[ximi]

Out of curiosity: How many calories per day are you aiming for and how did you come up with that number?

I'm currently going for 1800 calories and after losing a decent amount of weight initially, I feel I'm making fairly little progress (to be expected). It seems to me that I actually lose more weight when I go a bit over the limit, which leads me to believe I might be eating so little that my metabolism slows down.

[ninkendo]

When I was losing weight I was trying for around 2100 calories per day, and that brought me to around 1 lb/week of weight loss.

From what I've read, the rule of thumb is 3500 calories = 1 lb of fat, so in a week, you want to run a 500 calorie deficit each day. That, and most of the online calorie estimators seemed to cluster around 2600 calories/day for "maintenance" for me, assuming a mostly sedentary lifestyle. So I came up with 2100 and that mostly worked.

It's important to "dial it in" though, by weighing yourself at the same time every day and keeping track of how much you've lost in a given week. At first I was doing 1800 calories per day and I was losing too much, so I bumped up my number up to 2100 and leveled off a bit.

Nowadays I'm doing 2600 per day and I'm coasting pretty well, maybe losing a tiny bit, but making up for it by blowing my budget on occasion. 2600 is very easy to hit though... I can still do fast food for lunch and have no problem making my budget so long as I don't overdo it too much.