Original email for context: In P3, I am slowly ramping up my calories this week (200 a day) and I will only be at 1100 by Monday. Do you recommend upping it a bit more? I’m doing HIIT bootcamp.
It’s definitely a great idea to slowly increase calories in Phase 3. Since you are doing HIIT bootcamp, it does complicate things just a bit – not saying you should stop at all though! I too exercised in P3 – but do please see my article about how exercise, especially exercise like that, will often affect the stabilization period okay? Otherwise you might drive yourself mad.
The other thing I could possibly mention that may have a bearing is how quickly you add the calories – adding 200 calories a day is probably okay for the moment – you may need to slow the increase pretty soon – again it is a bit harder to say with HIIT involved – but just to give you an idea of what we do in the P3toLife program, we start the calories day 1 of P3 at about 900, and the whole first week is 900-1050 calories. Week 2 we raise it about 200 calories, and all that week calories are anywhere between 1100-1200. Week 3, calories move to 1300-1450.
This raise in that period of time has worked WONDERFUL for ladies on a very consistent basis. However, most of them were not exercising, and a fair percentage of the women actually do lose weight during this time first 3 weeks, so with HIIT included, it seems fair to say that you could raise either a little higher than this or faster or both. As long as you are strategic and keep observing both the scale and how your body feels that can help you. The scale (as you’ll see if you read that first article) can be a really poor indicator of what is really going on once you are exercising, so I don’t advise going solely by that- also notate how your clothes are fitting, and if your body FEELS good, or like the food is too much.
If you are sticking to Phase 3 principles with eating (my free BEST way guide for P3 here) – and you are gaining a little, but you are not feeling overly full at your meals and you are stopping when satiated, I would trust that process and not do a steak day just because the scale is higher.
I hope that helps!
