When to Adjust Calorie Intake

Hi BBM team,

Hope you’re all doing good,

I have a question, if I may - how long would you stick with a particular calorie intake before adjusting if it doesn’t seem to be moving someone toward their weight management goal?

Context:
I’ve been slowly bulking for the past year, gaining something like ~0.5kg per month. During this time I was NOT keeping a food diary, just weighing myself daily, eating similar portion sizes each day, and aiming for ~30-40g protein per meal and 5+ fruit and veg portions per day (plus ~30g fiber and moderate saturated fat).

I decided I wanted to get a bit more focused, so last week I plugged my numbers into the BBM calorie calculator, and started tracking my meals with MFP and aiming to hit the number from the calculator.

For the last 7 days, my weight seems to have flattened/started trending down slightly, and I’m feeling more hungry and am fairly confident I’m eating a little less actual food than before. So, it’s only been 7 days, but I’m getting an indication that maybe this calorie is a little low.

Would you advise bumping the calorie goal up a little at this point? Or is it too early?

For reference, I started at ~74.5kg in March 2024, and am now around ~79.5kg today. I’m 186cm (6ft 1), doing ~100 mins of running and the Bodybuilding 2 3-day template. The calculator gave me ~3100 calories to gain weight based on all of this.

Thank you,
Jake

1 Like

Hey Jake,

It does seem like you’re likely eating less, though 1-week isn’t typically enough time to tell much of anything. That said, if you were planning on gaining weight, I would be more apt to increase Calorie intake. In hindsight, it may have been helpful to tally up your energy intake prior to these recent changes to have another data point, but I’d be in favor of just adding Cals now.

-Jordan

2 Likes

Thanks Jordan!

In hindsight I should have just started tracking what I was actually eating, yeah. Nothing that can’t be fixed pretty quick…