How much easier would it be to maintain a slightly higher weight?

One other thing. I didn’t try to change my diet to low carb, more protein or more satiating foods, as so many advise.
Unless you count eating extra veggies. Because life is too short and I don’t want to deny myself reasonable portions of my favorite foods. Ever.

For me, every time I've allowed my weight to go up, just a few pounds, I would end up regaining all the weight I had lost and then some. It's a very slippery slope. For years I thought 140 was my 'natural weight'. It turns out I was wrong. I've been maintaining 120-125 for the past 6 years. I do it by being mindful of what I eat - I log though I don't weigh everything I eat - and by being very active, running and walking a lot. I don't feel deprived because I know I can eat what I enjoy without worry since I burn an average of 500 extra calories every day.

As stated above, you need to work on a way of eating that is filling, but not fattening. It may mean going out to eat less often, or making different choices when you do. It may mean making exercise more a part of your life. You don't have to give up on maintaining your weight loss.

My take is that absent bloodwork to confirm either way, there's some evidence that hormonally driven regain is at least one of the things that aids, if not drives, regain.

And that there is some evidence that it may extend to years, not months. Or, until the unwanted outcome of substantial, if not full, regain.

I don't doubt that fat levels associated with higher bmi may be easier to maintain than lower. This is anecdotally confirmed by many.

The question is how to weather the storms and how to get to an easier to maintain equilibrium safely.

That's where your own mental processes management has to come in.

@psychod787 has done an awesome job to slowly and carefully regain some without giving up or overshooting and while continuing to maintain his physique! But he is a double exception among exceptions when is comes to weight management success.

I tried to avoid the issues he faced by convincing myself that I was on a five year weight loss plan and only doing things I would be willing to do for five years (so no resentment at "having" to do them, and not too much pushing of other goals beyond the primary one of sustainability)

The first 2+ were spent losing the weight. The rest "optionally losing", aka maintaining.

About 3 years post faster weight loss (2 years past the last 12lbs and while in a "final" maintenance range which has been closer to mid BMI 23's than anything else)... things started to feel easier, and daily calories limits require less management to be adhered to.

I have not found definitive and believable research on all this (behavioura?l, hormonal? both? how to fix????)

The timelines I experienced do correlate to statistics about the chances of successfully defending against weight regain.

Hence my advice to concentrate on trying to find something that works for you mentally and physically while ALLOWING but not SEEKING a certain degree of regain.

And thoroughly establishing that this is an experiment you're in charge of running and that you're the one managing it and driving it.

You're not helpless; but you're the principal investigator in experimenting with how to make things easier for yourself and evaluating the trade offs you're willing and able to make so as to get to an optimal, for you, outcome!!!

Last but not least, run an experiment, especially now with covid-19 and less eating out, as to how much you CAN actually increase your calories while maintaining. There exists some elasticity for most between losing calories, maintenance calories, and gain calories, usually absorbed by NEAT changes. And don't be afraid to experiment with ways of eating (changing fat and carb and protein ratios). These are both things you can do while allowing, without necessarily seeking, some regain!

purple4sure05 wrote: »

Thanks everyone for responding. Yes to clarify I was close to a BMI of 26, dropped to about 21, am currently 21.6, and asking about how much more sustainable it could be to inch up somewhere between 22.5 and 23. I already run about 3 miles per day and weight train for another 40 minutes 6 days a week, so adding exercise is not really an option for me as suggested in another comment. I also go for about an hour walk most days.

I have used a weight trend app and I have found that it is not just water weight, my weight will trend up if I start allowing myself to eat at a restaurant where I don't know the calories, even though I only would do this once a week. This is still honestly the case. I can only keep a handle on things when I have calculated the calories on every meal, which is getting old. I want to be able to go to dinner with friends once a week and not worry about how many calories I'm accounting for. I also don't have a problem with binging, so I don't go overboard in these scenarios. I weigh everything I eat for the most part the other 6 days.

Basically, if a slightly increased weight would allow me to actually live my life a bit more, it would be worth it. It sounds like experiences vary. For some it makes a huge difference, for others there is not much difference at all.

In the past I know I maintained a BMI of just under 24 pretty effortlessly while going out to eat or for drinks once or twice a week, plus not measuring food at all. That went on for two years before I began gaining a bit.

Anyway thanks again for the insight.

To the bolded:

You may be absolutely correct. Without seeing your full details, I have no idea.

However, I'm going to comment based on my own individual experience. I hope you'll be patient if it's a bit (heh) wordy.

As background: I lost weight in 2015, down to around BMI 19.5 (overshot goal intended goal weight), gained back a bit to around BMI 20 (goal), then started slowly creeping up from there to near BMI 23. Since late 2019, I'm super-slowly intentionally creeping back down again, currently at BMI 21.5. Despite the regain in there, I didn't find anything in that range to be especially subjectively harder or easier to maintain. (My issues have to do with gaming a self-indulgent personality, not really appetite or the like.) I have observed it being generally easier to maintain my weight now (going into year 5) than it was at first, FWIW. Though I describe my regain as "slow creep", it was actually primarily from too-frequent high-indulgence days that cumulatively over-ran my intentional calorie banking cushion.

I've used a weight trending app (Libra, in my case) for a good share of those years, and back-entered weight data going all the way back to when I started losing (at BMI 30.4, if that matters).

The thing is that the trend line is not a magical insight. If I have a peak-eating day, that single day's effect (via the next day or few's weigh-ins) is entirely capable of driving my trend line upward, which looks like regain, even when (simply by sticking to a rational maintenance routine, not trying to "make up for it") my scale weight will drop back to my starting point in another few days.

In other words, the trend line is misleading. It's just statistics. It's not deep insight.

Keep in mind that I told you I calorie bank (undereat maintenance) most days, to indulge some days. The goal is to maintain, overall. My routine deficit is in the 150-250 calorie range daily, and I usually eat it back over the course of a week or two, by having peaky meals or days. Every time I eat more, the next days' weigh-ins pull the trend line up. I'm going to share a chunk of 2016 here, by way of illustration (below). Look specifically at April, May, and into June. I would've been taking multiple weekend trips during that period, and eating very indulgently for a day or two each time. I'm talking eating 1.5 times or 2 times maintenance sometimes, 1000+ calories and more, not just a few extra calories.

You can see the post-weekend scale weights "yanking upward" on the trend line, and then the trend drops back again as what is in reality mostly water weight (and extra digestive contents in transit) work their way though my system, and the daily weights below the trend after that "yank downward" on the trend line again. What ought to be obvious, looking at the whole period, is that despite the crazy careening of daily weights from 116-124 and points in between, and the trend twitching from under 119 to over 120, is that I was actually maintaining my weight in that 119-120 range for those months. Personally, I would not want to misinterpret those shifts in the trend line as "actually gaining" in any meaningful way.



Now, here's a fun thing. In Libra (don't know about other apps) I can actually change the way it smooths the curve, and projects my trends. The chart above came from putting those settings at 7 days smoothing, 7 days projection, which I believe are the default settings. In maintenance, because I eat in such a whacky, uneven way, I've found it helpful to change my settings to use a longer term set of data. Below are the exact same daily weights, with the settings changed to 30 days smoothing, 60 days projection. Most of the wild swings of the trend line disappear, with this statistically longer view, and it actually appears that my weight was creeping downward a tiny, tiny bit over this period, from just a bit above 120, to just a bit below. Weird, huh?



There's an old saying about "Lies, d*mned lies, and statistics." This is statistics. Perhaps you know how statistics work. Knowing a little bit about that seems like a useful thing, when it comes to weight trends.

Best wishes! :flowerforyou:

This content has been removed.

purple4sure05 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

purple4sure05 wrote: »

Thanks everyone for responding. Yes to clarify I was close to a BMI of 26, dropped to about 21, am currently 21.6, and asking about how much more sustainable it could be to inch up somewhere between 22.5 and 23. I already run about 3 miles per day and weight train for another 40 minutes 6 days a week, so adding exercise is not really an option for me as suggested in another comment. I also go for about an hour walk most days.

I have used a weight trend app and I have found that it is not just water weight, my weight will trend up if I start allowing myself to eat at a restaurant where I don't know the calories, even though I only would do this once a week. This is still honestly the case. I can only keep a handle on things when I have calculated the calories on every meal, which is getting old. I want to be able to go to dinner with friends once a week and not worry about how many calories I'm accounting for. I also don't have a problem with binging, so I don't go overboard in these scenarios. I weigh everything I eat for the most part the other 6 days.

Basically, if a slightly increased weight would allow me to actually live my life a bit more, it would be worth it. It sounds like experiences vary. For some it makes a huge difference, for others there is not much difference at all.

In the past I know I maintained a BMI of just under 24 pretty effortlessly while going out to eat or for drinks once or twice a week, plus not measuring food at all. That went on for two years before I began gaining a bit.

Anyway thanks again for the insight.

To the bolded:

You may be absolutely correct. Without seeing your full details, I have no idea.

However, I'm going to comment based on my own individual experience. I hope you'll be patient if it's a bit (heh) wordy.

As background: I lost weight in 2015, down to around BMI 19.5 (overshot goal intended goal weight), gained back a bit to around BMI 20 (goal), then started slowly creeping up from there to near BMI 23. Since late 2019, I'm super-slowly intentionally creeping back down again, currently at BMI 21.5. Despite the regain in there, I didn't find anything in that range to be especially subjectively harder or easier to maintain. (My issues have to do with gaming a self-indulgent personality, not really appetite or the like.) I have observed it being generally easier to maintain my weight now (going into year 5) than it was at first, FWIW. Though I describe my regain as "slow creep", it was actually primarily from too-frequent high-indulgence days that cumulatively over-ran my intentional calorie banking cushion.

I've used a weight trending app (Libra, in my case) for a good share of those years, and back-entered weight data going all the way back to when I started losing (at BMI 30.4, if that matters).

The thing is that the trend line is not a magical insight. If I have a peak-eating day, that single day's effect (via the next day or few's weigh-ins) is entirely capable of driving my trend line upward, which looks like regain, even when (simply by sticking to a rational maintenance routine, not trying to "make up for it") my scale weight will drop back to my starting point in another few days.

In other words, the trend line is misleading. It's just statistics. It's not deep insight.

Keep in mind that I told you I calorie bank (undereat maintenance) most days, to indulge some days. The goal is to maintain, overall. My routine deficit is in the 150-250 calorie range daily, and I usually eat it back over the course of a week or two, by having peaky meals or days. Every time I eat more, the next days' weigh-ins pull the trend line up. I'm going to share a chunk of 2016 here, by way of illustration (below). Look specifically at April, May, and into June. I would've been taking multiple weekend trips during that period, and eating very indulgently for a day or two each time. I'm talking eating 1.5 times or 2 times maintenance sometimes, 1000+ calories and more, not just a few extra calories.

You can see the post-weekend scale weights "yanking upward" on the trend line, and then the trend drops back again as what is in reality mostly water weight (and extra digestive contents in transit) work their way though my system, and the daily weights below the trend after that "yank downward" on the trend line again. What ought to be obvious, looking at the whole period, is that despite the crazy careening of daily weights from 116-124 and points in between, and the trend twitching from under 119 to over 120, is that I was actually maintaining my weight in that 119-120 range for those months. Personally, I would not want to misinterpret those shifts in the trend line as "actually gaining" in any meaningful way.



Now, here's a fun thing. In Libra (don't know about other apps) I can actually change the way it smooths the curve, and projects my trends. The chart above came from putting those settings at 7 days smoothing, 7 days projection, which I believe are the default settings. In maintenance, because I eat in such a whacky, uneven way, I've found it helpful to change my settings to use a longer term set of data. Below are the exact same daily weights, with the settings changed to 30 days smoothing, 60 days projection. Most of the wild swings of the trend line disappear, with this statistically longer view, and it actually appears that my weight was creeping downward a tiny, tiny bit over this period, from just a bit above 120, to just a bit below. Weird, huh?



There's an old saying about "Lies, d*mned lies, and statistics." This is statistics. Perhaps you know how statistics work. Knowing a little bit about that seems like a useful thing, when it comes to weight trends.

Best wishes! :flowerforyou:

Thanks very much for all the info! Its helpful to see someone elses experience, as I also used to bank calories. Unfortunately even with this in mind, my trend line actually did go up, even when I would smooth it out. That was only the case when I didn't properly log calorie-surplus days. Obviously somehow Im creating a surplus despite aiming for well under maintenance the other days, but this was even with quitting drinking anything with calories ever, plus only eating out once a week.

There were months where on those high calorie days I weighed out batter to the gram and then weighed all my cupcakes and icing (for example) but although it worked, it got very old and didn't allow me to even go to a friends birthday party and eat what I wanted. From what you've said though I think its important for me to keep in mind that having big calorie days will throw things off. For me, my weight really only fluctuates within about 2 pounds actually. I know my food intake is the root problem. Its all science, but was hoping possibly a higher weight would be a little easier on me. Sounds like the answer is unfortunately "probably not!" Haha.

Even varying within 2 pounds +/- would be a pretty narrow definition of maintenance, about as narrow as the narrowest I've seen among successful maintainers here. Your weight will go up in maintenance: Guaranteed. It will also go back down again, if maintaining. That's how maintaining works, at any weight.

That concept will not change at BMI 20 vs. 23, just the numbers will change. If you "gain" now from a dinner out, you'll do the same at BMI 23. That would be my prediction, unfortunately.

Best wishes!