I've been maintaining my weight loss for almost 7 years at this point, which means I've beat the odds/am a statistical oddity. Within those years I experimented with various eating protocols, to see what way of eating made maintaining the easiest. ALL of the things I tried though revolved around counting/tracking/weighing out portion sizes etc. All the the programs were based on the concept of manipulating calories, even if they didn't advertise that.

And I did maintain, but it progressively got harder and harder the further along I went. By the time I hit my 6 year anniversary last spring I was completely burned out. I was re-gaining weight again and my mental health was in a bad place-the constant thinking about food/calories/numbers/tracking had become obsessive and unhealthy.

Walked away from all of it and decided to experiment with lower carb, and have now been low carb for almost a year, with most of that time focused on being mostly animal based. The difference has been shocking-for the first time in years of maintenance, I'm doing it with no effort or struggles. I'm eating whenever I want, eating to satiety without having to stop while still hungry, I no longer track/count anything, I no longer use a food scale for the first time in years, and I no longer think about food all the time.

I do think different things work for different people, but being very low carb/almost zero carb, has completely changed maintenance for me and I finally feel that I've found a sustainable plan that will work for me, for the long term