2500kcal is only suitable for people living a very active lifestyle or exercising a lot. Note that going to the gym for 45minutes 3 times a week is not being active.
When I spent an hour lifting heavy weights 5 times a week, my weight was stable at around 2500kcal.
The reality is that unless you work as a construction worker or other type of job that keep you active most of the day and/or exercise a lot (my 5x a week were heavy compound powerlifting lifts), chances are you need to adjust those recommendations down substantially.
Ultimatly the only thing you can do is to gradually lower your intake until you're losing weight. That you were adding weight at 2000kcal is not that surprising.
I've not tried Soylent, but I've trued Huel, and compared to what you described it seems a lot more pleasant, and more importantly, if anything I've found it hard to eat enough on it because it fills me up so much. The biggest problem for me in using it as much as I'd like is that filling me up doesn't stop me craving food - it's a reward thing for me.
In your own case you've yourself proven that the sources you've found are wrong or at least have a ridiculous error margin, given that you've measured that your maintenance intake is much lower than your sources claim it should be.
Meanwhile it's exceedingly rare to see the opposite.
One of the big issues appears to be that people take advice based on a belief they are more active than they are. E.g. as I mentioned elsewhere, pretty much anyone in an office job is sedentary by default, even if they spend most of their spare time being active.
I got a membership at a gym closer to my house, so now I go something like 3 times a week for 45 minutes (overall less, but likely more intense), so my maintenance is even lower now, probably.
You were eating too many calories. 2500 for maintaining body weight is a lot. Perhaps you were overestimating your activity level?
Overall I think the typical old advice of 2500kcal for men and 2000 for women are dangerously out of tune with modern lifestyles.
As your own results demonstrated, that's often way too high. Measure, weigh, adjust - ultimately the only thing that will tell you what the right amount of calories is for you is to actually adjust your intake and check what happens.
Obviously if the op was gaining weight at 2000 calories it was a bad estimate for him (or he was eating more than he thought, which is often the case), but it isn't a crazy estimate or anything.
The problem is not the estimate per se, it is that people don't understand what terms like sedentary and active implies, and tend to overestimate how active they are.
E.g. the vast majority of people who work office jobs are sedentary, whether or not they think that their out-of-office activities makes them "active". An hour of activity here and there in the evening does not get anywhere near compensating for 8 hours in a chair.
This, to me, is another reason why employing a feedback cycle and only relying on those estimates as a first approximation makes most sense.
The estimates won't take into account how dilligent you are: do you estimate how many meatballs there is per 100 calories, or do you guesstimate based on measuring once? do you count the calories in your sugar free chewing gum (it's certainly not calorie free)? do you measure out the amount of ketchup you put on your food and count the calories? And so on.
With a feedback cycle hopefully you're roughly consistent, and if you adjust on a weekly basis based on how you're doing you'll hopefully also counter-act your own self-sabotage (e.g. it's oh-so-easy to subconsciously take more of anything you've decided doesn't need measuring, like the above mentioned ketchup, or find yourself suddenly chewing 10x as much chewing gum...)
(at the same time, one of the benefits of these shakes certainly is that if you adhere strictly at least for periods, you take dilligence out of the picture; though you still need a feedback cycle, as e.g. differences in how much energy you have can easily affect your activity levels and so change your rate)
What matters is not what the average burn rate for your build is, but what you burn. And you yourself is the source for that calorie intake being too high for you.
The averages matters for generc advice and as a starting point, but they can never be as good as measuring and adjusting.
And I think that is part of the problem with this advice. Too many people seem to influence their intake by it but then get surprised and dejected when they don't get the result they expect, instead of using their result to tweak their intake accordingly.
For example, in my own experience counting calories, oil is always the killer - it's so calorie dense and sneaks into everything when you're cooking.
You need 2400 calories a day to maintain weight, were supposedly consuming 2000, and were (off the cuff) burning close to 1000 a day from running and other activity.
There's no way you'd gain weight at 220 lbs effectively consuming 1000 calories a day. I've lost weight eating more than that at 180 lbs body weight.
Counting calories is very difficult. It's so easy to over- or under-estimate.
No, his sources estimates 2400 calories a day. You're right to question if he's consumed more, but taking his claims at face value, they match my own experience and many, many anecdotes I've seen over the year to indicate that advice of maintenance levels around that range are way too high for most people.
> and were (off the cuff) burning close to 1000 a day from running and other activity.
I very much doubt that. My own off the cuff estimate is ~500 calories a day for that activity.
> There's no way you'd gain weight at 220 lbs effectively consuming 1000 calories a day. I've lost weight eating more than that at 180 lbs body weight.
More like 1500 by my account, possibly more depending on the intensity of his exercise. And if you assume lack of substantial muscle-weight in that, it matches pretty well with my own experience from before I started lifting weights - I had diets where I had to drop to around 1200/day before it made a noticeable difference.
Once I started adding muscle, I could get away with more, but not a lot more.
I don't doubt your numbers, but to me they'r why we shouldn't listen to estimates, but measure, as activity level (all day long, not just during exercise) and body composition makes the error margin on estimates of metabolic rate crazily high.
But even still, at 220 lbs, your estimate of 1500 calories a day should not cause weight gain.
And did, for that matter until I'd adjusted my intake further down. To notice much in terms of a loss I had to go below about 1600kcal before factoring in the exercise. I believe my maintenance level at the time was ~1800kcal.
If you're largely sedentary outside of your exercise, you can end up burning exceedingly little.
When is someone going to disrupt the smell-o-vision for the internet market?
I found that it did nothing to satiate my appetite and that I'd be hungry, bloated and gassy all day long. The bloating and gas were incredibly uncomfortable and never really subsided. Eschewing the normal 3 meals a day routine and doing 5 meals didn't seem to help. Despite the fact that I was only consuming 2000 calories, 500 less than recommended for my size/weight/age/sex, I managed to gain weight.
The powder was messy and would coat whatever surface I prepared it on with a fine dusting. The liquid smelled unpleasant after a while and eventually I started to smell like it when I sweat. The liquid was basically an oil and solid particulate suspension so if you spilled it on anything it was difficult to clean up because the particles would work their way into fabric. Not such a problem for clothes but more so for furniture or car seats.
From a social perspective it really sucked because meals are a time to socialize it was awkward to go out with people and not order anything. I gradually moved to half days which actually curbed the weight gain I was seeing and eventually motivated me to give it up.