The honest average
Five years after a structured weight-loss programme, the average person was still more than 3 kg lighter. That's only about a sixth to under a third of what they'd lost, so most of it came back. But not all of it, and the people who exercised more kept off more.
What the people who keep it off do
About one in five people with overweight manage to keep off at least 10% of their weight for a year or more. In the registry of successful maintainers, the common habits were high daily activity, a consistent eating pattern on weekdays and weekends, regular weighing, and eating breakfast. It also seems to get easier: after 2–5 years of maintaining, the odds of keeping it off improve a lot.
Members had lost 31 kg on average and were still 23 kg down ten years later. The people who regained were the ones who let things slide: less activity, less weighing, less structure around food.
Mostly adults with overweight or obesity, mostly not lifters. The Registry is self-selected: people join because they've already succeeded, so it shows what success looks like, not how likely it is. Anderson's meta-analysis is the better estimate of the typical outcome.
Coming off the diet
I couldn't find a controlled trial of “reverse dieting” (adding calories back very slowly), so this is my coaching approach:
- Step up to your new maintenance, roughly your diet intake plus the deficit you were running. Your new maintenance is lower than before the diet because you are smaller.
- Expect 1–2 kg on the scale in the first week or two. That's glycogen, water and food in the gut, not fat. Don't panic-cut.
- Keep weighing. Set a range, about ±1.5 kg around your new average. If you drift above it, tighten up for a couple of weeks.
- Keep the habits that got you here: protein, steps, training, a consistent weekly pattern.
What to do
- Plan maintenance before the diet ends. Decide your new calories and your weight range in advance.
- Keep moving. Activity was the most consistent difference between people who kept it off and people who didn't.
- Weigh regularly and act on the trend, not on single days.
- Eat the same way on weekends and weekdays, within reason.
- Give it two years. It gets easier the longer you hold it.
Want this set up around your actual life?
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