Maintenance Mode
Our last topic of discussion will be about activating your maintenance mode. You’ve achieved your goal weight and body fat percentage and now you want to maintain your level of leanness.
Eating at maintenance can actually be very problematic for many people. Because we usually become relaxed about our diet. We’re cheerful about the way we look , therefore we ease up on our diet significantly. We eat start eating more and consume more processed foods. All of the habits that we developed during our dieting stage will start to vanish.
This is definitely not how you activate your maintenance mode.
We actually advice using the cutting approach for your maintenance. Consume lots of lean protein and vegetables, conservative amounts of junk food and alcohol.
Basically, the only difference between cutting and maintenance is that when eating at maintenance you’ll be consuming more calories.
Adjust macros for your maintenance modeIf you were losing 1 lbs of fat per week during the end of your cut. There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, this means that you can boost your weekly caloric intake by 3500. That's an additional 500 calories per day. If at the end of your cut you were only dropping 0.5 lbs per week then you’d have an extra 250 calories per day to increase.
Or if you were losing 1.5 lbs per weekly; in this case you'd have an additional 750 calories per day to consume..
So when going on a maintenance mode, all you will do is increase your calorie intake to stop/prevent a caloric deficit that you were having before. Please acknowledge that you may gain 2 4 lbs simply from consuming more calories. This happens due to higher water retention and glycogen. If you’re eating at maintenance then this is definitely not from fat gain. After this initial weight gain, your weight will get back on its track.
If you carry on gaining weight after about 2 weeks from activating your maintenance mode then you'll need to reduce your calories by 250- 300.
When adding additional calories to your diet, it’s your choice on how you do it. You may want to only add an extra 200 or so during the week and then add more calories on the weekend. or you might prefer to increase calories by the same amount each day. How you do it is completly up to you !
Maintenance Dieting Scheme