Tracking your progress during the maintenance phase helps ensure long-term success.
“Self-monitoring, in many ways, is more important during the maintenance phase,” Kumar says.
Although you may feel like stopping weekly weigh-ins and food tracking after you hit your weight loss goals, they may be more critical for keeping weight off than they were for losing it in the first place.
Building a support team can help. A registered dietitian can customize your diet to your new calorie needs, while a mental health professional can help you address body-image issues and your evolving relationship with food. Mental health support is also valuable for navigating the social side of weight loss — namely, the unsolicited comments that tend to appear during the maintenance phase.
“Patients start getting comments from people saying: ‘What did you do? Oh, you lost so much weight. You look so good,’” Kumar says.
Online communities, whether formal support groups or social media connections, can also provide a space to process these experiences with people who have been through it themselves.
Your doctor should remain part of that support system, too. Kumar recommends checking in every three months once you hit your weight loss goals, gradually spacing visits to every six months or once a year as you find your footing.
“Even the patients who have been doing really well for years and years, I have to see them at least once a year because any life stressor can shake up their journey,” she says.
Don’t wait for your next scheduled appointment if you notice your weight increasing. Reach out as soon as it becomes a concern. This can vary by person: Some people remain healthy after gaining back 2 to 5 percent of their body weight on a reduced dose of GLP-1, while others won’t tolerate even a slight increase, Kumar says.
She also suggests paying attention to:
- Increased food noise, or intrusive thoughts about food
- Unhealthy cravings that return
- Old habits that you might slip into
If you notice any of these red flags, reach out to your doctor. These might be signs to adjust your medication dosage or add behavioral support.
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