Eating advice for middle aged guys

[gnperdue]

Hi all, I am a 44 year old male, 5'10", 172 pounds. I recently lost a lot of weight (from Sept. 2020 -> Sept. 2021 I lost ~100 pounds by cleaning up my diet and utilizing intermittent fasting). I started strength training with barbells this past December. Actually, I was only exercising I suppose - I found "Starting Strength" and "The Barbell Prescription" this month and the approach really resonated with me.

At any rate, I am attempting a NLP and trying to eat correctly to support it. I am pretty active and estimate my maintenance calories to be around 3,000 (I do track). My question is - should I really eat 4,000 calories to support recovery? If I were 24 instead of 44, sure, but can I effectively utilize all those calories at my age? Obviously everyone is different and nobody can say for sure (I am running an experiment, haha), but I'm curious if other middle-aged dudes have had success utilizing a reasonably large caloric surplus. Thanks!

[Robert Santana]

3000 is a good start. You may end up at 4000 when it gets heavy but start at 3000. The guy who had a 100 lb to lose is the same as the guy who needs to lose 100 lb in that he doesn't need a ton of calories. That said, 172 is too light.

[gnperdue]

Okay, thanks! I'm actually at 4k already (well, average over the last week as 3.8k) based on "First Three Questions," but I'll dial it back a bit (~3600?).

[Robert Santana]

When Rip talks about extremely high calories he is talking to the skinny guy who can't gain weight and the skinny fat guy who is more skinny than he is fat. He is not talking to the fat guy that just lost a ton of weight. That guy can gain it all back easily taking advice for the skinny guy. That said, you need to get back up closer to 200 for starters. Where are your lifts at?

[gnperdue]

My lifts are not impressive, LOL. I was a couch potato for too many decades and it shows.

160 squat
155 bench
100 press
190 deadlift

...but all of them are up about ~30 pounds over the last month. I have a long way to go but also feel like I am making very good progress. And I'm not rushing anywhere. My hope is to be in it for the very long haul.

Anyway, I started off eating closer to 3,000, then went to 3,200 then went to 4,000 (planned) about a week ago when I felt like I was struggling a bit to hit a jump. I have not been good at getting down 4k calories (harder than I thought it would be, heh), but I've averaged about 3.8k over the last week and it feels like it actually helped a lot. But I do wonder about my ability to productively use all the calories at my age.

Thanks for all your comments and thoughts.

[Robert Santana]

You have a ways to go and probably don't need 4k at those current numbers. When the squat and deadlift double you'll need the 4k.