Time to respawn....after a week?!

[Krazi3man]

So I've been here 10 days and I think I rushed my eating habits. I put on about 5 pounds. I'm bordering 190lbs again and I don't like it. I went from eating about 1500 calories a day, if that, to almost 2300 for the past week. 2300 is what fitnesspal gave me to work with and I don't think it's right for me. Not yet. I'm active and work out but I don't think I'm at the point to eat that much. Another factor may have been that I've been eating a LOT of carbs to reach that calorie range. I think my body was just shocked that it ate more than usual >.<

 

So I'm respawning....after a week. I'll go back down to my 1500 calories or so and work my way up to more calories as my exercises intensifies. I'll be greatly reducing carbs as well and focusing on eating more fruits and veggies. I'm pretty upset with myself because it's not how i want to start off! Start off with a bang not a slump blah

[theseus]

Scales can definitely be deceiving at times, so it's entirely possible (nay, even probable!) that you didn't gain 5 lbs. in 10 days. It's much more likely that it's just a natural weight fluctuation, so I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you.

 

Depending on how often you weigh yourself, you might consider taking the moving average of your weight over time. This can help to increase to signal-to-noise ratio a bit (in favor of signal, naturally). John Walker's book The Hacker Diet has a good section on calculating this that you may find interesting. Check it out here: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/subsection1_2_4_0_4.html  This approach can help if you're the sort of person who likes to record your weight on a daily basis. 

 

As for calculating daily calorie figures, I've had decent results using the Harris-Benedict equation to get a sense of my daily caloric requirements and working from there. You can get an idea of your basal metabolic rate here: http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/ There are additional directions on the site that describe how to use this figure to derive what your daily caloric intake ought to be.

 

Best of luck!