Eat More?

Maybe.  I've been dealing with a lot of ups and downs with weigh ins over the last 6 months or so and haven't been dropping as quickly as I'd like even when I'm being super careful about my diet and exercise.  I lost 50 lbs in my first 6 months, 75 in my first year, but I've only lost 6 in the last 3 months.  Naturally, the loss is going to slow down as I get closer to my goal, but this has seemed really slow. I've mentioned before that I use an app called Lose It!  which gives me a calorie budget each day.  What I've been been doing is eating my full calorie budget (right now its 1,513) and leaving the calories I burn with exercise as a deficit.  I was looking at this a couple of weeks ago and realized there were days (like on long run days) that after my exercise calories were deducted my net intake was only around 1,000 calories.  Conventional wisdom says that you should not eat less than 1,200 calories.  I started eating additional calories making sure my net ends up right around 1,200 each day just to see what would happen.  Guess what?  I've lost 1 lb each week I've done this.  I was shocked by it this week, because we went out to dinner last Friday with my grandparents for Mexican food which resulted in a lot of extra calories, and I indulged in some Easter candy over the weekend.  Given that and the fact that (sorry if this is TMI) it is very close to my time of the month, I fully expected a gain yesterday, but lost 1.1 lbs.  Wow!  I'm not convinced yet, that this is the reason why, but I'm going to keep at it as long as it works.  Now, I should say, I don't wait until the end of the day and take in a couple of hundred extra calories.  I'm a planner.  I actually log all of my meals and snacks in the morning that I'll be eating that day, and I know about how many exercise calories I'll burn that day so I work the additional calories in over the full day.  If you aren't losing, maybe the answer is to eat more. Who knew?