subject: Finishing Your Diet – How To Transition to a Maintenance Diet [print this page] Finishing Your Diet How To Transition to a Maintenance Diet
Say you've been dieting. Rough. Now say you're one of the few who has done it successfully. Well done! Over the past six months or however long you've been restricting your calories you've struggled to hold to your diet, occasionally slipping up whether on purpose or by accident, and now you have reached your desired weight. Now what? You don't go back to your old habits, that's fore sure, because those are the ones that got you into trouble in the first place. Instead, you transition into a maintenance diet, but how do you do that exactly? In today's article we're going to take a look at that middle ground between the end of your diet and the beginning of your maintenance diet, and see how best it can be handled.
The reason this is a topic for discussion is because the change between your diet and your maintenance diet can often be about five hundred calories or more. Suddenly you are no longer eating to lose weight, but eating to hold your current weight, and that means a serious change to your diet. Do you make the leap to your new caloric requirements immediately, or do you take the transition slowly?
Many people are eager to go right up to the new maximum. They think that they deserve it, that they want to eat more, and come on, they're tired of being hungry. So they jump right up to the new level, and this can often lead to trouble. Why? Making such a big jump is a big test of your control. People often simply lose control or perspective, and can actually eat a lot more and ruin their diet. Professional athletes with good control of their diets can make this jump easily, but the rest of us have to be careful.
With the slow approach, you raise the amount you are eating over the a short period of time, say about a week or so. This means you can add about a hundred calories a day, making sure you are in complete control of what you are eating over time, so that there's never a big leap that can unbalance you. When you reach your limit, you then level out, and hold to that for basically forever. This is a controlled ascent, and as such has the highest chance of success.
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