Transition to Maintenance

Your plan looks good to me. And congrats on getting so close to maintenance! I've been maintaining now for about 3 mos and - to my surprise - find it relatively effortless. I was really, really fretting about it!! As it turns out, I'm basically continuing to live the same way I did while I was losing: Eating healthy, tracking cico, and getting regular exercise. I eat at the level of deficit calories most days, but once or twice a week I relax and eat a burger and fries or mac & cheese, etc. Or a piece of decadent chocolate cake. In other words, those yummies I only rarely ate while reducing. I will probably continue to track my calories for the rest of my life - seems to make all the diff for me. But I'm pretty much on automatic about that, so it's easy. Life is good!

A 500 caloric deficit daily will result in 3500 caloric deficit weekly. That will - all things being equal - lead to one pound of weight loss for that week. Everyone is different, but that is the general guideline.

Are you weighing yourself everyday, at the same time, on the same scale and then taking a weekly average?

Do you know what your Basal Metabolic Rate is?

Here is the formula (for a woman; there is a different one for a man):

BMR = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)


To give you a starting point, if you take your BMR and multiply it by an "Activity Multiplier" then you can find your "Active Metabolic Rate". This will give you a starting point as to what your "maintenance" caloric intake should be. Again, these are formulas so they are a starting point. Everyone will be a little bit different.

The "Activity Multiplier" looks like this:

*Sedentary (little or no exercise) – your AMR = BMR x 1.2
*Lightly active (light exercise/work 1-3 days per week) – your AMR = BMR x 1.375
*Moderately active (moderate exercise/work 3-5 days per week) – your AMR = BMR x 1.55
*Very active (hard exercise/work 6-7 days a week) – your AMR = BMR x 1.725
*Ultra active (very hard exercise/work 6-7 days a week) – your AMR = BMR x 1.9

So, to find out what your maintenance calories are, you take (BMR + AMR)/2. Again, this is a starting point. It will likely be close, but you will need to play with this. So, your "take some time and figure out my maintenance calories" is EXACTLY the proper thought process.

Small changes, over time, are indeed on order. Congrats on the great work!

It's oddly hard to go back to eating maintenance amounts after an extended period of eating at a deficit without going overboard. Don't force a ton of foods you wouldn't normally eat on yourself or cram yourself overfull of foods you don't want just to get the calories in.

Think of the transition as 'dieting in reverse'. Keep eating the way you've been eating and just gradually eat more of it to avoid a shock to the system or the recrafting of bad eating habits.

Keep 100 calorie snacks, fruit, and/or other 'single serving' items around. They a great way to slowly add calories to your day in a controlled manner without having to resort to drinking straight oil or eating butter or anything goofy like that. And since they're relatively small, it won't feel like much of a change just to pop one every once in a while.

Enjoy the freedom and remember to keep monitoring your weight for long-term trends (studies say that people who regularly weigh themselves after losing have a much higher chance of keeping the weight off than otherwise).

The best part amount maintenance is that the hard work is done. All you need to do it to stay alert/aware enough to nip issues in the bud. Eating at a deficit for one or two days to make up a bad night at a restaurant is nothing compared to eating at a deficit for months in order to make up for years of indulgence.

Good luck!