Sorry for the long delay in responding ...
CR is not about your weight. It makes sense to track it, amongst other things as a safety monitor [...] and secondary metric [...] but should not be the target.
However, on the page you referred me to of your guidelines for starting CR you seem to indicate that praticing CR is more about maintaining a stable low weight:
If you are lucky enough to have had a clear, healthy 'setpoint' in your youth -- a weight to which you tended to remain stably when you were in your early twenties, and that was within the healthy BMI range -- take that as your baseline, and restrict Calories down to a level that keeps you at least 15% below that.
and
Watch your weight and your software: lose no more than a pound or two a week. Keep gradually doing this until you reach a level of Calorie intake that keeps you at least about 15% below your biological 'setpoint.' Then, keep tweaking your intake modestly to stay there, indefinitely.
This suggests to me that while the aim of CR is not achieving a specific body weight (or "setpoint") per se, the practice of it does involve trying to target your weight to a chosen level. While I understand that CR is about calorie intake and not not leaness achieved through exercise, what you wrote seems to suggest that you target a chosen low weight and then eat a fully balanced diet to keep you at that weight while exercising moderately. Would you say that that is correct?
I can see how you would take that away from what I said above, that wasn't what I meant. Rather, I meant that this (the number of Calories required to get to 15% below "setpoint," or if not at least below a best guess of youthful BMI within the healthy range) is a good
threshold level of Caloric restriction
per se required to be reasonably confident that you're in "CR mode." Your actual Calorie
target should be this low or preferably lower (as noted), but the point is that the target is the Calories, not the weight. Again, watch your weight, too -- but what you really need to know is your Calorie intake.
after achieving a stable CRed weight, you should transition to the RDA and not much more: 0.8 mg/kg. See my guidelines on protein intake on CR.
I am wondering how difficult it is to achieve this in practice as even on a vegan diet I struggle keep my protein intake below 1.0 g per kilogram body weight (with a daily calorie intake of under 1750 kcal) according to CRON-O-METER. Do others struggle with this more than the keeping the calorie count down also?
Certainly, my own experience is that it's hard to keep down to the RDA even in totally vegan meals. Contrary to all the hype about people not getting enough protein, it's surprisingly hard to keep
as low as the RDA, once you cut out sugar and grains and get the great bulk your carb from vegetables. I take it that this is the origin of your "problem"?
If indeed all your protein is vegan, and it doesn't come from quotidian intake of soy (which you should
cease and desist immediately, if so), I wouldn't worry about it much beyond your current 1 mg/kg, as the quality of vegan protein is rather low anyway, despite the insistence to the contrary of overly-zealous vegetarian evangelists.
But of course, if you really want a proper answer, you should analyze and/or post your actual food records and nutrition analysis from nutrition software
.
