How to Do Lifetime Maintenance Correctly
How to Do Lifetime Maintenance Correctly
Enjoy your more liberal dietary intake, but this is not a license to return to your old eating patterns.
Now that you've made it to your goal weight, you can continue to select from a greater range of foods and consume more carbs than you did in the weight-loss phases of the Atkins Nutritional Approach™. If your metabolism can handle it, you can—in moderation—eat many of the foods you used to enjoy. But remember that all too often, people win the battle of weight loss only to lose the war of weight control. To maintain your goal weight, you must know your metabolic needs. Your Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium (ACE), which you found during Pre-Maintenance, lets you know how many carbs you can eat each day to maintain your weight.
Stay right at or around that number, and your weight should not fluctuate beyond the perfectly natural range of two or three pounds. (Hormonal changes and other daily fluctuations in your body account for a small seesaw effect.) Later, you'll learn why and how you may have to adjust your ACE at various times in your life. To get an idea of typical grams of carbohydrate intake for people of varying degrees of metabolic resistance, see "Carbohydrate Gram Levels and Metabolic Resistance for Maintaining," below.
You also must conquer your former bad habits and learn how to cope with real-world challenges. Maintaining weight loss is as much a mental challenge as a physical one. For example, you need to eat right even under stress. How? By realizing that we tend to reach for sugar and starchy foods for comfort, when proper food choices can actually lessen the impact of stress on your body. Similarly, you'll need coping strategies for holidays and special occasions, as well as knowing how to get restaurants to serve you exactly what you know you should be eating.
Perhaps you can plan to cheat by cutting back for a few days before an event and then carefully choose a few indulgences. Or go back to a previous level of the plan prior to a vacation or holiday to give yourself some leeway.
As you did in the three weight-loss phases of Atkins, make weight control a constant priority in your life. Re-create that attitude and you can continue your success. One good tool is to—once and for all—get rid of your "fat" wardrobe. When your clothes are getting tight and you don't have the next size in the closet to retreat to, you'll be forced to confront your weight gain sooner. By never letting your weight vary more than three to five pounds, you'll head off trouble and get off the weight roller coaster for good.
Promise to weigh yourself at least once a week. Choose a lifetime weight range of five pounds, the low number being your goal weight. The higher number will be your maximum allowable weight. Whenever you reach the higher number, you must promise yourself that, within a week, you will begin the Induction phase and quickly switch to Ongoing Weight Loss until you reach your goal weight again. Do this and you will never have more than five pounds to lose. For more advice, click on to How to Do Lifetime Maintenance Correctly, Part 2.
Carbohydrate Gram Levels and Metabolic Resistance for Maintaining Metabolic Resistance
| Approximate ACE Range | |
| High | 25 to 40 grams of carbs per day |
| Average | 40 to 60 grams of carbs per day |
| Low | 60 to 90 grams of carbs per day |
| Regular exerciser* | 90 or more grams of carbs per day |
This article is continued here: How to Do Lifetime Maintenance Correctly, Part 2.
