How do you find top end maintenance?
And how do you know if you over shot it?
What even is Top End Maintenance?
First let’s define some key terms:
Adapted Maintenance = when you are chronically dieting, you may experience a plateau and be able to maintain on lower calories
Maintenance Range = The range of calories you can eat and maintain your current weight (no, it’s not one specific number)
Top End Maintenance = the very top of your calorie range where you can maintain your weight
Surplus = calories eaten above maintenance resulting in weight gain (some combination of muscle and body fat)
Step 1: Finding the Top End
Many of our clients come to us in an adapted maintenance state. Where they’ve constantly yo-yo’d in and out of deficits slowly lowering their maintenance calories.
For these clients we follow this exact process in our cohorts and the 1:1 environment:
Step 1: Smooth the Highs and Lows
Are you eating in a broad range of calories from day to day? Some days you eat 1400 calories and other days 2200, but it all averages out to 1800?
Start with smoothing out those days to eating +/- 100 calories of your weekly average goal. For example, you might set a calorie range of 1700-1900 based on the above numbers.
Additionally, you need to get on the scale daily to accurately determine how your body is responding.
Step 2: Maintain
Once you’ve smoothed out the highs and lows for 2-3 weeks, what does your weight trend look like?
Flat?
Push that calorie range up by ~100 calories, so now you’re targeting 1800-2000.
Trending downwards?
You may want to more aggressively increase your calorie range depending on the rate at which you’re trending down.
A good rule of thumb here is bumping ~100 cals for every 0.2 downward trend.
Example: Is your trendline down 0.5lbs per week? Add 200-300 calories.
Step 3: Gain
You’re going to follow the process in step 2 until you’re consistently gaining 3 weeks in a row.
Don’t kid yourself here, we’re talking a solid 3 weeks of a trendline of +0.2 lbs/week or higher. That means your average weekly weight has to be 0.2 pounds higher than the previous week’s average.
At this point we’ve actually achieved a surplus 😉. And we’re willing to bet that achieving this is a lot harder than you might think.
Now, you’ve officially found the magic number!
You can peel back to your prior targets knowing you’ve found that top end of calories you can maintain at or continue in a muscle-building phase.
Would you like a little more guidance?
Our 7-day mini-course on how to track your data is perfect for finding you maintenance and top end maintenance on your own. You can read more about it here:
