SCARED to gain

I am not at maintenance stage yet but in your position I would not immediately up my calories to full maintenance plus exercise. I think what you need to do is increase your calories gradually until you find that sweet spot where your weight stays stable. Maybe just add 100 or 200 calories per day, sticking at that level for a week or so to see what happens and then increasing as you see fit? That approach will get your body used to eating a bit more, too, rather than just jumping in with a load of unexpected calories every day.

Good luck, and well done on reaching target.

Just work your calories up week by week, did you know you can manually set your goal to make small increments as well as the gross changes by changing your goal?

You don't and can't suddenly gain all your weight back - it takes months and months of both overeating and ignoring the scales moving up. Keep weighing yourself, set an upper intervention weight that triggers intervention and you have a safety net.

Above all you need to trust the process that brought you so far, learn what your natural fluctuations look like and realise that short term fluctuations are not variations in fat. Over time you should be able to reduce your anxiety level way down from "scared" to vigilant as maintenance should be a happy place.

Whether you account for your exercise separately after the event or role it up into a daily average is personal choice - your body counts those calories whether you label them as such or not.

One day at a time, my friend.

Like sijomial said, you won't gain unless you ignore your body weight scale for a very long time.

I still log food, like I said in your other thread I tried not logging food and had to re-lose that very difficult "last 10 pounds" AGAIN, and I'm not making that mistake twice. If/when I stop logging I tend to forget my portion sizes and "ignore" that cheeseburger, fries and milkshake twice a week and before I know it. . . bam. 10.

So stick with us. Congrats on Maintenance. The first year is a bit of a roller coaster, don't freak out, keep eating well most of the time, I'd say give yourself a flexible range (most people have a 5 pound Maintenance range) and keep stepping on that scale once or twice a week. I still log my weight and food and exercise in my Excel sheet. It's worth it to me to plot my numbers.

To add to the excellent advice above:

There's a post in the maintenance Most Helpful Posts that might give you some food for thought, though not for the obvious reasons. It sounds like you have a maintenance estimate, maybe based off MFP settings. There are multiple ways to estimate maintenance calories. Maybe it would help you to consider some of the other estimating methods, and thus increase your confidence when they all suggest that you can safely eat more? (Keep in mind that some estimates include exercise in the base estimate (like TDEE calculators) and others don't include exercise in the base estimate (like MFP), so you need to think and be comparing apples to apples).

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10638211/how-to-find-your-maintenance-calorie-level

One thing to be aware of: If you add a decent-sized clump of calories to your eating, that will tend to include some extra carbs, some extra sodium, and/or some extra bulk (fiber, etc.). Those may potentially cause a little extra water retention, and a little higher average digestive system contents (that will eventually be eliminated), so cause a bit of scale jump (not tens of pounds or anything, but it can be one or two-ish).

Sometimes people go to maintenance calories, see that sudden little scale jump, and think "Oh, noooo: If I eat more I always gain weight!". But it's not fat: It's just an adjustment in non-fat stuff that changes one's relationship with gravity a tiny bit. Things will settle out.

You've been losing weight for a while, I gather. That should be enough experience to give you confidence that you can't gain 2 pounds (7000 calories worth of fat, approximately) by eating 200 or even 500 more calories for a couple of days or so. The message is that any sudden, kinda big scale jump - when you didn't eat a big boatload of extra calories to account for it - is water weight or digestive contents or both, not fat, so not something to freak out about.

Gradually increasing calories can help avoid this, but it's still something to know, and feel calm about.

If you're still watching calories, any actual fat gain - i.e., if you accidentally start eating more than your true maintenance calories - tends to be a very slow, gradual upward creep of the scale weight, over weeks to months, not a sudden jump of a pound or two or three overnight.

You can do this! Some people even find that as they go to maintenance calories, their energy level picks up a little (maybe right away, maybe over a few weeks), so that their final maintenance calories are a bit above what they might have expected. You might possibly be one of the lucky ones: Only one way to find out!

Best wishes! :flowerforyou: