Maintenance - the story so far

At the end of March I hit 85kg (BMI 24.8), and Team Marshall decided that was enough weight loss, and that maintenance should begin. I thought that it might be interesting to review how my first two months of maintenance have worked out. The headline is that I am finding maintenance quite difficult. What I've found so far is that in some ways it's harder than losing, because with losing the objective is crystal clear - lose weight. With maintaining, the objective is vaguer - don't lose, don't gain, but if either happens, make some adjustment.

Early on I figured out that having a set target weight was no good, because nearly every weighing would be 'too low' or 'too high'. So I decided on an acceptable range - between 82kg and 85kg. I suppose I hoped that my eating habits had changed, and my weight would always be pretty steady, and certainly within that 3kg range. But no - as always if I lose my grip, the weight piles back on. Two nights away - put on 2kg. Six days on holiday - put on 3.4kg. It's true that I'm now good at losing it again, but it's worrying when it happens!

In fact my main problem seems more to be that I am still losing, maybe because I am worried that after one of these trips away, I will not be able to lose what I have gained. In fact my latest weighing was 82.4kg (BMI 24.1), so I am near the bottom of my range. It could be that I need to eat less when I am away from home, but eat more when I am at home, but neither of these is easy to do. I have made a rather half-hearted effort to eat more at home, but increasing my portion of porridge by 20g may not be all of the solution!

So this maintenance lark is very much work-in-progress. The one thing that I already believe is that taking a lot of notice of what I eat, so I can successfully walk the tightrope between losing too much and gaining too much is something that I will be doing forever.