How to Find Your Real Maintenance Calories After a Cut

Nikkiey: Hey everyone, Nikkiey here with WarriorBabe, and this video topic today was a popular demand on my Instagram. I got so much good feedback, so I'm excited to bring it to you here. In this video you are going to learn how you could eat a thousand plus more calories with more carbs and fats and maintain your current weight and body composition. So I'm going to break it down so that you know exactly what a maintenance threshold is and how you can begin to replicate this type of strategy in your own fitness journey as well.

So if you stay until the end of this video, you are going to know all of my secrets, all that I have learned and how I have implemented this strategy with hundreds of women who have been able to reach their desired goal of being toned, building muscle and changing their body composition. So get ready and enjoy. But before we dive in, please smash the like button. It will help other women engage with this video so they too can learn this information for themselves.

So first off, let me just say how online macro calculators can be so freaking misleading. For those of you who want to be in a maintenance phase and you go to find what your macro numbers should be using an online calculator, those starting numbers will not be the numbers that carry you through a legitimate maintenance phase that produces the ultimate result you could accomplish within that phase. Meaning, with some time at those starting macro numbers, you could initially lose weight, which is not your ultimate goal with being in a maintenance phase. And vice versa, you could potentially gain weight because it may be too many calories for your body.

Those calculators don't determine your lifestyle demands. They only determine a broad thing for you. Then it's up to you to figure out how to adjust those numbers to align with what your actual goal is: maintaining weight, give or take a few pounds, keeping a decent level of leanness to your body and building some more muscle. That's what you want to accomplish in a maintenance phase. And that process of trying to align those numbers can be so freaking overwhelming, since it's not your area of expertise.

Let me just speak to this very important reminder here first. This type of strategy may or may not work for you depending on your own personal consistency throughout. This requires a great level of consistency and adherence to figure out all the data and everything that works specifically for you. It also depends where you're at in your current fitness journey and the level of experience that you have with tracking macronutrients. Also, all macro numbers are completely unique and totally different for every single individual. So what someone's 2,200 calorie maintenance level is may be different from what yours specifically is.

What is a maintenance threshold? Well, first of all, the goal of it is to maintain your weight, give or take a few pounds of daily fluctuations, and maintain a decent level of leanness to your body while eating way more calories, way more macros, than where you were at in a fat loss or cutting phase.

So in short, there is a lower level to this where your body basically starts out at your maintenance macros. And here at the lower level, you can maintain your weight, you can maintain your level of leanness, or you could possibly even lose weight. As you continue to lose or maintain your weight, give or take those fluctuations that happen daily, and your level of leanness, this is where you slowly increase your macro numbers weekly or biweekly, depending on how your body adapts to the increases. And doing this repeatedly while maintaining great results can push you well above the maintenance macros that you initially started with.

So you see, those online calculators aren't going to carry you through the entire maintenance phase, because your macro numbers are going to change. And this is the beauty of eating way more food while maintaining or even improving your body composition results, and how I am able to eat now 500 plus more calories, incorporating more carbs and fats, above my starting maintenance macros.

So to dive in with a little more context on what I'm currently doing: three weeks ago, we kicked off our 80 Day Strong challenge in our WarriorBabe VIP program. If you want to learn more about our programs, the link is in the description below. My goal throughout this challenge is to stay in maintenance while determining where my new maintenance threshold is.

So let me just say, as you go through fat loss and maintenance phases numerous times, as I have for the last seven years, your maintenance threshold can change. It should change, because you are building more muscle, and more muscle needs more food. So every maintenance phase is going to require different numbers for you.

So five days into the challenge, I dropped five pounds. Now, the majority of that was water weight from the holidays, but I was also getting hungry, hungry to the point where I wanted to chew my hand off. So I gave myself a refeed day, which is a day of tracking a higher intake of macros. The next day I dropped more weight and I felt leaner than ever before. And I'm like, okay, this is not my goal right now. So I took that feedback as my body needing more food.

So I increased my calories by 250, coming from a makeup of more carbs and more fats, and my body started to level out. And I have since been maintaining weight, give or take a few pounds, and I've been maintaining an overall great level of leanness to my body. After two weeks at this calorie and macro adjustment with maintained results, I increased my calories again by 250 calories, coming again from a makeup of carbs and fats.

Here, the goal is to continue to increase my intake every week or two weeks, depending on how my body adapts to the increases, and that's how I preach it for everyone else too, while maintaining overall leanness to my body and a steady weight. But also understand, weight may increase more than normal fluctuations, and that's okay, because my body, your body, during this is also building muscle. So just a reminder: don't entirely rely on that scale. Just use it as a tool.

So all in all, now I'm eating 500 more calories than at the start of my maintenance while maintaining my body composition, leanness and weight. So I'm working my way up in the threshold, and I'm going to keep going.

Now, here's another, more in-depth example: my current WarriorBabe VIP client who is 58 years young. I pulled her stats so that I could give more context to this strategy for you, so follow along. Back at the end of September, we started to reverse her upwards out of a fat loss or cutting phase to maintenance. She ended her cutting phase at 1,850 calories, and the reverse for a month went amazing. Each week or every other week we increased her calories and her macros for a month, and she continued to drop weight. She lost five more pounds while eating 300 more calories.

Finally, at 141 pounds, we got her to level out and maintain eating around 2,150 calories, and this was in mid-October. So 2,150 calories was the low end of her maintenance threshold. We have since pushed her maintenance threshold to a higher end, and she's still got so much more wiggle room to go because she's still maintaining very well. She's now eating 2,800 calories. 2,800 calories. That's 650 more calories than when we leveled her weight out at the lower end of her maintenance threshold, and 950 more calories than when she was in a fat loss cutting phase.

This whole strategy is extremely cool to understand and also totally eye-opening as to how much more food your body has the potential to eat while maintaining where you would ideally like your body to be.

To recap, the goal of a maintenance threshold is to maintain weight, give or take a few pounds, and most importantly keep a decent level of leanness to your body while eating way more calories and macros. There's a lower level where your body basically starts out at maintenance macros, and here you can maintain your weight, maintain your level of leanness, or you could possibly lose weight. If you do lose weight, then you've got to work your numbers upwards.

As you continue to lose or maintain weight, give or take the fluctuations, and you maintain that solid level of leanness that you want to keep, you slowly increase macro numbers weekly or biweekly depending on how your body adapts to them. And doing this repeatedly while maintaining great results can push you well above the maintenance macros that you initially started with. This is the beauty of eating way more while maintaining or even improving your body composition results.

I hope you all enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed giving you the information and helping you learn more about this phenomenal strategy. If you do have any questions, please leave them below this video in the comment section. I am always happy to help and answer them. And if you want to be sure that you get sustainable macro nutrition and workout information for your individual needs, head over to warriorbabe.com, where you can find even more amazing resources like this to help you build the lean, toned body you want and, most importantly, keep your results forever. Also, please make sure to subscribe to this channel. More videos like this one are to come. Stay tuned and I'll see you soon.