Successful Maintenance

I’ve decided that I’d like to move to maintenance. Theoretically, I know what I want to do: exercise the same amount and eat marginally more. But…. I have no experience with eating at a happy medium: I have my pre-weight loss free-for-all and my closely-monitored calorie counting, but there is a lot of middle ground between those two places. Frankly, as I’m goal-oriented, I think that losing weight was the easy part—keeping it off, with no “Ha! I made it!” moment waiting for me at the end will be a lot harder. I lost some (though not this much) weight once before and regained it, so obviously this is a challenge for me, though I’ve learned a lot more about nutrition this time around. I don’t doubt that I can be successful, but I would like to figure this out with a minimum of trial and error. I want to eat and live like a normal, healthy, un-obsessed person.

Right now I am thinking that I will continue calorie counting for a while, so I can recalibrate my brain and my body for an even-keeled, non-deficit diet, with the idea of eventually stopping the counting. I seem to recall that RJenkins has set upper and lower limits on his weight, and starts counting again if his weight exceeds those boundaries, which seems sensible to me, and which I will probably adopt for myself.

I would like to hear what else everybody has to suggest for weight maintenance. If you have successfully been maintaining your weight, what techniques or strategies do you use, and have those strategies have changed over time? Who else out there is thinking of moving to maintenance or has done so recently, and what challenges, if any, do you think you’ll face?