I have what some might consider to be a hot take when it comes to calorie tracking and losing weight: If you’re starting out, you should eat at maintenance. Meaning, track and eat the same amount of calories that you require to maintain your weight, even if your actual goal is to lose weight.
There are a few reasons for this:
Only Take On One Challenge at a Time
Learning how to track calories for the first time can be a challenge, and losing weight is obviously a challenge. Doing both at the same time? All the more challenging, often enough to quickly overwhelm a beginner. So why not instead just worry about one at a time? Get the habit of tracking calories down, then worry about the weight loss part.
Fundamentally, People Have to “Relearn” Food
Understanding what maintenance looks and feels like is really important for maintaining results long term. A lot of us—Americans in particular—have a warped sense of what a normal amount of food is because we’re inundated with massive portions of hyperpalatable junk food our whole lives.
Many of us need to deprogram from the food matrix and relearn what a truly normal amount of food that maintains a healthy weight actually looks like on a plate and feels like hunger-wise. So, if we need to learn this anyway, we might as well learn it at the start so that we have that frame of reference from the beginning.
How Much More Hungry Should You Actually Be When Losing Weight?
It’s also really important to understand what a calorie deficit for weight loss feels like in relation to what maintenance actually feels like. It’s significant enough that you’ll probably notice it, but it’s definitely not massive. We’re talking eating to like 70% fullness instead of 80%.
Compare that to someone going straight from a standard American hypercaloric diet all the way to a fad crash diet, and the difference is way too extreme because they don’t have that frame of reference, and this rarely ends well.
Learning Patience Is One of the Most Important Things
Starting at maintenance helps train patience, which is honestly one of the hardest things. Weight loss doesn’t necessarily need to be complicated, or even all that difficult, actually.
But it is slow and boring, no way around it. And human brains have a remarkable penchant for shaking things up, even if it’s already working, because we think, “Oh, I can do more and get there faster maybe.” Again, this rarely ends well.
The Goal Is Sustainability, Not Speed
In the grand scheme of things, are you really going to care if you get to your goal weight a few weeks later? Especially if taking the extra time means the difference between keeping the weight off and giving up entirely?
Start at maintenance calories for a few weeks to find your bearings first; then worry about the weight loss. You’re going to spend a lot more time maintaining your weight than losing it anyway, so you might as well start there.