How to Maintain Weight After Losing It

Hello ladies! Today we’re discussing maintaining lasting weight loss. Everyone knows how to lose weight, but no one knows how to maintain weight loss. Most women just focus on losing weight and how to get un-fat as quickly as possible. But what most women don’t realize is that they have two problems. A weight loss problem and a weight maintenance problem.

If you say you want to lose weight, is your goal to keep the weight off or to lose weight and regain it? I don’t know any woman who would say I want to lose weight and regain it. But something a lot of women do not understand is that you cannot go on a weight loss journey and go back to normal. Ever.

I believe a lot of women have no plan for how to maintain weight loss. I’ve worked with many 1:1 clients throughout the years who did a fad diet then worked with me because they started regaining weight after they stopped the fad diet. You can’t hope you will maintain weight loss and unfortunately, I do think most women their plan is relying on hope. “Well, I hope I can keep it off.”

What most women do after losing weight is gradually, they go back to normal. Going back to normal guarantees you will regain the weight within 2 to 3 years. There are studies that show this. I actually talk about this in my free weight loss class the 5 steps to lasting weight loss – why fat loss feels harder after 35 and what to do now. The link to that class is in the show notes or you can find it on my website if you’re interested.

I used to be over 200 pounds and the reason I have been able to sustain an 80-pound weight loss for 17 years is because I never went back. I built habits over a two-year period and ate in a calorie deficit while building skills around cooking, balancing my meals, tracking my food, learning about food, walking daily, learning how to strength train and fit exercise into my schedule.

I traveled weekly as a consultant, so I had to figure out how to eat out and stay in a calorie deficit. I had to figure out how to eat on the days I was at home and how to plan for the days at home and how to plan differently for the days I traveled for work vs when I was at home.

It was two years of building skills that I did not have previously and learning about nutrition, exercise and figuring out how to fit those into my busy life. At the end of the two years, guess what I didn’t do. Stop!

I didn’t stop walking. I didn’t stop exercising. I didn’t stop strength training. I didn’t stop paying attention to protein. I didn’t stop eating fruit and vegetables. I didn’t stop tracking my food. I tracked my food for YEARS after losing 80 pounds.

Guess what would have happened if I had stopped? I would have gained all my weight back. The only thing I stopped was eating in a calorie deficit. I still tracked my food. I still walked daily. I still followed my weekly exercise routine. I still meal prepped. I still paid attention to protein, fruit and vegetables and eating complex carbs. I still paid attention to how many fun foods I ate.

Do you know why I didn’t stop? Because my new habits made me feel so good and I was doing the habits for reasons that had nothing to do with weight loss. When I started my weight loss journey, the only thing I cared about was feeling at peace with food and feeling better. Those were my motivations. Not the scale.

Not the size of my body. Sure, losing weight made me feel better. But really the confidence I gained was from going through that two-year process of learning and building skills gave me internal confidence I never had. I learned to show up for myself. I learned to stop putting others first. I learned I was important and that I could support myself and that, I was the best friend I could count on. I didn’t have that before losing 80 pounds.

Losing 80 pounds would have been meaningless to me without the internal transformation I went through and the confidence I gained in myself. And I believe this is what so many women miss. They don’t allow themselves to go through the transformation process. The learning. The building skills. They just look at the scale and do unhealthy behaviors to get the scale number down. But you’re not changing when you do that.

Sure, you can go on Optavia and eat their cardboard food. But you’re not changing. Sure, you can restrict your eating window and fast. But you’re not changing. Sure, you can cut out an entire food group like carbs. But you’re not changing. 

Sure, you can follow a meal plan to lose weight. But you’re not changing. How does following a meal plan teach you how to eat out at a restaurant? How does following a meal plan teach you how to eat when you go on vacation? How does following a meal plan teach you to eat the foods you enjoy and balance them appropriately according to your caloric needs? It doesn’t. It doesn’t teach you anything but to follow rules of a diet.

A lot of women want it to be simpler. They don’t want to think or have to be intentional about their choices. So, they do a diet like Optavia, fasting, cutting carbs or follow a meal plan so they don’t have to think or be intentional. But the problem is you’re not changing and the real problem is you’re not the building skills you need to keep weight off for life. You’re just hoping when you come off that restrictive diet, you can keep it off. But you don’t keep it off.

How many times do you have to keep proving to yourself that you can’t keep it off doing fad diets? How many times do you have to prove to yourself that you can’t keep it off being strict? How many times do you have to prove to yourself that you can’t keep it off being aggressive eating too little?

You’re just trying to get better at restricting and having the willpower to restrict when you approach you do these things and these things will never result in long-term weight loss maintenance.

Remember you have a weight loss problem, and you have a weight maintenance problem. Most women have a problem maintaining weight loss because they never work on building the skills around nutrition, exercise and mindset necessary for maintaining weight loss long-term. Without the skills, you don’t know how to eat like a normal person.

You don’t know how to go on vacation without being bad and feeling guilty when you come home. You don’t know how to go to a restaurant, order what satisfies you without feeling like you did something wrong. You don’t know how to eat cookies in the breakroom at work without feeling like you ruined your weight and have to shame yourself into starting over Monday.

It’s 2026 and it’s kind of crazy to me that women still think to lose weight that following a fad diet makes sense. A fad diet that teaches you no nutrition and exercise skills like a diet that hands you a meal plan and tells you only to eat protein and a vegetable or eat from a list of foods that says what you can and cannot eat therefore assigning this morality to food like good foods and bad foods.

I see this all the time with my 1:1 clients. Women who’ve been trying to lose weight on and off for 10, 20, 30 or more years and still haven’t realized that fad diets will never be maintainable.

You think you need strictness to lose weight, but you can’t sustain strictness, so you fall off and think you failed, but you’re not actually learning anything the entire time. Strictness is not how any of this is done.

The hardest thing for most women is recognizing that there is no diet plan that’s going to get you long term sustainable results. You build your way of eating. You don’t find it. There are guidelines around nutrition and exercise that everyone should aim for and it’s up to you to figure out how to apply those guidelines to your life. That’s how you make it a lifestyle change. This is what I help my clients with.

Because here’s the truth. If you were to wake up tomorrow and have the body of your dreams, you would not be able to maintain it because you wouldn’t have the skills to know how, and that is the hardest part of body transformation. It’s not knowing the what to do.

Most of you know you need to eat protein and fiber. You know you should move more and that adding in strength training would be good for you and that a calorie deficit is required to lose weight.

So, the what is not the issue but people continue to follow these fad diets and lose weight only to regain it back or not lose weight at all. That’s what we have to recognize and that is the most difficult piece in all of this. It’s not the what to do. You know what to do, but it’s understanding how to apply it consistently.

If what you’re doing isn’t livable you won’t be able to sustain it. If you can’t sustain it, what’s the point of doing it? You can’t do it for a decade, don’t do it today. So why do we keep going back to thinking that food elimination, food group elimination, macronutrient elimination, time restricted eating and demonizing foods is the way when we have the studies that show 95% of people who try fad diets regain all their weight within a two to three-year timespan?

Like imagine buying a house and not thinking about the next five or ten years. That would be silly. We need to think about the rest of our lives when we’re trying to lose weight. Weight maintenance should be the goal. Building skills around nutrition, exercise and mindset should be the goal to support losing weight and maintaining weight.

Have the restraint to avoid the next shiny object and start looking deeper into your behaviors, mindsets, values. What do you want to be able to do for the rest of your life? What kind of life do you want to have and what do you need to add to improve your quality of life? If you’re the type of person who believes everything I just said is completely unrelated then that is the exact reason you continue to stay stuck in this cycle of yo-yo dieting because they are dependent on you maintaining weight loss.

And look, if you want to eat cardboard Optavia meals for the rest of your life, or you never want to enjoy carbohydrates again, or you want to be confined to a strict eating window. That is your choice, but you and I both know you’re not going to do that. But I know you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to be a prisoner to Optavia, or an eating window, or not eating carbohydrates or demonizing foods and playing the mental gymnastics of why did I eat that? That food was unhealthy!

Understand if your goal is maintaining weight loss you cannot go back to normal. So, if you’re okay with never eating carbohydrates, fearing foods and always trying to restrict them. Then that will be your battle the rest of your life because you can never go back to how you were eating and living before losing weight otherwise the weight will come back.

What you are signing up for if forever. Forever! Forever… because if you can’t do it forever, the weight will come back.

My intent isn’t to be a Debbie downer but to be the person who tells you the truth. Weight loss is not easy. Changing your habits is not easy. You’re building new skills and learning a lot of new things. You’re learning how to create a lifestyle that’s livable for you. Where you make progress towards your goals but also cook for your family and enjoy eating with your family.

Where you can go out to eat and not have food guilt or anxiety around the choices that you’re making. Where you learn how to balance exercise and nutrition with your time constraints without sacrificing everything you enjoy and living in that grey area.

Going through the transformation makes you feel powerful and confident. Learning to show up for yourself, learning taking care of yourself, no longer fearing a cookie or the breadbasket, makes you feel more confident than any scale number. The scale is just a by-product of going through the journey. I see this all the time with my 1:1 weight loss clients.

They tell me how they now hear their friends and family talking crazy about food and realize that once was them! They didn’t realize how crazy they were with food. Fearing a cookie. Fearing pizza or eating out, eating the wrong foods or not eating the healthiest thing. The freedom from all the mental food noise is worth it. 

This is what nutritionists like me are trained to help people with. It’s literally our job. I’m always surprised when women are hesitant to work with a nutritionist. If you have a toothache, you go to the dentist. If your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic. If you have a leak in your house, you call a plumber. But you got a food and weight problem, instead of going straight to an expert. People go on a fad diet. That’s like putting duct tape on a leaky faucet. At some point, the tape is not going to hold, and you will either have to apply more duct tape or call a plumber.

If you want to address the leak, you have to get the right expert. If you want to maintain weight loss forever, you can never go back. You cannot stop otherwise weight comes back. That means taking the time to build skills and learning the things that will help you do it. That may mean getting the right expert to help you if you don’t know how to build those skills. Because there’s no maintaining weight loss without building the right nutrition and exercise skills.

And maintenance is not a free for all. You can’t stop doing the habits. You can’t stop going to the gym and lifting weights. You can’t stop paying attention to your steps. You can’t stop getting steps. You can’t stop tracking your food for a while until you learn where you are maintaining your weight loss. You can’t stop paying attention to protein and fiber. You can’t stop. You can’t go back to the life that caused the weight gain.

What’s going to happen if you go back is that you gain the weight back and a lot of women they get to maintenance and they just stop paying attention and they stop doing their nutrition and exercise habits. They go back to the old lifestyle that caused the weight gain in the first place. This is something you must accept, and I know this is hard.

This means taking smaller changes towards your goal and having a reasonable expectation of how fast you will see change is critical. This journey should take you 1 to 2 years. Maybe more just depending on your history with dieting and the demands in your life. But give yourself 1 to 2 years minimum to build the skills. I promise you. It will be so worth it.

The habits have to stay with you forever! That’s why building right habits is so important. Not just doing some short-term fad diet only to regain it. Now is the time for you to get brutally honest with yourself. Is what you’re doing right now, what you can do for the rest of your life? Be honest! I see a lot of women in my consultations who tell me these strict plans they’re following, and I can tell they feel totally defeated because they can’t be strict.

Right, because those strict plans are fad diets that are meant to be temporary. They can’t be sustained which is why a lot of people do fad diets and regain all their weight because they’re not meant to be permanent. The sooner you realize the diet industry is marketing to you temporary diets that are not meant to work long-term, the sooner you stop falling victim to them.

How would it feel to lose weight and regain it (again)? Truly, what would that feel like?

Now ask yourself what would it feel like to reach your goal and to never have to regain weight ever again? What would it feel like to go on vacation with your family and feel relaxed with food? What would it feel like to see other women stressing about eating fruit, bread, cookies and carbs and having the confidence to know you can eat those foods guilt-free and maintain your weight? What would it feel like to look forward to your habits and feel good about yourself? To actual feel motivated to move your body and exercise?

Building the right skills gives you that and more and it will be so worth it in the long run! I am proof of that because I once was 215 pounds and the thought of exercise felt dreadful to me. But 17 years later, I absolutely love exercising. You can change.
You just need the right expert and support to help you get there.

Alright ladies, I hope this was helpful to you. If you feel stuck and defeated by strict diets like so many of my 1:1 client do, I offer free consultations to help you understand what might be keeping you stuck and how you can achieve lasting weight loss. You can find the link in the show notes to schedule a consultation. Talk to you soon!