How to keep the weight off for good

Coming off the diet properly

The worst way to end a diet is to celebrate reaching your goal with a fortnight of eating everything you missed. The best way is to raise your calories to your new maintenance over two to four weeks.

1. Work out your new maintenance. You are lighter now, so it will be lower than when you started. Our guide to maintenance calories shows how.
2. Add back roughly 100 to 200 kcal a day each week, mostly from carbs and fats, until you reach it.
3. Keep protein, training and steps exactly as they were.
4. Watch your weekly average weight. If it levels off, you have found maintenance. If it keeps climbing, pull back slightly.

Expect the scales to rise by around 1 to 2 kg in the first couple of weeks as your muscles store more glycogen and water. That is not fat, and it is not a reason to panic. Decide in advance that your new normal weight is your end weight plus that small buffer.

What successful maintainers do

Large registries of people who have kept significant weight off for years have found a set of habits that come up again and again. They are not glamorous, but they are consistent.

• They stay active, usually with daily walking plus regular structured exercise.
• They keep monitoring, weighing themselves regularly and noticing small changes early.
• They eat fairly consistently, with similar patterns on weekdays and weekends.
• They keep regular meals rather than skipping and then overeating, although the exact pattern varies.
• They limit time spent sitting, including screen time in the evenings.

No single one of these is magic. Together, they describe people who have made the new behaviours part of normal life rather than a temporary project.

Set a range, not a number

Your weight naturally varies by 1 to 2 kg from day to day, so trying to hold one exact number will drive you mad. Instead, set a range of around 2 to 3 kg with a clear upper limit.

When your weekly average drifts into the top of the range, act straight away with a couple of weeks of tighter eating, more steps and a check on your habits. Two weeks of attention at 2 kg over is easy. Waiting until you are 8 kg over means starting a whole new diet.

Pair the scales with a waist measurement every few weeks and how your clothes fit. Measuring progress beyond the scales covers how to use them together.

Keep lifting and keep walking

Training matters more in maintenance, not less. Regular strength training keeps the muscle you worked hard to protect, and more muscle makes the same weight look and feel better. Daily walking keeps your energy use up, which gives you more room to eat.

Research on weight maintenance consistently finds that people who stay physically active are more successful at keeping weight off. You do not need to train like an athlete. Two or three strength sessions and a steady daily step count is enough for most people.

Having something to train for helps as well. A first HYROX, a charity run or a strength goal gives your training a purpose beyond the scales. At Lycan Strength, the in-house Lycan Games competition and HYROX doubles and relay races give members that kind of target.

Handling slips

Holidays, Christmas, illness, injuries, new jobs and new babies will all knock you off course at some point. The goal is not to prevent slips. It is to keep them short.

• Plan for known disruptions. Decide before the holiday what good enough looks like.
• Get back to normal at the next meal, not next Monday.
• Avoid the crash diet reflex. Return to your normal maintenance habits and the extra water weight usually sorts itself out.
• Keep at least one habit going through everything, such as a daily walk or protein at breakfast.

If you notice yourself sliding and cannot seem to stop, ask for help sooner rather than later. Our guide to nutrition accountability explains why outside support works, and Lycan Strength offers nutrition and accountability coaching.

Make it who you are

People who keep weight off tend to stop thinking of themselves as being on a diet and start thinking of themselves as people who train, walk and eat well. That shift in identity is what turns effort into habit. Our guide on building a fitness habit that sticks goes into how to make it happen.

Give it time. The first year of maintenance is usually the hardest. After that, for most people, the new normal simply becomes normal.