Mental wellbeing in maintenance: staying confident after weight loss

When you hit your goal weight, you may feel a rush of pride, and rightly so! You’ve achieved a huge amount. But it can also come with challenging and surprising emotions, and the maintenance phase of weight loss can come with motivational slips.

This page discusses how to keep up a positive mindset, ride out potential setbacks, manage confidence, and protect your mental wellbeing during the maintenance phase.

We’ll cover how to regulate your emotions after weight loss, ways to stop a difficult day from becoming a difficult week, and how to build resilience. You’ll also learn about normal weight fluctuations and maintaining motivation after weight loss.

Key Points

• Emotional changes after weight loss are normal, and learning to navigate them is key to long-term weight management.
• Progress in maintenance is more about staying stable and calm while building a sustainable lifestyle. It’ll look and feel different from the weight loss phase.
• Building a structure from small, consistent, enjoyable habits is vital for keeping weight off.

Adjusting emotionally after weight loss

Achieving your weight goal – or any goal – can create positive emotions from pride to relief. But you might also feel restless, anxious about maintaining this goal weight, and lacking purpose. Emotional adjustment after weight loss means taking a different view of your success and building a plan.

You’re far from alone if you have a “what now?” feeling after reaching your weight loss goals. After a long period of change, you’re now having to focus on stability, and this can be a challenge.

Until now, you’ve been able to measure success by watching a number move on a scale or tracking changes in how your body looks. The good news is, that was the hardest part!

The bad news? Achieving your goals doesn’t always feel how you’d expect. You might feel:

• Worry about losing your momentum
• Fear that you might ‘fail’ even though you’ve already achieved a huge milestone
• Anticlimactic, like the anticipation was greater than the reward
• Low self-esteem after comparing yourself to others who might have lost more weight
• Empty, which is known as the ‘arrival fallacy’ – expecting hitting a goal to feel joyous, but instead you feel numb
• Purposeless after working so hard to hit a single goal
• Anxious, because you had unrealistic expectations that losing weight would mean you’d feel great forever, and you still experience sadness and have bad days

The weight maintenance phase isn’t plain sailing either. Weight regain is common if you’ve been using weight management medications, according to a British Medical Journal study. Controlling your anxiety around putting weight back on is a very real part of maintaining weight loss.

Understanding this gives you more control over your long-term weight management, and knowing the practical steps you can take to stay on top of your maintenance can help you bring your anxiety down.

These can include:

• Eating a balanced diet
• Finding fun ways to stay active that fit in with your lifestyle
• Managing any underlying conditions that may be causing weight gain
• Getting support from your GP or a dietitian, as well as family and friends
• Setting achievable goals
• Being aware of how you feel and what triggers negative emotions, as well as the tools that help you cope best in the moment

In the maintenance phase, success looks like a new, balanced normal in which you have the energy, focus, and self-trust to sustain healthy new habits. When you’re used to seeing your body change, this can feel like you’re not moving the needle much.

But reframing that feeling can be helpful: getting here was the point.

Managing setbacks without spiralling

Setbacks are a regular feature of making changes. Everyone has them. Recognising unhelpful habits, being kind to yourself, and planning how you will deal with them next time can help you avoid spirals and prevent setbacks from building into a larger problem.

Your hunger may come back after your weight loss programme. Eating more in response to stress, a bad day at the office or in your relationship might mean you feel the urge to comfort snack.

Weight regain can feel a little disheartening, but putting weight back on is completely normal after weight loss. Your body adapts to weight loss in the following ways:

• Your fat cells become physically stressed after shrinking, which readies them for a quick refill.
• Your body creates chemical signals that prioritise storing fat over burning it.
• Your body uses energy more slowly to conserve it, so you burn far fewer calories than before.
• Communication between your gut and brain can change, making you feel hungrier and less satisfied after eating.
• Your cells can ‘switch’ certain genes on or off to program the body to return to its previous weight.

Weight gain doesn’t cancel out the benefits of a weight management programme for your heart, blood vessels, and diabetes risk. The National Institute for Health and Care Research suggests that the health benefits of a weight management programme can last for five years after the programme ends.

If you feel anxious, bored, stressed, defeated, or angry about a setback, it increases the risk that a tough day will develop into a larger issue. You could try to break the cycle by resetting your routine with the following steps:

• Calmly noting what emotion you’re feeling
• Working out what this emotion tells you
• Thinking about how you’d usually respond
• Assessing whether that’s helpful
• Planning for a future response

For example:

• My emotion: Stress
• What it tells me: I’m struggling at work at the moment
• My usual response: Eat two chocolate biscuits to feel better
• Does it help? No, it’s a barrier to weight management and causes more guilt.
• Plan for a future response: I’ll talk to a colleague about my concerns at work. If no one’s around, I’ll do some breathing exercises and go for a ten-minute walk around the building.

This system can help some people avoid negative spirals. You might also benefit from mindfulness practices such as deep-breathing exercises or pausing when you feel hungry.

Another powerful tool is reframing worrisome “what ifs” to “ifs” to involve a solution. So:

• REPLACE: What if I absent-mindedly snack on some sweets during a movie?
• WITH: If I snack on some sweets during a movie, I can track their calories and eat fewer calories over the next week to account for it.

The key to overcoming setbacks is nurturing a solutions-based mindset and not punishing yourself for stepping outside of it sometimes. Your coping toolkit might look different from someone else’s.

You don’t have to get through this alone. Seeking support early on from your care team, a therapist, or your friends and family can be central to getting through a tough day before it becomes a tough week or month.

Building a resilient maintenance mindset

Resilience is the ability to bounce back when life doesn’t go to plan. If you’re in weight-loss maintenance, being resilient will help you overcome setbacks and stay balanced.

Anchor habits

Habits you can lean on to stay consistent and that you can use to build other healthy habits can help you reset when things don’t work out as planned. These are known as ‘anchor habits’.

One effective habit to support self-care and help you reflect on daily progress is journaling. You don’t need a fancy journal, just a notebook to record your emotions. This might involve the following steps:

1. Wake up and spend ten minutes thinking about and writing down your daily goals.
2. Check in with your journal after dinner and reflect on what you did that day – especially your achievements.
3. Be sure to write down and celebrate your wins in the journal.
4. Reflect on days when you didn’t hit some of your goals and consider what you can do next time to get you closer. Use gentle, positive language.

Managing stress

Many people reach for unhealthy snacks as a response to stress, so managing stress can also help keep your daily habits consistent.

Mindfulness or being aware of how you feel in the moment can be an effective way to spot and defuse stressful feelings.

Ayesha Bashir, weight loss expert at myBMI

Some methods for checking in with your mindset include:

• Mindful eating, which involves really focusing on the taste, smell, and texture of what you eat
• Deep breathing meditation
• Mindful movement, in which you pay close attention to your surroundings while on a walk or the feeling of wind on your skin when you’re running or cycling, for example
• Body scan meditation, in which you tense and untense different body parts and pay attention to how they feel
• Mindful drawing and colouring, which involves focusing on how the pencil feels against the paper and the colours rather than what you’re drawing or colouring in

Other ways to relieve stress include:

• Spending more time in nature
• Listening to music
• Arts and crafts
• Hanging out with friends, family, or pets
• Playing games

Meal planning

Finally, meal planning can help you stick to your maintenance plan.

This involves calculating your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which is how many calories you burn in a day without exercising. You can then divide this by the number of meals you like to eat daily, and this will be the calorie count you need to stay at to maintain weight loss.

Look up healthy recipes that fit within your calorie count. Then, add the ingredients to a shopping list and stock up for the week. If you have time and freezer space, batch cooking for the week can help you stick to your plan.

You may have heard that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’; that also applies to your maintenance. Aim for consistency, not perfection, and you might find it easier to stay on track. Remember that no one is born resilient – you have to build it with practice.

Understanding weight fluctuations during maintenance

Maintenance isn’t about keeping your weight exactly the same at all times. The number on the scale will naturally rise and fall, very often by 0.5 kg - 1kg a day in healthy people. Sometimes, that number could be as high as 5 lbs (2.26 kg).

If your scale varies like this, you’re still on track and doing a great job. Hormones, what you eat, your bodily fluid levels, certain medications, your sleep schedule, and underlying health conditions such as diabetes, can all affect your daily weight fluctuations.

What you should really look out for is long-term weight gain. Ideally, you should weigh yourself no more than twice a week and monitor changes over time. If your weight starts creeping up over time, you might need to adjust your approach to weight management.

For example, record how you feel each day rather than what you eat to identify any triggers. These feelings might be driving unplanned snacks or stress-eating.

You might then benefit from using your coping toolkit or trying cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT can help you identify unhelpful thought patterns and how you respond to them, providing methods to change your responses. This can help people with emotional eating.

If you’re still struggling with long-term weight regain, consider speaking to your GP to review your treatment plan or get more support.

Ayesha Bashir, weight loss expert at myBMI

Staying motivated beyond your goal weight

Keeping your motivation up can be tough once you’ve reached your goal weight or any other significant milestone in your life. On some days, you may feel really driven to think about your maintenance. On others, your motivation may dip without a precise goal to aim for.

During weight loss, others notice your transformation and comment on it, giving you a nice burst of encouragement. You might also experience the thrill of impressive before-and-after pictures or seeing a change on the scale.

But these sources of motivation are hard to come by during the maintenance phase. Instead, you’ll need to find ways to challenge yourself and enjoy the process.

Studies have found that how challenging a task is can be more motivating than the reward it gives you, even if it’s really difficult. You could set yourself non-weight-based goals, including:

• Seeing your mental health improve
• A performance-based challenge, like running a certain distance, going on hikes in a region you’ve never visited before, or trying out new sports or hobbies.
• Measuring your health in a different way, if you enjoy the numbers-based aspect of weight loss. Some people measure body composition – the percentage of muscle to fat in your body – as a way to track their progress. Many home scales and gyms offer body fat percentage measurement.

You can draw as much motivation by looking back on what you’ve achieved as you can from looking forward to new challenges. Reward yourself with a treat, whether it’s a spa day, a trip away, or a night out, at your 3-, 6-, and 12-month maintenance milestones so you can give yourself love and appreciation for having already tackled the hard part.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I feel anxious even though I have reached my goal?

Feeling worried about weight regain, failure, or what to do next is natural. Hitting a goal might not feel how you expected, or you might feel restless or purposeless without something to aim for. With support and a plan, you can ride out these feelings and build a smooth maintenance routine.

Is it normal to regain a few pounds in maintenance?

Most people regain weight after a period of weight loss, as hormones adjust, hunger returns, and your metabolism slows down. But even if you do, there are many health benefits to weight loss that mean you can feel the benefits for a long time. And by building a library of coping mechanisms and planning your meals, you can offset this natural weight regain.

How do I stay motivated without a target weight?

Looking back on what you’ve achieved so far can be highly motivating. You can also take on new challenges, sports, or hobbies, measure your body composition rather than weight, or set mental health goals to keep you motivated.

What should I do if I start slipping back into old habits?

First, avoid punishing yourself. Journaling can help you spot and address the emotional triggers behind your negative habits. Calorie tracking can also help you keep tabs on how you’re doing with your maintenance plan. If you’re finding it hard to stop these habits from returning, get support from a clinician or a loved one.

Sources

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• New Year’s resolutions: setting realistic goals and how NHS Talking Therapies can help achieve positive change. (2024). NHS. [Accessed on January 30, 2026]
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