It’s the plan after the plan: maintenance bb!
It’s where you challenge food, scale, mindset and body beliefs which often makes it the toughest leg of the journey for some people.
But why?
Keep reading to see the most common things I see people struggle with as they transition away from eating less than what they need for weight loss and fat loss results.
The scale is your validation for success + failure
You know the feeling: when the scale goes down, you’re being “good” and when the scale goes up, you’re being “bad”. The scale tells you success and failure, deserve to eat or not, allowed to eat or not.
Using the scale as a metric for how you should feel about your body or how you should treat your body, is toxic. If you’re stuck in this warp, maintenance is going to feel extremely uncomfortable as you watch normal, typical fluctuations up and down for months and months.
Luckily there are plenty of dietitians, coaches and therapists that can help you untangle that scale narrative, but only if you’re willing to work hard
you've never purposefully eaten enough for your body
It may have started as a teen reading about Jennifer Aniston’s strict meal plan while she was on Friends. Maybe you learned a little more watching your Mom wrestle with Weight Watchers points every time you went out to eat.
When “losing weight” is the only lens through which you learn about nutrition, so you probably don’t realize how many thousands of calories it takes to support your body and your active lifestyle.
Maintenance is uncomfortable because it’s new, not because it’s wrong. Accept that you didn’t have all the information and a lot of the information that you did have, was just plain incorrect!
you thrive in restriction
You hold on to old clothes that don’t fit anymore for motivation, because ‘they might someday”. After an overindulgent night, you’re fasting far past noon, co-opting your friend’s juice clean, swearing off all sugar and carbs for days.
You’re using food to exercise control, especially when life feels chaotic and unsettling. It feels comforting when there are fewer “allowed” foods on this list because the more rules, the easier it is to “do it right”. Neat, tidy, controlled.
The abundance of maintenance makes you feel uncomfortable because there’s not enough “guidelines” or “rules” to “keep you in check”. You can learn different coping mechanisms that don’t involve restriction. After all, discipline is not in the calorie deficit phase, it’s in maintenance phase.
you lack goals outside of aesthetic based ones
Have you ever had a goal for your health or nutrition that did not involve losing weight?
No, really. Have you?
Do you really want to lose weight or do you want what weight loss promises – feeling more confident, sexy, desirable? You know you can have all of those things without weight loss, right?
Eating enough, or at maintenance, should dominate the majority of your year. Perhaps one of the reasons you can’t deal is because you have never set health or nutrition goals that don’t require restriction to get there. It’s time to expand your brain for different possibilities and get to work!
Do you struggle eating more, eating enough to support your body and your active lifestyle?
