maintaining... for now... tips

omg congrats!!!!!!! When I go into maintenance, at first I found it hard to even get all the calories every day But I started finding somethings that really worked (high protein def helped) - but also carved out the extra cals as like a treat... so like... froyo... or a reeeeeally good cheese on my salad grinnn.

I now I realize i don't have the experience to answer your actual question hahahaha... but I am excited for you.

Good luck!

Really, to me, what I am hearing is that you do need a break from dieting and you aren't sure how much of a break to take. I'm also hearing about that you feel that your current low energy intake is causing binging/cravings?

First of all, well done!

The amount of time you spend maintaining is up to you. Take as long as *you* need; if it's two weeks or two months, it doesn't matter. What really matters is you taking the required amount of time to feel "rested" to continue on your journey. What also does matter is that you don't set back yourself by gaining back most, or all the weight you have lost prior.

As another member posted above about diet breaks and re-feeds - I haven't clicked the link but do have some experience/knowledge from personal experience, reading studies, my profession etc etc. Dieting breaks are a great *tool* for all the reasons above.

Regarding building muscle. I am not sure what you current body composition or experience with muscle building is, so I'm going to assume you're completely new to it. The more muscle you have, the metabolically active your muscles and therefore body is; more muscle, more energy burned! Say you started a weight-training regime which you were consistent with, completing all the compounds lifts and seen fair improvements over a 3-month period. Then regardless if you're in a kcal deficit, surplus, or maintenance you're going to see some kind of results. Simply put, this is just the body's response early on, otherwise known as "newby gains". These effects fade after this point, meaning that you will have to focus more on nutrition and progressive overload in your training to pack on that muscle. As you may know, the body *optimally* builds muscle in a kcal surplus (something you don't want to be in with your current goals to lose body mass - specifically body fat). So, once you leave the "newby gains" phase then you may or may not want to focus on muscle-building and therefore a calorie surplus.

Keep going, you're smashin' it!

I have done diet breaks for 2 weeks for every 5lbs lost. The best advice I can give you is to:
a-) Try to use this time as a way of figuring out how to eat mostly healthy foods and meet that maintenance goal. The first couple I took were hard - because my deficit to start with was too big and then I had no idea how to get enough cals without going back to stuff like chips and candy. Weird, upside down, but a thing I really needed to learn.
b-) Get your general goal up. Being overly aggressive makes the above harder.
c-) Expect temporary scale weight to jump up due to more food in your system and water weight retention above and beyond usual because of things like more carbs and more salt.

How long did it take you to lose your 100 lb? 2 years? I'm amazed you stuck to 1200 kcal for that long.

Were you eating exercise calories on top of the the 1200? You should.