Is anyone else scared of hitting your goal weight?

nowine4me

Trust me, the “project” does not end when you hit your goal. Really, that’s just the beginning.

lorrpb

How large is your deficit now? With only 8 left to go you should target 250 deficit for 0.5 lb loss per week . Going into Maintenance shouldn't be a huge change. I was losing so slowly at the end I hardly got anything extra in maintenance,.

MadisonMolly2017

Yes, I got nervous as I got closer to my original goal weight of 169. So I switched to losing 0.5 lbs a week and refocused on building muscle & my fitness.

I think I still held out hope as I got thinner that my body would be “perfect.” It’s easy to imagine this. I also realized I’d been dieting a LONG time... time to give my body a bit of a break.

The exercise increase helped as did more nutrition & I shifted my mindset to how great I feel/felt physically. Since then have lost 3-5lbs slowly. Basically, I’m creeping towards my revised goal weight & giving myself a ton of time to do this. “It’s not a race.” Is one of the things I’ve told myself over the past 2.5 years.

And yes, we don’t get back a bunch of calories in maintenance, but we do with exercise!!!!

AnnPT77

One thing that helped me was to gradually add back calories to slow weight loss as goal got close. If I added 100 daily calories every week or so, I was more likely to spend them on small pleasurable but nutritious tweaks to the way I was already eating. If I'd added back 500 or so calories in one big block, it would've been more of a temptation to some big ridiculous low-nutrient food every day.

That said, there really aren't "unhealthy foods" (well, maybe trans fats ), there are only unhealthy overall ways of eating. If you get the nutrients you need, and still have calories left to spend, there's nothing wrong with having something less nutrient dense but really tasty or satisfying. You don't get extra credit for getting excess nutrition.

chunkytfg

Thanks for all your input. Really useful to see that i'm not totally alone.

I do understand that it never really stops when I hit goal its just this current lifestyle i'm in now started around 7 years ago when I hit ~350lb and i've been doing it so long I don't really know any different. Before that my life is much like everyone else who's been fat there entire life. WW, SW, Herbalife, Atkins etc etc, tried them all. i'm 37yo now and for probably the past 20+ years i've either been overweight and unwilling to do anything about it or overweight and trying to do something about it. I don't know anything different and thats scary!

MFP works and I get that there are not 'unhealthy' foods as I put it, but with my lack of self control to only eat 1 of something and my need to hide from loved ones what I have eaten, I can't bring myself to leave an open packet around of anything so have a habit of 99% of the time eating the whole thing such as multi packs of doughnuts, cookies etc. So I find it easier to just avoid them in the first place. My GF and i both do MFP and she lives on 1400 cals a day with no snacking accounted for so it's really easy to eat the same as her and then I make up 'snack packs' to eat throughout the day to account for my extra calories which works out around 1800-2000 a day.

Hitting goal and then needing to up my intake to mtce levels just seems like a huge amount of snacking if the meals remain the same and thats where the 'fear' comes from. I know I could eat larger portions or add something she doesn't eat to it to up the cals and thats what will probably happen I just worry about the idea of doing it.

MelanieCN77

The difference between my loss and maintenance calories at 0.5lb a week isn't even that large. Are you sure yours is? My last five pounds I had done even slower as I refused to go down to 1300 something cals - I set to maintenance and just tried to leave 1-200 cals a day on the table, so less than 0.25lb per week. Totally doable and no big adjustment at the end.