Hit in the Eyeball, No Longer Cuddly
November 2018 — about seventeen months in, straight from sparring
The topic that night was maintenance, and I showed up to the live with dinner on a fork and one eye that might have been swelling. I'd just come from kickboxing. I tried a spinning back kick, which means for a second my back was to my partner, and he threw a hook over my shoulder and caught me right in the actual eyeball. First time that had ever happened to me, which you'd think would happen more often (live GBSN3916).
I don't cover up a black eye. I teach and train martial arts, and sometimes you get punched in the eye. It was friendly. It was also a reminder that head trauma is bad and you shouldn't get hit too hard too often (live GBSN3916).
Maintenance is its own diet
What I wanted to say that night was that maintenance is a third phase, not the end of the diet. Intro, weight loss, maintenance. You probably messed up intro the first time and could nail it now. Then you spent a long time, maybe a pound a week for a couple of years with birthdays and holidays and weddings in the way, learning how to lose. And then you hit your goal and the rules change. Different macros, different proteins, different meal planning. You go from tuna and lean chicken back to skin-on chicken, ribeye instead of sirloin, cheese and cream sauces on the lean stuff you've been eating (live GBSN3916).
But I said the food isn't the hard part. The hard part is psychological and social.
- You lose your comebacks. While you're losing, anybody who says your diet is unhealthy gets "well, I'm down ten pounds." In maintenance the scale stops giving you that. Gain five and every critic in your life has an opening (live GBSN3916).
- You need wiggle room. If your goal is 150, then 149 and 151 can't be failures. Draw a line, say a size or two up, and when you cross it you go back to the weight-loss phase you already know how to do, get a little under goal, and come back out. You're already good at losing. That's the safety net (live GBSN3916).
- You need new numbers. Somebody in the live said she was a data analyst, so I suggested she grade herself on a few things she cared about, like body fat, lean mass and resting heart rate, weight each one and add up a score. Key performance indicators work for bodies too (live GBSN3916).
Not cuddly anymore
Then I got to the thing I hadn't expected. When I was bigger, people said I was cuddly. They said they felt surrounded when I hugged them. Those were nice things, and they were tied to the old me. I'm not as big or as soft now, so those words don't fit, and part of me wondered if that meant I couldn't give people that anymore (live GBSN3916).
That's the strange grief of maintenance. It isn't fair to compare your new self to your old self, any more than it's fair to ask which of your kids you love more. Your new self can do a lot your old self couldn't. But we still miss anything we used to be good at. I think the most useful thing you can do is let the old self go, instead of trying to get back whatever the old body was good for (live GBSN3916).
Meanwhile the other parts of my life were changing too. The coaching I'd been doing was now set up properly, with contracts and an LLC behind it (live GBSN3916).
What I'd tell you now
I'd still say maintenance is mostly in your head, and I'd still say build in a range instead of a single number. One thing I'd add: as you put fat back, keep your protein where it was. The protein page sums up trials where higher-protein diets during weight loss gave a bit more fat loss and less loss of lean mass (doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.112.044321), and a review linking about 1.2–1.6 g per kg a day to better appetite and weight management (doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.114.084038); details are on the protein evidence page. That night I also said olive oil was the safest fat to eat a lot of, from the research I'd seen. That was my 2018 read, and the evidence pages here don't cover cooking oils yet, so see Cooking Oils and weigh it as that. If you're on medication for diabetes or blood pressure, have kidney disease or are pregnant, talk to your doctor before you change your macros in either direction (why doses change). The full live is here, and the guide's take is Moving From Weight Loss to Maintenance. On fighting and keto: Keto for MMA, Kickboxing and Combat Sports.
Earlier: The Garbage Plate · Later: Putting Down a 40-Pound Bag of Rocks