After you stop weight loss and go into maintenance your weight will go up a little bit, and it isn’t body fat. You don’t need to freak out or worry about it.
Here is a dirty little secret about fat loss… and it might upset you just a smidge, but you need to hear it. When you hit the lowest weight on the scale you will ever hit, that is an artificially low weight. You are probably running low on muscle glycogen and you are probably a bit dehydrated.
Your actual true lowest body weight when it isn’t depleted is probably a few pounds heavier.
This is important to understand, especially as you transition to maintenance. Here is an example. You started at 175 and dieted down to 125… which is a huge amount of weight loss, and the lowest number you saw on the scale was 125.6 when you weighed first thing in the morning after you just finished a hard cutting cycle with low calories. That day you say, “we made it fam” and then you move to maintenance and you consume EXACT maintenance level calories, and you do that for a week, your body fat mass hasn’t changed one iota… but your scale weight could go up 2-4 pounds, just because you are not dehydrated or depleted of carbohydrates.
This is often where people have a little bit of panic mode. They say to themselves, “OMG all my hard work is coming undone”… which makes sense. You probably just saw a 2-4 pound scale spike in 3-4 days after you probably spent the last 4 weeks scraping and clawing to get those 2-4 pounds off.
But realize this isn’t body fat, you aren’t actually backsliding in terms of your progress. You still have the same body fat amount you did 4 days ago. You just have a normal amount of water and you have filled your muscle glycogen stores back up… which means you probably look even better than on the day you hit that lowest number ever.
