an article in womens health, about yoyo dieting, states that once you up your calories (for maintenance) from 1200 calories to 1300 calories (an example they give) you will begin to gain weight back. is this true!? i'm eating 1200 calories a day, and although it's low it's working well for me, and i'm afraid that once I try to maintain at maybe 1400 or 1500 a day i will gain it all back! this article scares me! is this 100% true?

Yikes I hope not! I thought the point of lowering your calories, for example to 1200, was to lose.. since its more calories out than in (I think I got that right). Then when you went back up it was to balance that out so you wouldn't KEEP losing. You don't want to start looking sickly.

I am a long way from maintainance but my understanding is that you up the calories very slowly and really moniter your weight closely to give your body time to adjust.

I think it has to do with how high or low your calories are in proportion to your weight. So when you finish, if your weight is low enough to maintain in 1200, 1200 it is. If your weigh is not low enough, then you can raise your calories accordingly.

Here's the deal, or how I understand it (so take that for what it's worth).

1. The longer you maintain a low calorie diet the slower your metabolism becomes and the slower you have to take an increase to give your metabolism time to adjust. You metabolism has adjusted to expect a 1200 calorie diet.
2. As PP mentioned you have to take adding calories back during maitenance very slowly, some add 100 cals back a week until they see a gain, you can try going even slower than this, but you certainly can't just go from 1200 to 1800 cals a day and not expect to see some kind of reaction
3. The smaller we are the less calories we need. Many people assume that once the weight is lost they can return to close to the numbers of cals, well obviously they cannot. It take way less calories for someone 130 lbs to maintain that it does for someone who is 230 lbs.

This is why I've decided to start out losing at the highest calories possible and stay at that level for as long as possible. I'm eating 1650 a day on average (I zig zag) and I find it to be a good level for me and a level I won't mind maintaining. In fact if I use the super simple maitenance formula of goal weight x 12 to find my maitenance calories I'm almost eating my maitenance calories now. So if I can stay at this level til my goal I'd be stoked, but I know that is probably not going to happen. Also, if I do have to drop as low as say 1200 I won't have to be there for very long becuase I started out high, but honestly judging by how it's going I don't think I'll have to go that low. I know it's tempting to jump right in a 1200-1500 and I know that is a popular opinion around here, but I think you'd be doing yourself a favor if you started as high as you can and still lose weight.