How to keep the weight off after you lose it

Keeping weight off is harder than losing it, because after a diet your body burns less and your appetite asks for more. The people who manage it move up to their new maintenance, keep the habits that lost the weight, and weigh in often enough to catch a few pounds early.

You lost the weight. Now what?

The scale says the number you wanted and your clothes fit. It feels like the finish line. For most people it’s half time. Plenty of people manage to lose weight, and keeping it off is where most of them come unstuck.

It’s easy to see why. You stop the diet, go back to eating normally, and normal is what put the weight on. And even if you eat the way you ate during the diet, your body has changed in two ways that both push you back up.

The pay cut and the raise

Your maintenance calories are like your salary. Losing 30 pounds is a pay cut. NIH researchers worked out that each pound lost lowers the calories you need by about 10 a day, so 30 pounds is about 300 a day less. In people who keep off 10% of their weight, the burn often drops another 10 to 15% beyond what the smaller body explains.

At the same time your appetite asks for a raise. In a trial of 153 people on canagliflozin, a diabetes drug that makes you pass extra sugar in your urine, researchers could measure how much more people ate as they lost weight. For each kilogram lost, appetite rose by about 100 calories a day, more than three times as much as the burn fell.

A smaller salary and a bigger appetite leave a gap. Fill it with the old eating and the weight comes back. You close it on purpose, with the right calories, the habits that keep hunger down, and a scale that catches a drift early.

The five parts

1. You lost the weight. Now what? The first months after a diet, the habits of people who keep it off, and the line that tells you when to act.
2. Your maintenance calories after a diet. How to find your new number, how to step up to it, and whether a slow reverse diet helps.
3. Why your daily burn drops while you lose. A smaller body, less movement, more efficient muscles and a watch that guesses, with the sizes from studies.
4. How long to diet before a break. Diet breaks, the MATADOR trial, and when to stop and hold for months.
5. Bulking after a cut. When to start, how big a surplus, and how to gain muscle without undoing the cut.

Can people really keep it off?

Yes, and more than the usual numbers suggest.

The registry is made of people who already succeeded, so it can’t tell you the odds. But it shows what success looks like. A 2005 review of the registry found that maintenance got easier once people had kept the weight off for two to five years.

The habits that keep it off

From the registry and the trials, a short list keeps turning up.

• Keep weighing. In a study of 9,768 smart scale users, people who stopped weighing for a month or more gained about 2 pounds during the break.
• Keep moving. Registry members average about an hour of activity a day.
• Eat the same way on weekends. Registry members tend to eat a consistent diet across the week.
• Keep protein and lifting. They protect the muscle you kept, and protein keeps you full.
• Act early. A few pounds is a week or two of tightening up. Fifteen pounds is another diet.

The full list, and what to do in your first twelve weeks, is in you lost the weight, now what.