How to Increase Your Maintenance Calories

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To enjoy the glow of good health, you must exercise.
––Gene Tunney

Wouldn’t it be cool to eat more and get to maintain your weight instead of gaining?

If you enjoy food, I bet the answer is yes.

But is it possible?

Also yes… but there are some myths regarding what’s truly effective.

Let’s get this out of the way from the get-go: The only way to increase your maintenance calories is to induce the body to burn more, so that it will require a greater caloric intake to match the extra expenditure.

In this article, I’m going to cover three facts and two myths about how you can increase your maintenance calories.

1. Increasing your bodyweight increases your maintenance calories: Fact.

In a recent podcast interview with Dr. Eric Trexler, in which we discussed metabolism and fat loss, Dr. Trexler mentioned a paper by Rosenbaum and colleagues.
 
According to this, for every 10% of body mass loss, total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) seems to decrease by up to 25%.

While I don’t have any specific evidence-based numbers such as 10% and 25% as it pertains to weight gain––to my knowledge, there’s no research on this––the reverse also appears to be true.

In other words, a larger body requires more calories, therefore weighing more will enable you to increase the calories you need to maintain your weight.

I doubt permanent weight gain will be the go-to strategy for most people reading this, but some of you may be on a weight gain journey.

In this case, if you’ve gained some weight but have hit a plateau, this may be because, having increased your caloric expenditure by increasing bodyweight, what used to be a surplus is now closer to your maintenance. Therefore, you need more calories in order to continue growing.

2. Increasing muscle mass increases your maintenance calories: Fact.

This isn’t the same as “increasing bodyweight” because:

• You can increase bodyweight by increasing both fat and muscle tissue.
• You can increase bodyweight by primarily increasing fat tissue, with little additional muscle.
• You can increase muscle mass without a change in bodyweight if you lose some fat in the process, which is called body recomposition.

If you take two people with the same bodyweight, the person with the greater muscle mass also burns more calories.

By the same token, building more muscle than you currently carry will increase your current caloric expenditure.

According to research, the difference in caloric expenditure between muscle and fat appears to be the following:
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• Muscle tissue: 10-15 calories/kg of body mass/day
• Fat tissue: 4-5 calories/kg of body mass/day

Based on these data, by building an extra 5 kg of muscle (~11 lbs), you’d burn an extra 50 to 75 calories per day, which is the caloric equivalent of a medium egg.

Furthermore, building this much muscle takes a long time.

According to Lyle McDonald’s muscle gain rate model, a cisgender man may build 20 to 25 lbs of muscle in his first year of consistent, well-executed, hypertrophy-specific training (9 to 11 kg), whereas a cisgender woman may build roughly half as much (5 to 10 kg).

These values may differ if you’re on hormone therapy for the purpose of transitioning to your chosen gender.

So, depending on your genetics, sex assigned at birth, hormonal milieu, and consistency with training and nutrition, it may take you six months to a year as a beginner to build ~5 kg of muscle, assuming this model is somewhat correct.

… And these are the fastest gains you’ll ever make.

If you’re more advanced, building 5 kg of muscle will take longer than a year, though the actual time depends on how advanced you are and all the other above-mentioned factors.

In other words, in a year’s time as a beginner or in several years’ time as an advanced trainee, you’ll likely have built enough new muscle to be able to eat an extra egg. Yay.

This is an important perspective because some people make it sound as though building muscle will turn you into an anabolic machine that can maintain weight on 4000 calories a day.

That is not the case, unless you’re a “genetic freak” and/or on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

3. Increasing your activity levels increases your maintenance calories: Fact.

Not only that, but a high energy output through physical activity, when matched with an equally high caloric intake to support all this movement, seems to be an effective and health-promoting way to increase your maintenance calories, according to the research conducted so far on a concept known as “energy flux”.

Energy flux is the amount of energy going through the system of the human body.

You’re in a state of so-called “high energy flux” when you’re expending a lot of energy and therefore require an equivalent amount in order to maintain your current body composition.

Based on the research on this topic, it seems like a higher energy flux has two main benefits:

• It helps you maintain fat loss successfully in the long term
• It improves your metabolic health––which is more likely to occur when you lose excess body fat––even if your weight doesn’t change

Furthermore, of all the strategies addressed so far, it’s the one that’s most likely to have a tangible outcome in a relatively short time. For instance, building muscle can be a very health-promoting endeavour, too, but the results take way longer, as discussed above.

4. Reverse dieting increases your maintenance calories: Myth.

Reverse dieting is a dietary strategy that you can employ to transition from a calorie deficit to maintenance.

It involves increasing your calories gradually until you bridge the gap between your deficit range and maintenance range.

Some claim that this process increases your maintenance calories by “boosting your metabolism”, which is supposedly “damaged” by being in a deficit for a prolonged period of time.

This doesn’t actually pan out in research or in my experience.

For one, a deficit doesn’t damage your metabolism; it simply causes metabolic adaption, which can be reversed in most cases by returning to maintenance calories straight away, with no need to spend any time reverse dieting.

If you want to learn more about metabolic adaptation, tune into this podcast.

Saying that, some people may feel that reverse dieting has helped their metabolism because, before taking this approach, they were under the impression that increasing their calories would immediately cause “fat gain”.

What’s more likely to have happened is that these people would bump their calories up to estimated maintenance and see a sharp increase in scale weight…

… Which is normal when you’re eating several hundred calories more than when you were in a deficit. As a result of the extra consumption, you have more gut residue (food in your stomach) and more carbs in your body, each gram of which is absorbed with 3-4g of water.

All of these factors––gut residue, carbohydrate, and water––will contribute to weight gain, but it isn’t fat gain and will not affect your appearance or health in any particular way.

However, likely because these individuals didn’t have a knowledgeable coach to give them realistic expectations, the sudden uptick in weight would scare them and lead them to believe they were “gaining fat”.

So they’d drop their calories back down to a deficit, heave a sigh of relief when the scale would go down again, and convince themselves that said deficit is in fact their maintenance.

To be clear, I’m not criticising these people.

I was one of them once upon a time, and very scared of even the smallest increase in scale weight, so I have a lot of empathy for them.

Had I known about reverse dieting at the time, I probably would have thought it could “cure” my metabolism, too.

Had these people continued to eat at their estimated maintenance for at least two to four weeks, they’d have realised that this “weight gain” doesn’t last forever.

After a couple of weeks out of a deficit, you’re not gaining any more gut residue or water weight, so your scale weight stabilises, assuming your estimation of maintenance calories is correct.

If you reverse diet and increase calories a little at a time, you’re not going to see such a sharp increase in weight, which is why you may think that reverse dieting “boosted your metabolism”.

It’s also the main reason why I may utilise reverse dieting in my coaching practice.

While it doesn’t have any proven physiological benefits, it can have great psychological benefits for this type of person, as it would encourage them to eat more and achieve true maintenance instead of thinking that their deficit calories are their “new maintenance” and thus feel restricted by the small amount of food they believe they must eat in order to preserve their results.

Moreover, the type of person who tends to be afraid of seeing the scale go up after a diet, is usually someone who’s never lost weight successfully and kept it off for the long haul.

Therefore, estimating their maintenance calories takes some trial and error, since they don’t have any prior data to look back on.

Reverse dieting can suit this situation well, as it would keep the fear of sudden weight regain at bay whilst enabling you to more accurately gauge your maintenance calories by making conservative increases.

However, you can take it too far, for example by only upping calories by 50 or less every week or every couple of weeks.

This is a measly increase that ultimately keeps you in a deficit, albeit a smaller one, for longer than may be needed or desired.

In my view, if the goal is to transition to maintenance, then you want to spend as little time as possible still in a deficit, otherwise you’re not acting in true alignment with this goal.

Therefore, a reasonable reverse dieting approach would entail boosting calories up by at least 100 at a time, depending on the person, after which you’d wait at least a few days to a week in order to ascertain whether the new intake is still a deficit or not.

5. Bulking increases your maintenance calories: Myth.

Some people may find that, when they’re in a muscle-building phase in a surplus, they have to increase their calories a lot more than expected based on their original maintenance calories in order to gain weight.

If they’re new to bodybuilding and this is their first phase in a calorie surplus, they may get excited and think that this means that their maintenance calories are now higher than their starting point.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that is not usually the case.

The reason for the disproportionate surplus is, more often than not, one of two.

The first reason is that their metabolism is very “adaptive”.

An adaptive metabolism fights harder than average to maintain homeostasis and avoid weight gain (or fat loss in a deficit) by increasing your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) to a greater degree than what other people, with a less adaptive metabolism, may experience.

In other words, you start fidgeting, blinking, and generally moving more than usual without realising, thus increasing your energy expenditure.

However, once you reduce calories again to transition out of a surplus, it’s likely that your body will adapt to the decrease, too, and thus your maintenance calories will be…

… Pretty much the same as when you started, unless you’ve built so much muscle that you’re now burning more calories to maintain the new tissue.

As I addressed earlier in this article, this scenario is quite unlikely within a single three- to twelve-month long muscle-gaining phase––the typical length of one such phase that I’ve seen in my practice––given how slow muscle growth is and how little even 5 kg of muscle seems to contribute to your metabolic rate.

Metabolisms can be adaptive in both directions. For instance, some people need to diet on lower calories than expected because their body defends very effectively against fat loss.

In addition, your metabolism may be adaptive in one direction, but not the other. So, just because you diet on lower calories than expected, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll need a larger surplus, and vice versa.

The other reason why your maintenance calories may seem “inflated” in a surplus is that many people transition into a higher-frequency and higher-intensity program when they start a muscle-building phase.

It’s not uncommon for my own beginner clients, who are embarking upon their first muscle-building phase under my guidance, to “graduate” from a three-day to a four- or five-day program.

As a result, their maintenance goes up because they’re training more frequently, often harder and with better execution than when they were less experienced, and thus they burn more calories overall.

If that’s the case, then your maintenance calories may remain higher when you transition out of a surplus, especially if you maintain the same training frequency, quality, and intensity of effort.

On the other hand, if you haven’t changed your program to generate more energy output, then don’t assume that your maintenance calories will be higher than they were when you started your muscle-gaining phase. They probably won’t be.

Finally, for clarity, I’m not claiming that no one would ever be able to build so much muscle as to increase their maintenance calories within a relatively short-term muscle-gaining phase.

However, I think that this is more likely if, again, you’re a genetic freak and/or take PEDs.

Most of the people I coach don’t fall under either category, so the most likely explanations remain, in my view, an adaptive metabolism and/or an increase in energy output.

In summary, the most effective ways to increase your maintenance calories include:

• Adopting a “high energy flux” lifestyle
• Building more muscle mass

On the other hand, reverse dieting and bulking in a calorie surplus sometimes appear to increase maintenance calories, but this isn’t currently supported by evidence nor does it actually occur in practice.
 
Thanks for reading. May you make the best gains.
 
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