Looking for words of wisdom/anyone who’s been through something similar/ support
24F I’m 4’11 and I started a cut back in November. I’m a professional dancer/ dance teacher. I’m not performing in a dance show contract year round, I try and do 2-3 shows a year (each contract usually lasts about 3-4 months) but I do teach jazz and ballet to littles.
I naturally lost 25-30lbs over a year without calorie counting, I didn’t even realize I had lost it until people started pointing it out. I bought a scale just cuz I was curious and then wanted to see if I could lean out a tiny bit more. Just wanted to lose like 5ish more pounds. I’m very new to calorie counting so I followed a TDEE calculator online and it placed my maintenance at 1600. Everywhere recommended a 500 cal deficit for weight loss and I thought that was CRAZY because no way could I eat just 1100 cals a day so I decided to go slowly and eat between 1300-1500 calories a day. Everywhere online said that for my height and weight, that was standard so I didn’t think I was under eating.
I started running 3 miles 2x a week with 15 minutes of pilates 3x times a week. Then in January, I started a new dance contract and it was pretty intense. We rehearsed 4hrs a night during the week and 8hrs on both Saturday and Sunday. This is a normal schedule for me but in this particular show, I got hired as the choreographers assistant and was put into every single number so it was a lot of movement. I also taught baby ballet 5 days a week, 5hrs a day (my full time job) but I never felt like this was a lot of movement because it’s so simple.
Fast forward to now (April), I’ve missed 3 period cycles and officially got diagnosed with amenorrhea and an energy deficiency. For the last 30 days I’ve been trying to recover it. My dance contract ended 2 weeks ago and I’ve basically been laying in bed whenever I can and trying to be in a surplus. I figured the quicker I can regain my cycle, the sooner I can get back to exercising. The thing that’s MIND boggling me is I was maintaining (possible plateau?) 100-103lbs on around 1500cals (I prefer to look at weekly averages) but after 30 days of an average of 2000cals, I’m fluctuating between 103-105? I was so sure bumping up 500 cals would make me gain weight like crazy but it hasn’t?? Now I have no idea was my maintenance is but I know that it probably is a lot more than 1600.
The cool thing about me tracking everything is that I can look back at all the data. I can see that I was unintentionally eating very low fat and low carb. I don’t think this helped me out. But I also didn’t feel like I was restricting food? I ate tons of fruit and veggies and ate dessert and takeout when I wanted.
TLDR: accidentally gave myself amenorrhea and the super slow weight gain from my recovery surplus is making me question what my maintenance calories actually are.
I guess I’m looking to see if anyone has any similar experiences
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/1jzkszh/hormonesmissing_period_confusing_maintenance/
Comments
Post a Comment