Okay to be slightly over calories?

[bruinsgirl33]

Last week was my first full week of me wanting to eat 1400 calories a day and was really good about it. I want to lose 1lb a week and slightly gained when I got on the scale despite me sticking to my goal calories and exercising (thank you, female hormones!)

This week I’ve eaten a little less than 1500 calories a day and have exercised about the same amount as last week. Will I gain again next week, or should I be okay as long as I stick to my 1400 cals the rest of the week?

[Esya]

As long as the amount of calories eaten is less than the amount of calories burned you should lose weight. It might look like you gained if you add the day to day fluctuations (like water retention), but the trend will be down. The weight loss will be more slow if the difference between what you ate and burned is smaller than you planned, but you should still lose weight as long as there is a calories deficit.

You might want to set up an account at trendweight.com. You can link your FitBit account to it and it will plot your weight data and show you the trend. This makes it easier to ignore the short term fluctuations. The more data it has, the better it will work, therefore I weigh myself once a day. If you weigh yourself once a week it will take longer before it can provide you a good trendline.

[bruinsgirl33]

It says I should weigh myself on a WiFi scale but I don't have one. Can I still sign up and just log my weight manually?

[Dominique]

If you enter your weigh-ins in your Fitbit account, you will be able to link your account to TrendWeight. TrendWeight doesn’t care how the weigh-ins were added in Fitbit (manually or with a WiFi smartscale). It will take whatever data is found there. The more data points there are, the most meaningful the trend curve will be.

[Mukluk4]

---

@bruinsgirl33 wrote:

It says I should weigh myself on a WiFi scale but I don't have one. Can I still sign up and just log my weight manually?

---

I would invest in something that can measure Body Fat %.  You need to make sure you are losing the right type of weight.

[Dominique · Accepted solution]

@bruinsgirl33: 1400 vs. 1500 calories won’t make much of a difference. If you are in a deficit, you will lose weight, it will only take a bit longer. Consistency is the key: keep doing the right things most of the time for long enough. Two weeks is too short of a period to assess your results, one of the reasons being the one you mentioned. If you are committed to being more active, you need energy to fuel that extra activity, in which case it is better to eat more rather than less.