How to maintain weight but not gain
hi I’ve lost 20 lbs over the last few months and have finally reached my goal weight. I’ve been on 1200 calories a day but now I want to maintain my weight without gaining it back. Does anyone know how and what the best way to do it is? I don’t care if it takes time. I rather do it healthily.
Answers
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Simplistically, the answer is to eat the same number of calories you burn, as averaged over relatively short time periods.
That can be accomplished by continuing with counting the calories, or by having routine eating/activity habits that accomplish that without counting. Some people use habits and a weight range: If the scale creeps up above the top of the range, they cut back on what they eat until they're back at the bottom of the range again. I kind of do that with jeans size myself, because I hate clothes shopping with a horrible fiery passion. 😆
If the question is about knowing how many calories to eat, there are various approaches. Here's a thread where people talk about various methods:
If the question is more about what habits are helpful for staying at a good weight, then that varies quite a bit individual. Reading a number of threads in this part of the MFP Community would let you understand how other people go about it. I'd suggest starting with the posts in the "Most Helpful Posts" section, then browsing through other posts in this section looking for promising titles. I got a lot out of reading posts like those when I was about to go into maintenance . . . nine-plus years ago now. So far, it's working. 🤞
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@AnnPT77 -- without fail, your posts are always worth reading, helpful, informative . . . I could go on!
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Overwhelmingly, when they go out in the wild and look for people who have lost significant weight and kept it off for years, the common denominator is that they are physically active. And that is the recommendation by all of the health/fitness orgs like the ACSM, CDC, etc. If start to gain weight you raise your activity level to the point that you don't gain weight. For every 20 lbs lost that would be about 100 calories of extra activity, a 20 minute brisk walk outside, 10 minutes of 12% inclined walking.
The basis of this is simply that if your "maintenance" plan is too restrictive you will eventually eat more, and in order to allow that and not gain weight you must be more active. And when you look at people who avoided gaining weight to begin with, they simply exercised proactively.
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You and I feel very differently about this, and have very different personal experiences. I'm going to double down on my advice above that the right maintenance routine is very individual, based on personal experiments we each need to perform.
Yes, things like research based on the US National Weight Control Registry** data say that people in long term successful maintenance tend to be active.
** http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/default.htm
What we don't get from that is a feel for those individuals' history, or range of experiences.
In my case, I was very active for about a dozen years while remaining class 1 obese. I was quite similarly active while losing around 50 pounds in just under a year. I've remained similarly active for 9+ years of successful maintenance so far.
Being active is great, and yes, being active means we can eat more for any given weight-management goal we may have. But people's preferences and experiences vary.
In my case, I'm quite convinced that managing calorie intake, the eating side of things, is crucial for both loss and maintenance. (I honestly don't think of them as wildly distinct phases: My maintenance habits are generally like the habits I worked out during weight loss, just with a few more calories available daily.)
I'm certainly not going to increase exercise and keep eating in the same way if I have a few pounds to creep back off when they've crept on during weight maintenance. I've been in that situation, and I instead reduced calories very modestly on the eating side until the weight crept off again. That's much easier for me. It was virtually painless.
In contrast, increasing exercise isn't an attractive option for me. I enjoy what I do - so much so that I'd do it even if it weren't good for me - but spending material extra time daily on exercise would impair my good overall life balance. I want that time and energy for other things, and reducing eating a bit takes zero time and very little energy.
People are going to vary in what works as a successful maintenance routine. Reading other threads here about how people handle maintenance makes that very clear. There's nothing wrong with your approach as long as it's working great for you, but it's not the universal or only way.
P.S. I have friends who've always been slim their whole lives, i.e., avoided gaining weight to begin with, who weren't particularly active as they did it - not proactively exercising. They aren't young people, nor people with active jobs, either.
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@AnnPT77 I agree 100% with your advice. While exercise is vital for so many reasons, weight loss is not one of them. One of my favorite sayings is “you can’t outrun a bad diet”. If one has made lifestyle changes, maintenance should be simple. I said simple, not easy. 🙂 I had been fit fat for over 20 years, very active but terrible diet. In the past 10 months I have lost 40 lbs through food tracking, protein prioritization and of course eating less. Exercise remained the same. Your advice is exceptional. Congrats on your weight loss and maintenance.
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I don't think you and I feel very differently about this. You're active and maintaining and I'm active and maintaining. And it isn't just the NWCR study supporting this. It is also the increasing amount of data from doubly labeled water experiments in the last 30 years that are giving us a better picture of the normal distribution of caloric intakes in people. Plus all of the people who never became obese to begin with, which is still 60% of the population, and their intakes and thier levels of activity, which range from light (as you noted) to very active.
I do agree that weight maintenance is very individual, but the underlying mechanics for "maintenance" has changed from "you must restrict your intake to your level of activity" to "you must be active enough for your intake". And by intake, I don't mean that you eat without bound, but there is some minimum amount that each of us must eat to be content (satieated) and to try to retrict below that indefinitely will only result in failure. And that minimum number falls in a normal distribution. My moderately active appetite is actually pretty normal even if above the "average". It is only the two tails of that distribution that may be peculiar. Those with sedentary appetites and those with abnormally large appetites.
And you can still count calories and not be overly restrictive. I stopped counting awhile ago, and I'm comfortable now I have returned to the state I was before the desk job, which is almost half my life. And once I shed the 95 lbs, I did experiment. If my TDEE is 2200, lbs stick too easily, 2300, ok, 2400+, weight proof. And I could drop down to 2200 and experiment with "watching" what I eat more closely, but for me it is easy enough to stay above that limit and just eat again.
The point is only that there is a limit and the reason that people who maintain well after losing a lot weight do so is that they are at least active enough to be above that limit. There is also a lot of evidence that the limit for most is near where they started. But you can experiment.
I also have to note, and it is quite obvious, the majority of people I know, virtually all of them in fact, are not at this moment counting at all, regardless of their weight, and the lighter ones, virtually all of them, don't know what calorie counting is. They've always been ahead of this and never had to go to that extreme. I do agree, as do the experts, in order to lose significant weight you have to restrict (count), even if you are active, but maintaining naturally (not counting) has always appeared to be the norm to me, regardless of the weight you end up at.
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I'm pretty sure I know when I disagree with someone. 😆
You seem very focused on activity as the key. I'm personally focused on eating as the key. That's partly because I was equally active for a dozen years while obese, even competing as an athlete, not always unsuccessfully in age group competition, besides. I was maintaining weight then, and am maintaining weight now - a very different weight! - and my activity level is about the same, then and now. What changed? Eating habits.
Also I've gone through some multi-week periods during maintenance when I wasn't active - recovery from injury or surgery for example. I know how many calories I need to eat to maintain without activities, and I can be content eating that number of calories. I don't work out to earn calories, or to stay in maintenance. I work out because what I do is fun. (I mostly call it "exercise" or "workouts" to be conventional.) It's just something enjoyable I do and have done for about 23 years, fat and thin, because it makes me happy. As an unapologetic hedonist, I rarely do unenjoyable things just because they're good for me. (Yes, that's probably a character fault. I don't care. 😉)
I could maintain without counting, but as a data geek in other respects, and as someone who thinks nutrition is pretty important (and as a vegetarian I think that's a bit more complex than for omnivores), counting suits me very well.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying people are individuals, and their attitudes and preferences vary. I don't need people to agree with me in order for me to think I'm right about what works best for me. I don't expect other people to think or live as I do. In fact, people differing is what makes interacting with others interesting, in my world.
Am I an outlier in some way? Don't know, don't care. I'm still going to advocate that people like OP (and others) consider various viewpoints and strategies, and pick mindsets and tactics that suit them personally, whatever those may be.
We're well beyond what's on-topic to the thread or potentially helpful to OP, I think. I wanted to respond to your post initially because your view of it is so very different from mine IMO, and I think it's useful to have multiple contrasting views on a thread.
I'm glad your maintenance approach is working well for you, sincerely . . . and also glad that you put it out there for OP to consider.
ETA, the underlying question you and I are discussing is IMO more of a debate topic, and there are already some posts in the Debate Club part of the Community related to it. This is one that falls pretty close to it, I think.
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fair enough. I was simply offering the OP the current health/fitness orgs’ recommendations which are clearly activity centric, a shift that has primarily occurred due to studies continuing to find it to be the common denominator in long term success. My own personal experience was merely an example.
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One thing which might help is to view your weight as a range. It’s tempting to think you have to stay at your “ideal” rate and that something has gone wrong when you gain a pound or two. Many of us have a 4-6 pound weight range which is our normal - above or below that needs a slight tweak to eating. It allows for water weight, hormone weight (especially if female) and different foods in the system.
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