trying to maintain

v27pig

Not long ago I reached my goal weight (maybe a month ago). I changed my settings to maintain weight and it increased my calories up to 1800 or 1850, (due to also changing how much I exercised). At first I struggled to eat enough and lost more weight and have to admit I was a little bit scared about eating more. Had this awful feeling that once I started eating more that the weight would pile on, daft i know now, but still struggle with the that thought at times. I'm not always eating the 1800, but sometimes I do go over and they make up for days i don't. I don't weigh myself every day now, but I do keep a check on it just to make sure that the weight isn't creeping back. Did anyone else worry at first with maintaining / increasing calories

brenn24179

yep, it is a balancing thing. I had to play around with it a while to see how many calories I could eat and not gain weight. I think it is good to be cautious.

v27pig

I know that my weight goes up and down during the week by 1-2 lbs depending on how much I've ate obviously. But I've tried to not stop from having some treats that I may not of ate previously but then compensated during the week. That's why I stopped weighing myself daily (drive me crazy, lol). But so far it's working. I reduced my exercise right down too, but want to start doing more again so will have to balance that out.

Patttience

If there's one thing that makes watching your weight complicated, its exercise. when you only have to watch what you are eating, its easy but exercise seems to make things unpredictable.

The tricky part is to match your dietary intake to your output.

You should probably learn to eat using an intuitive eating system. I have written about one at length many times but i'm a bit tired of rewriting it.

Suffice to say its a system of monitoring your hunger and satiety after you've eaten. But i do this with food logging, though not counting calories. Once you've mastered the art, you don't need to log any more but you still need to practice restraint and weigh fairly regularly.

So some key things would be:

don't ever eat til you are full. Try to stop eating when you are satisfied. If you don't eat too fast and don't serve yourself large positions this isn't hard.
Eat when you are hungry and not just bored etc.
Continue to eat healthy food all the time.
Minimise junk food all the time
If you overindulge one day, try to compensate another.
You might also look into 5:2 fasting. In maintenance mode, people fast one day week and eat normally i.e. at TDEE the rest of the time. You could try it. check out the fast diet website. On fast days you eat 500 calories so you'd probably need to count calories until you got a grip on what that was like in terms of what are the right foods to eat and how much. I found at least after 2 months, i had a very good idea of what would work.

v27pig

Thanks, I'll look into the 5:2,