How to Regulate Calories to Maintain Weight Loss Success!
Congratulations! You’re where you want to be in your weight loss goals… now how do you sustain and maintain it? If you’ve been on an extremely restrictive diet, you’ll want to be careful about how you re-introduce yourself to a level of food intake you feel will be acceptable to you for the rest of your life. This is part of why many diets don’t work – you accomplish something – but then you feel your work is done, and it’s so easy to go back to the dietary habits you had before, that created that shape you did not want.
Since you’re no longer trying to lose weight, you don’t need to create a calorie deficit – good news! The most basic (and quite possibly inaccurate) way to estimate your new daily calorie requirement, is to take your new body weight and multiply it by 15-16 calories. If 150 is the weight you want to maintain, chow down 2250 calories to maintain weight a day… enjoy!
Click here to discover an easier way to maintain calories in deficit
If it were that simple, that would be great – but just as it took some adjustment to figure out how much it would take to lose weight, adjusting to your new ‘maintenance diet’ will take some trial and error. Maybe over the course of a few months you’ll find out that if you slip up on your workout schedule, your weight starts creeping back up. Maybe the elaborate coffee routine you’ve allowed yourself to fall back into starts packing on the pounds.
Some fitness factors to consider in maintaining your weight: how’s your exercise level? If you now have an exercise level that requires more food, take in some more protein daily, and see what effects that has. Are you looking to build muscle? Now that you’re slim, do you want to work on getting slim and shapely as well? That will require adjustments to your diet in terms of protein balance and calories overall. Experiment and play with your diet and how it makes you feel, now that you’re not looking for that deficit. Changes will be subtle, and subtle is easy to reverse if it’s not what you want. Will eating a higher percentage of good fats make you feel better? What helps your skin look amazing? Is chocolate still a miracle food? 
Maybe you need to look into a diet program again – but look at it from the point of view that you’re looking for a plan that has calories to maintain weight ideally, not weight loss. I have been working on maintaining weight for awhile, and my best tool has been Eat Stop Eat. It has the benefit of allowing you to really (seriously for realz, yo 
) eat completely normally, and if you’ve noticed a little tick upward in your weight, just take a day or two off in the next week – and boom your calories are back where they need to be, and maintenance is extremely simple. For me, this works – it’s not a hassle, and I don’t have to think about it all the time for results.
Congratulations again! Maintaining your weight is less sexy and exciting then counting the pounds coming off on the scale – but it’s a place you should be excited to stay at for a long, long time. Enjoy!