The maintenance phase of nutrition coaching is extremely important but often overlooked and underrated.
The reason…It’s not the sexy fun part.
Simlar to having to install a new roof or HVAC system for your house. They are important and critical to making the house function properly, but you don’t snap photos or invite friends over to show off your new furnace!
So what is Maintenance?
It’s the number of calories you need to consume in order to maintain your current weight.
Now your first thought might be, “well that’s cool but I don’t want to maintain my current weight, I’m looking to LOSE weight”.
Let me explain.
Your maintenance calories are calculated using one of a variety of different standardized formulas. They often include your height, weight, age, and daily activity level. This formula gives you the number of calories you should be eating in order to maintain your current weight. The difficulty comes when this calculated number doesn’t represent the ACTUAL number of calories you normally consume.
If you remember from last week, we talked about how many people (women in particular) are UNDER eating which in turn has resulted in their metabolism adapting to that lower calorie intake. This requires beginning with a metabolic rehab phase to slowly build those calories back up to somewhere near their calculated maintenance calorie intake.
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is moving directly from a metabolic rehab phase into a fat loss phase. The body needs time to adjust. Just like your metabolism was able to adapt to the lower calorie intake over time, it will also adapt to the higher calorie intake…OVER TIME.
The key here is TIME. If you rush too quickly into a fat loss phase your body hasn’t had time to adjust to the higher intake. The deficit you are now trying to create to stimulate fat loss is not really a deficit. You are just jumping right back to the lower calorie intake your body was used to.
How much time should you spend in a maintenance phase?
This can’t sometimes be the tricky part and can very much be person dependent. As a rule, you always want to spend longer time eating at your maintenance calories than you spend in a fat loss phase.
In general, I will spend the first three months of coaching working from a metabolic rehab and into a maintenance phase before starting a fat loss phase. I’m looking for several weeks, if not months, of being able to consistently eat at maintenance while also maintaining weight and other biomarkers such as enough sleep, good digestion, and lower stress. Some may gain weight during this time as well due to building lean muscle tissue through weight training.
This can be a scary and frustrating phase for some. When you have an end goal of losing weight and you spend weeks/months not seeing the scale budge you might start to feel like you’re doing something wrong or something is wrong with your body.
It’s all about setting realistic expectations for the maintenance phase. You want to remind yourself that this is NOT the phase where we expect to see weight loss but it’s still a VERY important phase. This phase primes your metabolism to more effectively lose weight when the time does come to enter into a fat loss phase.
Stay tuned for next week when we talk about the next phase of nutrition…you guess it…FAT LOSS!
