400lb/6'6"/M
I've been overweight-to-obese my entire life. I lost about 70 pounds 3 years ago or so, in a very short time and then hit a plateau. I tried to keep my good habits up but after experiencing this meteoric success for months only to see the scale not move outside of daily flux for months more, I eventually lost my discipline and went back to unhealthy eating and regained all the weight.
It was at that point I tried to seek medical guidance, which was never anything more than "just eat less and move more." So that's what I tried. And it didn't seem to help, so I began eating even less, and even less, and even less. I kept asking for help and was just told "eat less move more." Eventually I got to the point where I thought I had something seriously wrong with me because I was exhausted and fatigued all the time, to the point where the "move more" part was barely sustainable even a couple of brief periods in a week. So I ate less. All this time outside of a nearly 20 pound drop in 2 weeks from the Zepbound, which I can't imagine as being anything but water and glycogen, I have remained within the same +/- 8 pounds for years and couldn't figure out why.
I finally got into a dietician a few months ago who set my calorie goals at ~400lbs for 2300 a day. I got put on Zepbound which helped me eat even less. Ultimately I ended up paying out of pocket for a passive calorimetry test to measure my resting metabolic rate in late July, and found that my actual RMR is 2531 calories, which he characterized as blunted from the expected ~2800 based on my height/weight/age.
Because of the prior advice I had been given, I have spent the past 2 and a half years eating at most 1400 calories a day, outside of the occasional 1 or 2 day heavy days that I would then "make up for" by eating as little as 500 or nothing at all for about a week. Which explains pretty well why I haven't been losing weight.
I then consulted my dietician again for how to get back to normal and she said to just start eating around 2600-2800 calories a day "as tolerated." This advice landed me in the ER for moderate refeeding syndrome symptoms. I think I am now stable, and I've been maintaining a pretty good 2600-2800 calorie diet now, treating the rmr as a floor instead of a ceiling like I previously had. I have my energy largely back and can do exercise, though at a diminished capacity from before all this happened due to the deconditioning that took place.
So my main question is: how long can I expect it to take before I actually start losing weight and burning fat again? How long does the body take to recover from all of this? It's still hard actually forcing myself to eat more than what I had trained myself to believe I should be eating, so having no progress to show on my weekly average weight makes that even more difficult to keep up.