People on maintenance

I try to do good all day but do tend to want a snack by the end of the night. I like fat free microwave popcorn, it fills me up with not to many calories. I also eat pickles. If you look at my diary the last few days its not good because we had my daughters b-day party this weekend. To maintain MFP has my calories at 1690 but I usually bump that up with exercise.

I am often my hungriest at the end of the day, and more prone to eat after 8pm, so most of my calories, well at least half, are eaten between 8pm and 3am. I am maintaining on around 2000-2500 calories, bearing in mind I tend to exercise at least an hour everyday except one, sometimes an hour of cycling, sometimes 2 hours, sometimes, like yesterday, 2 hours cycling and 2 hours of walking. Without exercise, my maintenance is about 1800. I am maintaining, sometimes losing a bit but remaining around 123-126Ibs. I sometimes go over by a few thousand, sometimes under by 400-500, but I just take it as par the course, it seems to balance out in the end, so yes, I do sometimes have a spike day, so to speak.

I just deal with my tendency to get hungrier in the evening/night, by basically not eating much between going to bed and dinnertime at 8pm. It seems to work well enough for me, and I found that if I ate before my exercise, I found it a lot harder and seemed to become more sluggish. If I am hungry at the end of the day, I eat pears, apples, a hard boiled egg, apple rice cakes, diet hot chocolate and my greek yoghurt with pb2, seeds and a little jam mixed in. The latter is pretty filling.

I've grown pretty used to my 1630 net maintenance calories. I've been maintaining since January. Some days I'm not as hungry, others I'm ravenous, but I just go with what my body is telling me. 90% of the time, my maintenance is perfect. I was at 125 (my original goal) until a couple months ago when I started strength training more often. Now I hover around 130 (5'5", slender frame). HTH!