Why you should incorporate maintenance phases
Do you struggle with the idea of ‘maintenance’ phases?
Winter is typically when I encourage my clients to lean into a maintenance phase, especially if they have focused on fat loss or body composition-related goals during other parts of the year.
Wearing more clothes, wanting to eat more to stay warm, and the fact that not consuming enough calories/kilojoules compromises our immune system (meaning you’re more likely to get sick this winter if you’re trying to diet), makes the colder months a good time to press pause on fat-loss goals if you’ve been working towards them for a while.
A maintenance phase is simply when you are eating and exercising in a way that allows you to maintain your body weight. The purpose of implementing maintenance phases between dieting phases is to provide a psychological and physiological break from the effects of being in an energy deficit.
Ideally, you want to spend the majority of your life in a ‘maintenance phase,’ as opposed to what I call, ‘half-arse-dieting’ all the time (where you’re perpetually attempting to diet on and off, not so successfully).
You could just spend your entire life in a maintenance phase and that might be the best route possible for your wellbeing. Your goals and what you choose to do with your body are completely your choice. You can absolutely still focus on improving your nutrition habits and your health without having a fat-loss goal.
Implementing maintenance phases is one of the ways I help clients who are seeking fat loss do so in a way that doesn’t compromise their relationship with food or their mental health because it allows you the space to ‘take a breather’, practise more intuitive eating and mindful eating and also enjoy the feeling of eating to fullness and eating for pleasure more often than when you are dieting (these are not bad things).
However, I often warn clients that maintenance phases can be more difficult than fat loss phases. After all, the gloomy statistics about most diets failing aren’t because people can’t successfully lose weight from dieting (most people can), but about whether people can keep it off. Around 90% of people who lose weight from dieting regain the weight they have lost, and often they gain even more.
Personal trainers will tell you that as long as you eat enough protein and train with resistance the whole time, this won’t happen to you because in theory - weight regain is due to metabolic slowdown from losing lean muscle mass by following a diet that is too low in protein that doesn’t involve resistance training. So if it does happen to you, it’s because you’ve accidentally wrecked your metabolism from not doing either of those two things.
Whilst your metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure will decrease when you lose lean muscle mass (and actually just lose weight in general), let me hold your hand while I say this… No matter how ‘dumb’ the last diet you went on was… You haven’t permanently wrecked your metabolism because of it.
Most people regain weight after a diet due to post-diet overeating/bingeing, not from metabolic slowdown.
The reason why your PT (not me, obvs) won’t tell you this, is because they are too uncomfortable to talk about this experience (they probably do it themselves) and because it’s always easier to come up with a scientific-sounding theory that is seemingly outside of everyone's control (if in doubt - blame insulin!).
Another reason I think we struggle to admit to ourselves that this is the reason why we gain weight after we lose it, is because if we can point the finger at a certain villain (like metabolic slowdown/starvation mode/whatever you want to call it), it means that we can place our hopes in various ‘saviours’ that we might stumble upon that promise to rescue us from said villain. Ideally some sort of magic pill or supplement, a special diet we can follow next time, or ice baths.
When our personal experience of ‘failing’ on a diet has led us to believe that our own willpower isn’t enough, we become vulnerable to buying into these kinds of narratives.
‘It’s not you, it’s (something confusing sounding)! Try (this gimmicky) approach and watch what happens!’ (We genuinely have no idea either!)
This kind of rhetoric is alluring because it’s more uncomfortable to accept that we just didn’t have habits in place before we dieted in the first place that allowed us to eat intuitively and maintain our weight.
Which is the whole point of a maintenance phase.
If you implement maintenance phases before, during and after fat loss phases, the odds of you gaining the weight back that you lost become much lower, and you’ll be less susceptible to buying all of the scammy protocols and supplements you come across.
I'd love to hear from you...
Have you ever implemented an intentional maitenance phase before? How has your experience been?
Does the idea of eating at maintenance on purpose give you anxiety?
Something else to think about...
Perhaps the reason why the idea of eating at maintenance can feel pointless or even 'unhealthy' is related to the 'no pain, no gain' mentality that we either consciously or subconsciously apply to our jobs and productivity, that we must 'work hard' or 'suffer' in order to earn something, in this case health, longevity or attractiveness. In a society that pushes us to strive for a place at the top, many of us feel guilt when we're not 'working towards something', hence why actively choosing to accept our bodies at the size or shape that they are (i.e. enter a maintenance phase) might feel like some kind of personal forfeit.
If you can relate, perhaps it might be worth doing some deconstructing about whether this narrative is helping you or hindering you. And perhaps this might also be your sign to rebel against that narrative and implement a maintenance phase yourself!
