Can I Avoid Gaining Weight After Surgery?
About 8 weeks into a weight loss phase (or “cut” for us cool fitness bro’s), tomorrow I am going to abruptly stop basically all physical activity for at least a week, maybe more, due to minor knee surgery. How much should I eat to avoid backsliding on my weight loss progress these last 8 weeks?
I’ve lost around 8 pounds in 8 weeks, by taking my calories from around 2,500 progressively lower down to around 2,000 calories while keeping activity level roughly constant.
That “constant activity level” has been pretty high, including:
- At least 11,000 steps a day
- 400m of lunges daily
- Weight training 6 days a week.
So, going from the above to almost zero activity (especially in the first few days after surgery) is going to be a shock to my system. This is probably an issue some of you may have faced in the COVID crisis if your gym or other means of activity (tennis, squash, pickup basketball, etc.), so I’d love to hear how you dealt with it.
Starting Point – Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
I was losing weight on around 2000-2100 calories a day the last week or so. The question is how much should I reduce my calorie intake to offset the loss of activity?
The place I started was a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator. There are a bunch of them out there if you Google it. The theory behind this calculation is that it is the base amount of calories your body burns without accounting for activity. Based on my age, height and weight, the calculators say I should burn around 1800 calories in a sedentary state.
That seems a bit on the high end, so I will shoot for around 1700 calories the first few days post surgery and adjust from there. It should be a fun experiment, and maybe it will help some of you if you find yourself in a similar situation and want to rely on a BMR calculator.
In any event, this small break from training overall, and longer break from lower body training is probably going to be very good for my overall nervous system, because I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard.
