Why you gain weight if you eat more than your cut

I'm very grateful for this post.

What I'm not clear on is why stepping up slowly to maintenance after reaching your goal avoids this pitfall. Won't you gain the weight back when your glycogen stores get back to normal, regardless of how slowly that happens?

It's great to know ahead of time to expect about a 5 lb weight gain upon starting maintenance.

Also great to have an explanation of why I lost so much that first week. Also why I gained so fast after a couple of high calorie days.

It's not always 5 lbs - it could be maybe 3-8 or so from everything I've read (the higher number being probably for men who have a much higher LBM than, say, a small woman). But I don't think stepping up slowly changes anything except for the way you perceive it.

If you step up slowly from a cut, you're still cutting until the point where your caloric intake actually reaches your maintenance level, so basically you're still probably burning more fat than you're storing while you're increasing calories. If you move from, say, a 500 calorie (daily) cut to maintenance over 1 or two weeks i.e. 1500 calories/day to cut then you get to the weight you like and add 250/day for a week and then add another 250/day for another week, you'll probably see that gain since glycogen could be, say 4 lbs added over 2 weeks but fat loss continues at 1/2 a pound per week for the first week increasing calories. So after those 2 weeks you've got a net gain of 3.5 lbs. If you step up even slower - at say 100 calories/day per week, the first week you'd have a 400 calorie/day deficit, the next week 300 calories/day deficit, the next week 200 calories/day deficit, the next week 100 calories/day deficit. By the time you get to your actual maintenance calories, you've created another 7000 calorie deficit over those 5 weeks for another 2 lbs of fat loss. So then maybe you only see a net 2 lb gain. If you add even slower - say 50 calories/day for a week at a time, you extend that deficit over an even longer period of time so in essence you actually ARE cutting to below goal weight before bumping calories up. Same difference as cutting right down to 3-5 lbs below your goal and increasing to maintenance all at once. It's just a mind game.

You have to get to the place where you can accept that the way your body looks and feels at the bottom of a cut is not the same as it will feel while maintaining. Most of us can feel that depleted, dehydrated cut feeling and enjoy it, which is why it's such a mind game when you puff back up with water... but that's the body's natural state. Homeostasis only happens in that state.