How much do you fluctuate and still consider yourself "maintaining"?

5 for me.

5-7 lbs of actual fat. I don't sweat it if I'm up more than that in water weight (shoots up quickly). I go more by how my tightest jeans fit than the scale.

I have a 5lb range. I ignore e.g a 4lb gain overnight from eating high sodium food or the 3lbs I gain at TOM - all water weight. Its only if my weight was going consistently upwards over several weeks that I would take action.

around 10 lbs, I'm tall also @rainbow198

I don't consider a specific weight change for a few days or even a single week to be relevant to my "maintenance."
I track weekly: every Wednesday morning I measure my waist and step on the scale.
Roughly the same time every Wednesday, after using the restroom and before eating or drinking anything.
Wednesday because it is in the middle of the week and it helps balance out any outlier data from the weekend.

If my weight and/or waist appears to consistently increase (or drop) for 3 or 4 weeks then clearly I am not "maintaining" something.
That may or may not be a good thing depending on my goals.

Weekly trends help account for things like cortisol and water weight.
It is also the same method I use when tracking a cut or bulk.
Generally, if my waist is shrinking and my weight is going up then that is still a Good Thing (tm).
You get the idea.

I would think tracking long-term like this would be especially important for women when they have other biological processes to consider.

Basing your weight changes on a few days is not an ideal way to track trends.
Even The Flowchart says you need about 3 weeks to see "results" so why fixate on something like 2 or 3 days for "maintenance"?
Yes, maintenance is a "diet program".

Love the flow chart

I've been in the same 3 lbs for two months now, I guess I can stop being so anxious about it, but I am logging and tracking still.

Normally I stay in a 3 lb range when I weigh every morning, but I swing quite a lot of water weight with glycogen depletion/refueling for races and long training runs. I look at long term trends to determine if I'm actually maintaining. When I initially started maintaining, I had to up my calories a bit because I was slowly losing 1/2-1 lb a month on average.

krazy1sbk wrote: »

Mine is only about +/-3 lbs. I'm a small person (121 is my norm), but I'll get as low as 118 in the summer if I'm really active; when I hit 125 I know it's time to be careful again. Right now I'm at 125-126, so I'm trying to be very deliberate about what I eat (though I'm a teacher and I know it's probably end-of-year stress).

So true!! I'm there with you. It definitely affects my eating habits as well as sleep

Using a 7 day moving average, +/-2.5# (5# total) is a sufficient range to monitor weight change day-to-day by smoothing out the daily variations.

Using raw daily weight figures, +/-5# (10# total) over 30 days (or a month) at a time allows for odd variations and short term trends w/o causing an immediate panic.

I have a 5-lb range.

+3lbs I've rarely gone under and I'd probably roll with it if I did so I don't give myself a minus range. Probably because I'm a creature of habit foodwise my weight tends to be remarkably stable. TOM/ovulation, heavy meal/high sodium, new workout routine has me up 2-3lbs. If that 2-3lbs remains consistent and can't be attributed to any of those I tighten things up until I'm back where I'm supposed to be. I tried giving myself +5lbs but that led me to letting +6,7,8 slide which led to laziness and a slow 20lb gain over two years. So, lesson learned.

Petite and older.. Fluctuations +/- 3 - 4 pounds.. If I go up for more than 7-8 days, something is off.

I am still meticulously logging so not a problem.