Maintaining Mindset

Is it common to find it hard to want to maintain? i tried for 1 week my weight went up a few grams and now i cant get myself to eat more than 1200 calories, which is less than what i was originally doing.

i basically just want to know what everyones maintaining experiences were?

I've had a few up days and a few down days. It often depends on what I'm eating... If I go overboard on foods with sodium my weight kicks up, but after a few days it drops back. I never ate only 1,200 calories when I was dieting, more like 1,300 or 1,400. Also if I eat more than expected one day I'll try to fit in some extra bike riding or walking. I was sick for a few days and lost a pound... So in my experience the weight does move up and down a few pounds.

The first few weeks were hard, not because I was gaining weight, but because my stomach felt like it was going to explode. Despite that, I actually wound up losing 10 lbs more than I wanted to.

What was hard was realizing I could eat a chocolate chip cookie or ice cream every so often without having an impact on my weight. I'm much more relaxed about cheating now, but it's still not something I would do every day.

I don't even know how you could measure a weight gain of just a few grams. 

I haven't changed a thing from my dieting, except that my calorie count is a bit higher. I moved up slowly, then stopped at the point that my weight stopped going down. I still watch everything I eat and count every calorie, and eat (and avoid) the same things - I just eat more, quantity-wise.

when i say a few grams its like 300 grams

300 grams isn't enough to matter.

In response to dm84's comment about being able to eat that cookie or ice cream every so often:  I happened to have a whole week where I went out to restaurants AND didn't get to exercise (vacation/traveling and birthday coincided). At the restaurants I would eat whatever I wanted without paying too much attention to the health or calorie value (ie, if I wanted the ravioli in a cream sauce, I didn't get the broiled white fish). And I got desserts. Anyway, after a few days of this I definitely felt like a blob but my weight didn't move more than normal fluctuations...

So I figured hey, when I eat at home, I eat right, and low-cal. So when I go out to eat for a special occasion (which has still been happening about once a week this month), I can splurge.

Problem is... I don't know if I got over-confident? Because I bought a body fat scale and my body fat % is higher than I thought it was. On the other hand, this scale also puts me at about 4 lbs heavier than my old scale. But now I'm wondering, maybe I took the maintenance mindset a little too far... although these were pretty much my habits before I started counting calories (and I was happy with my weight then). I guess only time will tell.

Well I wouldn't go several days in a row of splurging.

But beyond that, different scales read differently, and BF% scales are notoriously inaccurate. I don't know what my bf% is nor do I care. I can tell if my BF % is going up or down just by looking in the mirror. My weight stays within a certain range, which is ok with me, and if I gained a few pounds it wouldn't kill me either.