Eating at maintenance 5 lbs away from my goal weight?

Tanie98

I only have 5 lbs to lose and I 'm considering starting to eat at maintenance while hoping to still lose the last 5 lbs slowly. ..while trying to find the right maintenance calories.Reason being is, I continued to lose weight last time I reached my goal weight and i ended up being under my goal weight which was too thin, before I gained the weight back when I stopped exercising and using myfitnesspal. Has anyone tried this?

PAV8888

It should work fine! What's the worst that will happen? That you will lose the 5lbs slower or you might stop losing a bit earlier than goal and have to apply a small deficit again!

Just be sure to give it enough time to see the results (trending weight app and enough time to discern the trend)

In any case, 5lbs is probably only 2-3lbs up from the top of your eventual maintenance range

endermako

That's what i'm doing. I stopped at 3-4lbs from goal. Now i'm slowly chipping off the remaining weight.

whmscll

I am already losing super slowly and cannot wait to get rid of the last 6. Based on my history (3 mos to lose 9 lbs), I’m sticking as close to my deficit as I can until it’s all gone. That said, I do have 1-2 days a week where I eat close to maintenance, because life happens.

nxd10

I think those last 5 pounds took as long as the previous 30. I'd stick with it. Really. I finally went to maintenance at the bottom of my goal zone. Then I upped by 250 pounds to ease in.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Reading between the lines of your post, last time you lost weight, you overshot and felt like you got too thin, but apparently you have gained the weight back or else you wouldn't need to do it over again.

Right after you lose weight, your body will go into a mode where it encourages you to gain it back. (A good strategy when food is scarce.) You need to remain at your goal weight for months before that goes away (I think it took me a year of continued tracking at maintenance before I could switch to autopilot.

In my most recent and most successful cut (three years ago) I made sure to overshoot by a few pounds. I think this helped.

Good luck!

AnnPT77

I did a gradual phase-in of calories to reach maintenance, and lost a few more pounds along the way. That worked really well for me. Starting from about a 500-calorie deficit level, maybe a bit less, I added 100 daily calories, then waited a week or so (until I was sure I was still losing), then added another 100, etc. As I got closer to actual maintenance calories, weight loss got slower, and the waiting/monitoring period got longer.

One reason I liked it was that it encouraged me to add small, pleasant, usually nutritious tweaks to my eating: Since I can be a little (heh) self-indulgent, I think adding 250-500 daily calories all at once might have made me more likely to add some kind of big treat food. While there's nothing wrong with the occasional big treat food, I don't need it as a daily habit!

This approach isn't for everyone, but I liked it.

jrwms714

If this works for you, go for it. The last 5 lbs. were really slow and hard to get off for me, so I probably would just stick with the loss calories until I hit my goal range.