Maintaining Once You Reach Your Goal Weight

ewalker160

For those of you that have reached your goal weight, have you been able to maintain it? For how long? Did you gain weight when you stopped eating at a calorie deficit?

cwolfman13

If you've slowly upped your calories to maintenance, you shouldn't have any problems gaining weight. This is one of, but not the primary reason, you are supposed to eat at a very small (1/2 Lb per week) deficit as you approach your goal weight rather than going full blast and then slamming on the brakes to maintenance...lots of stress on the body there and if you're just jumping from a huge deficit to maintenance overnight, you're going to gain some weight as your metabolism can't adjust that fast to your intake.

I'm getting close to maintenance...about 10 Lbs to go and have upped my intake to lose about 1/2 Lb per week...these last 10 lbs will be slow, but from everyone I've talked to, this is the way to gracefully glide into maintenance mode. I figure once I get there, I'll up my calories by about 100 per week for a couple of weeks to full maintenance to let my metabolism adjust. I don't anticipate too many issues once I get to maintenance as I've adopted a pretty good lifestyle here, and nothing is really going to change for me. If I feel my pants getting tighter, I'll start dropping my numbers into my diary again and just cut back for a couple of weeks...no biggie.

ewalker160

Thank you for the reply. This is very helpful information.

auddii

Lots of info in this thread:
www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/816542-let-s-hear-it-for-maintainenance

llkilgore

I've successfully maintained since the fall of 2011, as far as my weight goes, but I did pay a price for slacking off on strength training as I steadily increased the number of miles I ran every week. I lost a lot of upper body strength and gained a muffin top, so I'm back to lifting weights 3 times a week. Other than that I've had a fairly easy time of it. With exercise I maintain on around 1900-2000 calories a day, which is a lot for a 123lb woman of nearly 60 and the reward I get for NOT buying the "I'm too old to eat more than 1200 calories" argument.

ewalker160

Thanks!

The_Enginerd

For those of you that have reached your goal weight, have you been able to maintain it? For how long? Did you gain weight when you stopped eating at a calorie deficit?

Yes, I've been able to maintain my weight since November 2011. I didn't gain any weight, I actually coasted down another 5 lbs or so once I reach maintenance. MFP and online calculators put my maintenance calories at 2150/day, but I need to eat 50-100 calories/day above that to maintain in the long run.