@buckbran My advice would be, since you just finished what seems to be a long and fairly aggressive cut just maintain for a bit, maybe the summer, and you'll make good gains. If you say you made gains on the cut and were basically a beginner, then you'll definitely still make gains at maintenance. Probably more gains. Then once you recomp a bit and get rid of some diet fatigue and your gains start slowing you can bulk and take advantage of the newbie gains. Newbie gains don't just go away or become unavailable if you don't get then within X amount of time training, it's just that most people can get them in some amount of time. But If you cut hard first, you'll only have gotten a fraction of the easiest gains to get, but some of those easiest gains to get will still be in the months immediately following your first bulk when beginning training. It would still probably do you good to maintain for maybe 8 weeks or so after stopping a deficit and get used to maintenance and let your body get back to a healthy baseline, and then start bulking slowly.
I see you say you don't want to maintain, but you'll still see physical changes for a few weeks after finishing a cut and switching to maintenence, especially as a beginner. Your muscles get fuller and you feel better physically and mentally and your strength starts increasing again or keeps increasing or increases at a faster rate if you're new enough. Your metabolism also gets used to this new "set point" and you will be able to eat a bit more and still maintain once you adapt.
I also love data and seeing numbers go up and down, especially on the scale, but if you and I worked so hard to lose weight and we can still gain strength and muscle at this lower bodyweight, then why not stick here for a bit and then increase mass when that's the only way to keep the numbers on our workouts going up?
I think you can gain enough muscle that maintaining for a bit and then going on a lean bulk would be much more beneficial than either just starting a bulk and gaining much more than ideal unnecessary fat or cutting more, hurting your gains, and then bulking back up to and beyond what your at now. I mean would it be much better to cut to 160 in like, 8 to 12 weeks and then spending 12 weeks to regain those 15 lbs, or whatever your ratio and rate of gain and loss is, than it would be to maintain for like 12 weeks and then lean bulk for 12 weeks such that in the same time frame you end up at the same weight but at least this second way you are only maintaining or bulking whereas the other method you are in a deficit and then a surplus, but are much less anabolic in general?
Honestly I have no idea, but I think if you cut you won't look shredded anyway. You should gain some muscle and settle in to your bf% before bulking again. Imo. I've done it and I've seen it, but I was disappointed after my first cut to low bf because I didn't have a good enough base of muscle. And that takes a while to build. I'm happy this time, but it took way longer than expected. I'm still happy with it, but doing hard cuts to low bf early on isn't necessarily worth it ime.
