Pre-Maintenance

Bump to re read again. I have been on maintenance for about three weeks and finding it harder than losing.

Monitor your weight, if you start gaining, eat at a deficit for a day or two to get you back on track. That's the mind set that I am taking anyway

Useful thread, thanks OP!

I'm a little way off my goal yet, but it's in sight so I need to start thinking about this.

Congrats to all the posters who have come so close to their goals!

Hi, I've saved & bookmarked your maintenance plan. I'm down almost 35 lbs & plan on going into maintenance when I lose approx 10 more lbs. I agree a plan is what got me here & a plan is needed to STAY fit. My biggest question, and anyone can answer is how many calories are needed on maintenance?? I'm at 1200 / day while losing. I exercise 4x week for between 200 - 420 calories burned each time (depending what I'm doing). I RARELY go above the 1200 calories even with exercising so my net is good each day. i'm feeling good. More energy, etc. I just really need to know what the daily requirement is on maintenance? TY TY in advance! If it helps I'm 52 and 5' tall. My goal weight will be to stay around 125 but not over 129.

You can figure your calorie needs with this formula. BMR is base metabolic rate, or the number of calories your body needs to function at rest. Figure in the activity multiplier that corresponds with the amount of exercise you'll be doing to maintain your goal weight.

BMR for Men: = 66 + (6.23 X weight in pounds) + (12.7 X height in inches) – (6.8 X age)

BMR for Women: = 655 + (4.35 X weight in pounds) + (4.7 X height in inches) – (4.7 X age)

Activity Multiplier:
Little or No Exercise, Desk Job: 1.2 x BMR
Light Exercise, Sports 1 to 3 Times Per Week: 1.375 x BMR
Moderate Exercise, Sports 3 to 5 Times Per Week 1x BMR
Heavy Exercise, Sports 6 to 7 Times Per Week: 1.725 x BMR

Great information here. I believe I'm within 10 pounds to maintenance and it will be a welcome challenge.

I continue to post everyday exactly what I eat. Even if being bad. I only weigh once a week. I average the calories I ate for a week. If I gained...I'm eating too much, if I lost I add a few calories...if I stayed the same....it was just right. When it is just right for a few weeks....I've found my maintenance calorie goal. I've been doing this for about 3 weeks now...and I am still losing....I need to not be afraid of eating a few more calories. Most of it is between our ears.

I am glad others are thinking about this! Thanks for this thread. I'm close to maintaining (this is the first time I've lost more than a couple pounds intentionally) and have been thinking about what I am going to do. Basically I'm planning to keep tracking my food and exercise on here for a while until I get used to the quantities of things I can eat while maintaining my weight. After a while I think I'll stop tracking, and just weigh myself once a week. If I go over the higher end of my desired weight range (104-107 lb-- I'm 5'1" and have a small frame) I'll start tracking again to get back to where I should be. But if I can maintain without using the internet to tell me how much I can eat, that will be great and that's what I'll do.

For now, it's hard to keep myself in a deficit because I'm so close and I'm pretty happy with how I look. I waver between thinking "oh, one big dinner won't do too much harm," and "I must be super careful and get to my goal as fast as I can!" (I'm losing weight at about 0.5 lb a week and have since the beginning).

I just want to be done with this losing-weight process. I've been quite successful so far but it will be nice to be able to eat a bit more on a daily basis without feeling like I cheated.

I am starting to see the wisdom of weighing every day. I have to admit that when I gained 22 pounds between September and February, I never weighed myself at all. I was eating junk and drinking too much. I guess I didn't really want to know how much I weighed.

While I am losing weight now, it feels great to step on the scale every day. It's not as much of a thrill to see that I am half a pound down as it is to see two pounds down, but I am starting to agree with you that it is wise to weigh daily.

I just don't want to get on that hamster wheel of gaining, losing, gaining, losing. I want to get into habits I can keep the rest of my life. idojpdx, thanks for posting that calculator. I finally tried to do it myself, and I got around 1500 to 1600 calories a day for maintenance.

What I don't understand, is if I am eating around 1200 calories a day now, that is only a 300 to 400 calorie deficit per day. That only comes out to about a pound a week. But I am losing about two pounds a week. Oh well. This thread isn't about losing weight, This thread is about maintaining our healthy bodies.

I think that's way too low for you. Did you add in the activity multiplier?

Trust me, it's not so much the number on the scale, it's whether you can maintain the eating and exercise that goes with the HEALTHY lifestyle you are living right now.

Many years ago I lost a lot of weight, but then returned to an unhealthy lifestyle and gain it all back plus some.
So... I knew going into this lifestyle change that if you don't maintain the mindful eye on what you're eating/drinking and don't maintain the exercise that will keep you healthy, then you will gain.

Many things change in a person's life -- mainly the amount of time and money we can expend to live a healthy life. If a schedule or work changes, and we lose the amount of time or money we spend on healthy foods, preparation of meals, exercising, etc -- then these changes along with stress can turn the tide to unhealthy choices.

I started maintaining two years ago, when I reached a healthy BMI, and felt I could maintain the time, energy and money to live THIS lifestyle. We have to go with what we can sustain.

MFP is a great resource and tool for this, because it allows me to track daily, where I am on calories and exercise, and stay on plan.

What I don't understand, is if I am eating around 1200 calories a day now, that is only a 300 to 400 calorie deficit per day. That only comes out to about a pound a week. But I am losing about two pounds a week. Oh well. This thread isn't about losing weight, This thread is about maintaining our healthy bodies.

Junebugzy, I have experienced the same thing since I started on here. I've always had my deficit set to lose 0.5 lb a week, but have found that it's usually closer to 0.75 lb or so each week. Perhaps we're both more active than we let the computers think, or we're logging a little more food/less exercise than we actually get, or maybe (this is my suspicion for myself) our metabolisms are a bit faster than the averages used for the calorie intake calculations.

Question for everyone: have you heard that as one gets close to maintaining, one should slowly up one's calories so the last few pounds are lost even more slowly than 0.5 lb a week? I've heard that on here-- the people who mentioned it said that doing this will prevent the immediate gain of water/glycogen weight when you up your calories for maintaining mode. I like the sound of that, but I'm not so keen on slowing my weight loss even more-- I'd love to be done with that part of this journey, and want to just get there.

I'm interested to hear what you all know or have heard about that.

Hi

This thread is just great - so many valid points. This will be my third time of getting to goal weight and i am determined to maintain this time. So stuff that i have learned from reading the forum and my own experience.

1. Keep exercise -don't stop. Build it into your normal routine for life.
2. Increase cals slowly 100k cals a week until you stop loosing weight
3. Weigh regularly - normally i weigh weekly but on maintenance i weighed twice a week.
4. Plan you day/meals - no shopping without a list or going beserk at restaurants. You can have treats but need to earn them.
5. Keep tracking on myfitness plan food and exercise. If poss find a maintenance buddy.
6. Accept that some foods will not be part of your future - for me it was bread and cheese - they are like a red rag to a bull. Ijust can not help myself. So i just cut them out completely and only by exception would I select/eat them.

Good luck everyone!

I wont be weighing everyday.

There is no point as there are normal weight flucuations during maintenance as there is in weight loss.

I will weight myself once a week per normal....

If you keep your calories on the level once a week should be plenty.

I've maintained my 50 pound loss for almost 2 years.

My strong suggestion is to develop a plan for maintenance, just as you had a plan to lose weight. My maintenance plan has been tested and tweaked and it's a good fit for me. It's just not possible for me to regain the 50 pounds that I've lost if I stick with my plan.

I wrote a blog post on the importance of having a mainteance plan, if you want to take a look:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/themedalist/view/what-s-your-maintenance-plan-624676

Best Wishes!

Loved this...thanks so much for sharing!

I'm changing how I think of the weight loss and maintenance periods. I'm starting to think of the current weight loss period as just training for maintenance, so I'm introducing the habits now which studies have proven successful maintainers follow. So

- Weigh every day. I do it now and I like the instant feedback and learning how my body adapts to calorie deficit and the types of foods I consume. I don't know how often I'll log it yet, but I quite like the daily routine of logging.

- Maintain 1hr planned physical activity every day, and log it.

- Keep logging what I eat. I'm hoping that I will have trained myself about portions to not have to weigh everything, but just to weigh occasionally as a check on my portion perception. We'll see how this goes. I might choose to weigh some foods (meat, cheese etc) but not others.

- Watch my protein intake and make sure I get enough. I'm aiming for 60g every day right now.

- Practice dietary restraint. I find for me it's easy to binge over holidays or vacations, so I'm practicing enjoying what I want (I'll be enjoying Easter eggs and my homemade hot cross buns, plus rib roast over Easter), but still keeping my weight more-or-less constant, so that'll mean working more fun, family-based activity around the holidays rather than sitting on the couch watching James Bond movies all day!

I don't know about calorie/protein targets yet. I want to hit my target weight and then focus more on reducing body fat over time, so I haven't calculated my metrics yet, but my plan is forming!!

BMR for Men: = 66 + (6.23 X weight in pounds) + (12.7 X height in inches) – (6.8 X age)

BMR for Women: = 655 + (4.35 X weight in pounds) + (4.7 X height in inches) – (4.7 X age)

Activity Multiplier:
Little or No Exercise, Desk Job: 1.2 x BMR
Light Exercise, Sports 1 to 3 Times Per Week: 1.375 x BMR
Moderate Exercise, Sports 3 to 5 Times Per Week 1x BMR
Heavy Exercise, Sports 6 to 7 Times Per Week: 1.725 x BMR

Is the activity multiplier right for moderate exercise? 1x BMR??

Good catch. It should be 1.55. The formatting was strange when I pasted it, and I probably introduced the error trying to straighten it out. I did post the URL for website with the info early in this thread, though. http://www.builtlean.com/2010/03/14/how-to-calculate-your-calorie-burn/