What are your plans for maintenance once you reach your goal weight?

Would love to hear what y'all are planning to do. If you don't know yet or if it stresses you to think about it, that's okay to. Taking one step at a time is a great strategy.

My plan if anyone is curious:

I'm at 275. My highest weight was 315. I'm looking to get to 150-160 range. So a long way to go.

When I get to my goal weight, I figure there's two options which are good for me:

1. I continue as I have been, only eating stuff I can input into my calorie app, inputting my steps. But set it to 'maintenance' instead of 'lose X per week.'

2. Do the above, but also allow myself to have one meal per (insert period of time) that has a stand-in calorie amount inputted. For example, once a week I can eat at a restaurant or a friend's house, and input that meal as 700 calories. Or maybe once every other week. Perhaps I could skip weeks to 'save up' for something like a vacation. For each 'cheat' meal I would try to stay reasonably healthy. If my weight creeps up as a result of this, I can just set up MyFitnessPal to have me at 'lose X lbs per week' every time I hit a certain weight ceiling. E.g. if I start at 150 lbs (BMI 20.3), I could set 'lose 1.5 lbs per week, goal 150 lbs' every time I hit 165 lbs (BMI 22.4). Normal weight = 18.5 - 24.9 so I would be staying at a normal weight despite mild yo-yoing (assuming my one cheat meal per week doesn't cancel out the 3500 deficit of 1 lb lost per week).

When it comes to losing weight, my experience has been that trying to allow for 'cheat meals' completely derails me. That means gaining the weight back and stagnation. It's to the point that worrying about being derailed, and experiencing the struggle of getting back on track, outweighs whatever joy I get from 'cheating.'

Once I'm at my goal weight, it will feel a little bit safer to try incorporating some cheating. Trying to stay at a healthy weight will be a fundamentally different scenario than trying to lose a massive amount of weight. But if I am suddenly way more stressed, craving, etc, I will just restart and indefinitely continue 'only eat what I can accurately put in MyFitnessPal.'

submitted by /u/LisneyDand
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/olaodn/what_are_your_plans_for_maintenance_once_you/