The question is effectively in the title but to give a little bit more specific detail,
I've been dieting for close to two years now and have lost upwards of 80kgs (the scale wouldn't tell me past 152 for the first seven months so that's probably lowballing). I'm 25, Male, 176cm, 79kgs and work out at home five days a week for bit over an hour with dumbbells, resistance bands and a bench, they're pretty light weights but due to dumb choices leading to a loss of strength and muscle over the diet I'm reliably wiped out by the end of each day. I also do an hour or so of rope-skipping on Saturdays and a half hour body weight routine three times a week spread out randomly. It's a lot of exercise but otherwise I'm very sedentary.
I'm effectively at my goal weight but I don't quite have the confidence to say I'm 'done' with my diet so I've been slowly increasing calories from the <800 a day I was eating up until mid August to about ~2000 a day this week and my weight has remained effectively stable with each ~100cal jump, so with family coming over next week I'm planning a full diet break.
Averaging out various TDEE calculators I get somewhere around 2300 maintenance calories if I plug in 'Light Exercise' or 2600 going to moderate (Working off of a 26% BF). I've been looking into diet breaks as a way to practice and maybe even just trick myself into maintenance because despite a lot of my strength coming back in a short amount of time since eating more sanely I've still been feeling overall sluggish and moody. I'm worried though about over or underestimating what I'm doing and putting myself back into a full-on diet and all the mental traps I stuck myself in all over again in a short space of time if I screw up.
Even in writing this I know the answer is more or less 'try it and see, adjust as necessary' but the problem is knowing what to do and following the information vs what I actually end up doing which always feels like I'm pushing too hard or not doing anything at all so I suppose a lot of this I just wanted to share just to get it off my chest and see if anyone had a similar experience with having trouble moving to 'normal' or even knowing what normal is if enough things have changed.
I didn't mean to blog and I'm sorry if this is against guidelines but thanks in advance for any advice and to everyone trying, keep pushing but when you get to a brick wall, believe me just find a way around it, don't try to break it down with your face. I've been there, it hurts.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/j0628h/estimating_maintenance_calories_for_a_diet/
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