How to Keep the Weight Off After Slow Carb: A Maintenance Plan

Quick Summary: Reached your goal weight on a low-carb or slow-carb diet? Here’s an evidence-based maintenance plan to keep it off. Covers carb creep, tracking strategies, scheduled cheat periods, reintroducing foods, and the role of exercise in long-term successwifi

Jump to: Why People Fail | Carb Creep | Schedule Cheating | Re-introducing Certain Foods | Exercise | Action Steps | FAQ

So you’ve met your goal weight!  Kudos!  Not an easy thing to do and the last thing you want to do is lose momentum and put to waste the struggle it involved, just to gain it all back in a year.  But if the statistics are accurate, that’s exactly what happens to most people. 

You need a plan.

The maintenance approach I’m outlining here isn’t based on clinical trials. It’s based on what has worked for me and about 80% of the clients I coached over the years, keeping the weight off for years rather than months.

The core insight is this: even if you adopted low-carb eating as a lifestyle rather than a diet, something called “carb creep” tends to enter our complicated lives at some point. Social eating, restaurant meals, busy schedules, and the convenience of prepared foods all work against you.

This maintenance plan addresses these realities head-on.

Why People Regain Weight (It’s Not Willpower)

The fact that we humans are social beings means that eating and drinking and celebrating with friends/family is going to be a part of life, and we need to acknowledge how we are going to contend with it.

Restaurants and food producers are making an effort to decrease the sugar in our food, but high levels of refined carbs and sugar in prepared food is still the norm.  

How many people cook regularly at home these days?  I don’t know the answer to this, but based on the pool of clients I have coached over the years, I would guess not many.  

A decrease in learning cooking skills at a young age, alongside our now busy lives often leads to the convenience of eating prepared foods or eating in restaurants if the budget allows.

Perhaps the best way to avoid gaining back all of the hard-earned fat loss is to eliminate the concept of the way you now eat as a “diet” and lean in to it as a sustainable lifestyle. 

The word “diet”, however, is quite ingrained in our culture and is often viewed as something you “get on”, lose the weight and then “get off “. 

If you have felt deprived while eating low carb, it may be an easier mindframe to think of being on a maintenance plan after reaching your goals, rather than an eternal diet (aka lifestyle change). 

The maintenance plan I’m outlining below is not based on clinical trials or large studies, but rather it is a plan that has worked for me and 80% of my clients in keeping the weight off for years rather than months.

Strategies for Sustaining Weight Loss

Four overarching strategies make up the plan:

1. Periodic data tracking to avoid carb creep.
2. Scheduling cheating or refeed periods and setting a “Red Flag Limit”.
3. Reintroducing Non-Compliant Foods.
4. Establishing an exercise routine that includes some resistance training for metabolism maintenance.

Strategy 1 – Track Your Weight and Watch for Carb Creep

As Tim Ferriss notes in a quote from Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets Managed”  I love this quote and live by it.  When I was doing slow carb for weight loss, I was very consistent about tracking.

It’s tedious at first, but becomes much easier after a while because you learn to estimate proportions instead of weighing everything. Once you have reached your goal weight and have been able to sustain it, you no longer need to do daily tracking.

The other reason to track your daily weight is that you can look back over the year(s) and see which months were difficult for you, what you may have been doing at that time, and how long it took to correct it.  

That last part can be a huge stress-reliever.  Just seeing that indeed you did correct it and it only took a couple of weeks can be highly motivating and allow you to calmly remedy the carb creep rather than falling into a spiral of self-hate.

Strategy 2 – Schedule Your Cheating

I call this strategy the Red Flag Limit.

The red-flag limit is a personal limit you give yourself for how many pounds you are willing to shrug off before you call it carb creep and slap yourself into being strictly compliant again.  My red-flag limit is 4 pounds.

People often need a scheduled cheat day when first starting the shift to low carb or slow carb, as it affords the delayed gratification that keeps you from giving up. 

Often however, what starts out as an all-out pizza and sugar cheat day once a week, slowly evolves into perhaps a cheat “meal” (instead of day) once a week, and eventually into just special celebration cheat days. 

The increased health and energy you receive when cutting sugar is quite rewarding and the lethargic, bloated way you feel post over-indulgent cheat day is eye-opening.

I personally have moved to scheduling mini-vacations every 2 months and enjoying the cuisine of the vacation area guilt-free, with very little cheating leading up to the break. 

Body builders might refer to this as refeed periods.  I just call it a relaxing, guilt free mini-vacation.

I will typically gain 3-4 pounds during the mini-vacation, and it will take about 1 week upon return to lose it again.  This is where the red flag limit comes in. 

For me, a 4-pound gain is a sign that I need to get back on myfitnesspal and track macros carefully for a couple of weeks until the low carb routine has come back in balance.

Your individual red-flag limit may be different based on your own weight and body rhythms, but it is important to establish one and then honor it.

Most people find that once they have been eating a low carb diet for a while, their body has reached a sort of equilibrium and it is fairly easy to lose the vacation weight in 1-2 weeks if you just become compliant again and get back into your low-carb eating habits.

Strategy 3 – Reintroduce Foods Carefully

By the time you’ve reached your goal weight, you’ve learned a lot about nutrition. You can start adding back certain foods that follow the principle of not spiking blood sugar:

• Full-fat plain yogurt (see this article for diet information on dairy)
• Aged hard cheeses (lactose-free)
• Some fruits
• Small portions of whole grains

Add them one at a time over a couple of weeks each and watch how your body responds. Sugar is the real culprit, and it hides in many foods. Read labels and stay aware.

Sugar is really the toxic agent in any diet plan, and sugar is present in many foods outside of sweet treats.  It will pay to get a working knowledge of sugar and sugar alternatives.

Strategy 4 – Add Exercise for Metabolism Maintenance

You can lose weight without exercise, but it probably won’t stay off without a regular routine.

The research debates what type of exercise is best for weight loss, but everyone agrees: start with something you enjoy that fits your schedule. The routine matters more than the specific exercise. Once you’re consistent, intensity tends to evolve naturally.

Current literature suggests interval training with a resistance component is most effective for weight control because it builds muscle, and muscle keeps your metabolism elevated.

This matters because your metabolism tends to downshift on a lower-calorie diet.

Strategy 5 – Set Specific Action Steps

This is a goal-setting exercise, helpful to do with a coach or accountability partner.

Make it work:

• Make action steps measurable
• Pick only 3-5 steps you’re willing to fully commit to
• Write them down physically where you’ll see them

Here is a brief example of one of my previous client’s goal-setting exercise for sustainability:

GOAL: To stay compliant with Slow Carb Diet (SCD) and make it a permanent lifestyle.

ACTION STEPS:

1. Stress is my nemesis when it comes to sugar.  When I feel the body signals that stress is coming, I will breathe deeply for 3 minutes.
2. When I find myself getting defensive around negative people, I will limit the amount of time I spend with them and seek out 1-2 places per month where I can find some healthy, like-minded friends.
3. When faced with food temptations at the office, I will use my phone and do the Pomodoro technique to distract me. I will use a Pomodoro technique timer .
4. When I fall off the wagon, I will note the trigger that caused it in my Evernote app and reflect on a simple strategy that will prevent a similar situation in the near future.
5. For inspiration, I will read a biography or listen to a podcast once a month about someone who accomplished their goals despite emotional or physical hardships.

FAQ

Interested in the Slow Carb Diet? Check out this comprehensive E-Guide on Fat Loss through a Slow Carb Diet.