Your new maintenance
"How much do I eat now, so that I don't put it back on?" Less than you did before you started — and the size of "less" is the whole point of this page.
Why the new level is lower
Two things reduce what you use after weight loss. The first is arithmetic: a smaller body has a lower resting expenditure — in the equation the app uses, roughly ten kilocalories a day less for every kilogram — and every movement costs less because there is less to move. Ten kilograms lost is, on that basis alone, a maintenance level a few hundred kilocalories a day below the old one. The second is adaptation: a further drop below what the new size predicts. The systematic review of it finds it real, variable and usually modest; it is not the main reason the number is lower, but it is part of it.
The consequence people miss: "eating normally again" means eating at the old maintenance, which is now a surplus. That is the mechanism of most regain, and it is not a failure of character. It is a number that moved.
How to find it
Not from a formula. The daily energy calculator gives a starting estimate for your new weight, with its ten-percent margin; the actual level is found the same way the deficit was:
- Raise intake from the deficit level to the calculator's estimate, in one step or two.
- Hold it for three or four weeks, logging roughly and weighing regularly.
- Read the trend. Flat means you have found it. Rising means the level is a little high; lower it by a hundred or two and hold again. Still falling means you can eat a little more.
Expect the scale to go up by a kilogram in the first week of eating more — that is glycogen and water returning, not fat, and it is the reason to wait three weeks before judging.
"Reverse dieting", honestly
The idea that raising intake very slowly — fifty kilocalories a week — coaxes expenditure upward and lets you maintain on more than you otherwise would is popular and, so far, unproven: there is no trial showing that the slow ramp changes where maintenance ends up, only that it delays getting there. The stepwise approach above reaches the same level faster and with fewer weeks of unnecessary deficit. If a slow ramp helps you psychologically, it does no harm; it is just not a metabolic trick.
In the app
When the goal is reached, the plan mode switches to maintenance and the target is re-issued from the current trend weight, then adjusted by the trend — the same loop as during loss, pointed at zero.