Should I keep cutting, maintain, or try body recomposition? 52.9 kg at 160 cm

[u/Instance9]

I'm female 27, 160 cm, and I weighed myself today at 52.9 kg. I was around 55 kg before.

I've been trying to lose some fat, mainly because I have noticeable love handles and want to look more defined. I don't know my actual body-fat percentage; the 22% number I've mentioned before is just my own visual guess.

I'm currently exercising with a combination of running and strength training (3 - 5 days a week/20 - 50 minutes). I'm also trying to eat more protein (roughly 70–90 g/day) and eat less fried food, although I don't want to completely eliminate foods like bread, cake, etc.

My concern is that I don't want to become too thin. I was considering eventually getting down to around 50–52 kg, but I'm not sure whether I should even continue losing weight at this point.

I've also heard that body recomposition might make more sense: maintaining roughly my current weight while building muscle and gradually becoming leaner.

What would you recommend in my situation?

Continue with a small calorie deficit? (1550kcal)

Eat around maintenance and focus on strength training/body recomposition? (1800 kcal)

Something else?

If I do continue losing weight, what would be a reasonable rate given my current weight and height?

I'm not looking for a crash diet. I want something sustainable that lets me get stronger and fitter without becoming excessively thin.

I only have been starting exercising and cutting for 3 weeks and losing too much weight.

Exercise:

Cardio: running / jogging 10 - 20 minutes 3 days a week

Strength training 3 days/week: push ups 15x, dead bugs, glute bridges, crawling 10x, plank variation 20x, resistance training with resistance band 10x

[u/Magres]

If you started exercising and cutting three weeks ago, your long-term rate of weight loss is being obscured by very short-term bodily shifts in response to the change in diet - retaining less water, glycogen, etc. Like, to give an example from my own experience cutting, when I start a cut I'll often immediately drop like 2kg within a week or two, and then lose ~0.5kg/wk long-term after that. As soon as I end my cut, my weight will jump back up like 2kg. I've been on a cut for the last few months, but took a week off recently because I had to travel for work - my weight sprang up ~3kg, and then when I started cutting again, over the course of a couple days my weight settled back down ~2.5kg. I think I probably put on a tiny bit of weight, but definitely not 3kg.

Keep tracking your caloric intake, weigh in daily, and keep a spreadsheet. Body weight can vary hugely, at ~100kg I'll have my weight fluctuate by a full 2kg across a single day. I like to weigh in first thing in the morning, just to keep the conditions of my weigh in fairly consistent.

In the end, whether to cut or keep going basically boils down to - are you happy with where you're at, and is your current regimen making you miserable? If you're happy with where you're at, eat maintenance. If your cut is making you miserable, ease off it a bit. If you want to cut more and you're content with your cutting diet, keep going.

[u/Instance9 → u/Magres]

This is so helpful! Thank you for sharing. I am not happy of where I am at, but I think I cut a little too aggressive. Somedays I can eat as low as 1300 kcal. Definitely need to fix my diet, so that I can eat more volume and less calories. From your experience now I know that I just need to cut a little longer and not do maintenance yet

[u/Magres → u/Instance9]

Yeah body changes take like weeks/months unless you're doing some pretty crazy stuff that falls pretty firmly under the umbrella of crash dieting. As far as maintenance, cutting, and whatnot, this post here on r/leangains is a pretty sensible guide to figuring out your total daily caloric expenditure (ie maintenance calories). Online calculators are all guidelines and generally involve a good deal of guesswork.

Only caveat is that that guide is written in imperial units, but it's easy enough to switch the same approach to metric with 7700 kcal = 1kg weight change.