After you have reached the goal weight, how to maintain?

After dieting/exercising and reaching your goal weight, you must decrease exercise. However, how can you maintain your new weight without gaining any after reducing your exercise time, keeping your diet the same? What are some tips? How fast should you decrease your exercise, and how much? Any tips or experiences?

Why must you decrease exercise?....  There's a saying I like which is 'don't do anything to lose weight that you can't see yourself happily doing for the rest of your life'  And that includes exercise..... because it's important for good health as well as weight-control to exercise regularly.   Find a happy combination of moderate exercise and reduced food intake that allows you to lose weight steadily and then, when you reach a healthy weight, increase the food intake slightly but keep the exercise roughly the same.

I agree with gi-jane.  I have not decreased my exercise - in fact, I have tailored it to fit my fitness goals, and even upped it!  What I have done is increase my intake to match my energy expenditure.  I have done this mostly by having more calorie-dense foods and closely monitoring my nutritional balance so that my weight does not drop.

+1 with the others.  I've been maintaining for the last 2 months, and the amount of exercising I've done hasn't decreased. 

Although if you chose to decrease your exercise and eat the same amount, it would work exactly the same way.  In other words, balance your calories burned with the calories eaten, and you'll maintain your weight.

For me, I tried to match things up gradually as I got closer to my goal, but that's because I was losing about 2 pounds per week, which made a difference of 1000 calories per day.  That's a lot of extra food to shovel in! :)

Clint

I have a friend who has been exercising 90 minutes a day to lose weight. She has asked me what would be the best way to wean herself off of exercise since she thinks 90 miunutes is quite a lot. She doesn't want to start eating more either. What should I tell her?

Thanks for the advice!!

What's her goal?  To stop/slow down her weight loss, or to continue losing weight at the same pace?

Let's say (just for ease of figuring) that she burns 500 calories per hour, and she does 90 minutes per day.  So that's 750 calories per day that she burns by working out.  If she wants to cut her exercise time back to 60 minutes, that's 250 calories that she will no longer burn.  Her options at this point are to either keep eating the same amount of calories and lose weight slower, or cut back her calories by 250 and lose weight at the same speed.

Clint

I can't say from personal experience since I've never reached a weight I've wanted to maintain, but I think most people continue to excercise the same amount, give or take, and eat a little more.  That would be my choice.  And if your friend doesn't want to eat more, I'm not sure why it would be so complicated to simply excercise for less than 90 minutes each day.

Personally, if I felt it was a hardship to excercise for less than 90 minutes a day, I'd stick with that and just add some nuts and oils or *gasp!* a piece of cake to my diet.  Why in the world would I want to lower my metabolism?

I started maintaining as I got to school so my activity changed -less an exercise regimen and more of daily life activity- but it might have actually increased a little.  So I was eating about between 1600 and 1800 to lose and now I am eating between 1800 and 2400 to maintain.  And I have been for the past month and a half. 

My advice: Stay active and shift the food intake.