Hi Stacie, my original goal was 148, but I decided I was good at 160 and started stabilization. What they do is they slowly add some food back to your current plan. The first week is unlimited veggies. The next week you get an additional dairy, the 3rd week I believe is an extra fruit and then an extra fat (and if you are on a plan with only 2 proteins an additional half protein) then they add a starch and finally another fat. So over 6 weeks you are slowly adding quite a lot of food back into your plan. If you go over 3 pounds above the goal weight that you had picked, then they might wait a week before giving you the additional exchanges. For maintenance you keep the same exchanges as at the end of stabilization, but they give you a book with the exchanges for just about anything under the sun to eat. Of course you still don't have unlimited exchanges to eat anything you want, but you can fit in all sorts of things in.
In maintenance the food diary is optional and you are only expected to come into the center once a week. Of course some counselors love, love, love looking at people's food diaries and encourage you to keep one still, but I haven't written down a thing I ate since I started maintenance. LOL. I had done that for like 10 months and needed a break!
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