One Year Anniversary of Maintenance

Owlfan88 wrote: »

Congrats! Have you found it relatively easy or sometimes a struggle or ?

SaraBeth2007 wrote: »

Congrats! Any advice?

Thanks everyone! In concept it's been really easy to maintain, because I'm doing the same EXACT things I did to lose the weight. Stay within my calories, still including the foods I love. So the only thing I'm doing differently is EATING MORE calories than I did when losing. Which is AWESOME!

I did try and not count calories and just eyeball it. I re-discovered that I am a poor eyeballer. The weight started to creep back up within a couple of weeks and I just accepted the fact that for me, I will always need to monitor calories to stay within my weight range. I pretty much eat the same foods 90% of the time, so it's easy.

I really feel I can control my weight. I can gain and lose at will now. So knowing this, I do allow myself to endulge from time to time (vacations, social events, etc.) and if my weight goes up, I can always make it go back down. Socially it's been great.

Just for kicks, I've experimented and tried many different methods of maintaining as well.
- Banking calories during the work week and eating more on the weekends
- 6 meals a day
- 3 meals a day
- Intermittent fasting 5:2, where you basically skip breakfast and lunch and eat a normal sized dinner (so for me, 600-1000 cal), and do this twice a week, which allows me to eat more per day 5 days a week.
- Others I can't recall at the moment, but you get the idea.

They all work as long as you stay within your maintenance calorie limits.

When I lost weight while eating 6 times a day (3 main meals, with 3 small snacks in between), I found I was never really satisfied because it's relatively few calories per meal.

So currently I am enjoying something called intermittent fasting 16:8. This is where you eat all your calories within a certain 8 hour window and you don't eat for 16 hours (or what ever times you want, 20:4, 18:6, etc.) It sounds complicated but it's not. Basically what this means is that I skip breakfast and then eat lunch and dinner, but each meal is larger. So I can eat a 1000 calorie lunch and a 1000 calorie dinner. Or if I know I'm going to have dinner with friends/family, I can eat a light lunch, say 600 cal and have a 1400 cal dinner, and vice versa for eating lunch out with friends/family. Socially it's been awesome, and I get to maintain my weight. I don't miss breakfast, but I do miss breakfast food, so I just eat those for lunch or dinner when I feel like it.

Also, I didn't exercise at all to lose the weight. I do exercise now (lift heavy weights and HIIT) for fitness and to recomp, but it was completely unnecessary in order to lose weight. (I'm not saying NOT to exercise, but just that you don't need it for pure weight loss.)

Anyway, this has been getting long. Thanks for reading!