 1500 calories out of your day.

The more (calories) you eat, the more nutrition you can take in. Very low calorie diets make it very difficult to eat a balanced diet. A multivitamin can help, but it can not take the place of the nutrition in real, whole foods.

Restricting calories can drastically lower metabolism faster and more dramatically than moderate changes. So, if you start out as low as you can go - if your body adapts too well to the low calorie level - you have no where to go. You can only cut so much. While the extent to which "starvation" or "survival" mode occur has been debated, there is abundant evidence that the phenomenon does exist. A person who has never dieted generally has a higher metabolism than a person who has - the more times and the more drastically the person has cut calories, the lower their metabolism tends to be (the effects may be temporary or permanent - there's growing evidence that the effects can be permanent).

So the less you restrict your calories, the less you may have to. If this is true, then it definitely makes the most sense to eat the most that you can and still lose weight. Restricting "just enough" to lose weight slowly, then when weight loss stalls, restricting just a little bit more..... may result in maximizing your metabolism. It could make the difference between being able to "maintain" your ideal weight on 1800 calories or on 1200. Which would you prefer? For me, I'd prefer to be able to maintain my ideal weight on as many calories as I can, so the higher I can keep my metabolism the better (I wish I'd learned this much earlier, as I think my metabolism has been destroyed by years of dieting).

Lori, as a long-time maintainer I can tell you that no one -- not you, not me, and certainly not a calculator -- knows how many calories you'll need in maintenance. But I can assure you that it HAS to be more than you were losing with -- otherwise you'd keep right on losing!

In the Maintainers Forum, we have a saying that "maintenance looks just like losing, but with a few more calories". What that means is that once you reach your goal, you keep on doing exactly what you were doing to lose weight and s-l-o-w-l-y add calories, maybe 100 - 200 per day. Each week you monitor your progress and if you're still losing, you bump up your calories by another 100 or so. If you've gained, you drop back a 100 or so. And if your weight stays the same -- eureka, you've found your unique maintenance calories!

Most of us who are maintaining find that calorie calculators are wildly inaccurate for us. There's a huge range of calories that our maintainers have, ranging from perhaps 1200/day to over 2200/day. So please remember that everyone is different and no one knows what your maintenance calories will be ahead of time.

But again, they have to be higher than the calories that allow for weight loss!

It sounds to me like you're a little confused about the advice you're reading. Even I got confused reading your post and had to go over it several times to understand what you were saying.

This makes no sense. If your maintenance calories are 1500, then you're not going to lose eating 1800 calories. If your maintenance calories are 1500 (and by the way, we're assuming here that all these numbers are just theoretical, because as Mel says, no one can tell you what an exact number is or isn't for you), then you'd have to eat at or below 1500 calories to get to that goal.

BUT ... here's where the higher calorie figure comes in.

Let's say there's a woman who is 5'5" and works out 3x a week. And these figures are for maintenance - not to lose, not to gain, just to maintain. (Again, these numbers are hypothetical and I'm rounding off for easier math.)
At 300 lbs, she needs 3000 calories to maintain her weight.
At 200 lbs, she needs 2500 calories to maintain her weight.
At 140 lbs, she needs 1800 calories to maintain her weight.

If you looked at it mathematically, you'd say that it would make sense for her to just start eating 1200 calories, get down to 140, and then add back in 600 calories to stay at 140 lbs.

That makes logical sense.

The problem here is that our bodies aren't machines in that respect. Even though you are dieting and want to lose weight, your body still needs to be nourished. And if you take away TOO MUCH nourishment at once, you freak out your body and cause it to stop losing weight. Our bodies are programmed for survival - over any other need. And if you suddenly drop the amount you're feeding your body *so* drastically below what it needs, your body starts holding on to everything you give it. Hence ... stalling, plateaus, etc.

So the better thing to do is to slowly reduce your calories. As long as you're at a calorie deficit (and assuming there are not other medical issues) you *will* lose weight.

So instead if you were the hypothetical woman above ... instead of freaking out your body and going from 3000 calories to 1200 calories ... go from 3000 to 2500. When your weight loss slows down, you drop down a little more, to 2200 or 2000. When your weight loss slows down even more, you drop down to 1800 or 1500 even. And then as you hit your goal, you start to stabilize.

This allows your body to adjust slowly to eating fewer calories. Instead of freaking out your system and throwing things out of whack, it's a healthy, reasonable way to lose weight. And you'll get more consistent results if you *don't* freak out your body.

That's why eating drastically lower than you have to is really not a good idea. The whole body freak out thing is something to be avoided.

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Personally I see it as way more punishing to "take away" 1500 calories per day at the beginning, than to gradually take those calories away in increments (and that's not even considering the survival mode adjustments that my body might make).

I mean, if someone told you that you had to learn to live on half your current income - which would you rather have them do - cut your salary in half today so you're only "punished" once, or gradually over the next five years, so that you could get rid of debt and expenses and learn to live on less over time rather than "sink or swim". Which would be more punishing?

I don't know about you, but I'd appreciate the gradual approach a lot more. My husband and I are now living on about 1/3 of the income we had only four years ago. 3/4 of our income disappeared overnight, when I became unable to work and we were living on 1/4 of the "old" income for a year. Just after I got onto disability and we saw the end of our financial troubles in sight, my husband experienced a serious injury and surgery that triggered a health cascade leaving my husband unable to work (very luckily he had good disability insurance at work). So now we're both on disability and living on 1/3 of the income we once had (and 1/3 is much better than 1/4, so I'm not complaining). I definitely do not believe that a gradual adjustment to our finances would have been worse than the sudden changes we experienced.

I think for weight it is the same way. Calories really are the body's "cash," and learning to live on the appropriate budget doesn't have to be seen as a punishment at all. If you spend less, you don't need to earn as much. Putting ourselves on a calorie "budget" means using and spending our body's resources wisely. Eating less and exercising more isn't about punishing ourselves, it's about using our resources wisely. Getting the most "bang" for our buck is a lot more important than the actual numbers. Your income can be a million dollars, but if you're spending a million and one, you're not in a better position than the person who's earning $20,000 and spending $15,000.

I think money management and health management have a lot in common. Neither is only about what comes in vs. what goes out (though many people do try to reduce it to that) - it's a much more complicated equation.

My husband and I are learning to live on less (both calories and money). With money, I'm learning that the more success I have in making small changes, the more changes I find I can make. I would have told you four years ago that much of what we are doing now was "impossible," or at least seriously "punishingly" miserable. I would have told you that living without a standard phone was impossible. My husband and I get high speed internet access, cable tv, and telephone and voice mail (through our cable service and skype) for less than the price we used to pay just for our monthly phone bill.

In a lot of ways, learning to eat on fewer calories is the same. If you would have told me four years ago that I could get as much enjoyment out of fresh blackberries as a piece of cheesecake, or more enjoyment out of roasted eggplant than a hamburger - I also would have told you that you were crazy.

Living on a smaller budget doesn't necessarily mean "less fun." In many ways, our quality of life has improved. We live better on less in many ways than we did on more. When we earned more, we spent more (and thought we had to). Most of our money went into supporting our lifestyle, which wasn't lavish - but working long hours meant more eating out or convenience foods. We "needed" two cars because our work hours weren't always compatible with car sharing, so we had to pay for, maintain and insure two cars.

I think the parallel in food for me, is that the better I eat (more nutrition for the calorie and a more appropriate calorie alottment), the better I feel. Drastically cutting calories make me miserable. I'm too fatigued to exercise properly, I'm tired and achey and irritable. Eating too many calories or the wrong foods, (especially refined carbs) also make me feel horrible. Finding the right balance - the amount and quality of food that allows me to feel my best while losing weight, and continuing to get healthier, that's a priceless formula. And I don't have it completely figured out yet, but I'm learning and getting better and better, and there's really no punishment in it at all. In fact, that's the biggest difference this time in my weight loss - punishment is not allowed at all.

What a great thread! Thank you ladies, for your insight. I have wondered how things actually "work", much like Lori Bell. You both have explained so much.