Keto Maintenance: Add Fat Back, Keep Protein and Carbs, and Expect It to Be Hard
A 32-minute Facebook Live from 2019-01-08, never posted to YouTube. By then the Keto Basic group was a year and a half to two years old, and a lot of members had lost most of what they set out to lose. So this one is about what comes after: maintenance, both the food and the head game.
In this recording
- [0:56] Why maintenance now. Two cases: you need to pause weight loss (loose skin, another health issue, life), or you're done.
- [1:57] The psychology: no new sizes, no scale movement, nobody telling you you look slimmer.
- [2:46] If you reintroduce carbs, do it gently. Losing the weight doesn't mean your insulin sensitivity is back to baseline. I'm not a doctor.
- [4:17] In maintenance, protein stays the same and carbs stay the same. Calories can go up a lot, sometimes double, because people get more active.
- [5:03] Not always, though. Someone whose job kept them moving all along may burn less now, carrying less weight.
- [5:50] My arithmetic: using the old 3,500-calories-a-pound rule of thumb, a pound a week of loss means adding about 500 calories a day back.
- [6:34] Add it back as fat. Protein around 80 to 100 g, more if you're active.
- [7:24] That can double your fat, which changes which proteins you buy, how you plate, which recipes and meal prep you use.
- [8:14] Your restaurant orders change too. Mayo is an easy fat, and homemade is worth learning if you use a lot.
- [9:00] Other ways: butter, a drizzle of olive oil, cream sauces, finishing a sauce with cold butter.
- [12:25] This is where keto gets its high-fat reputation: lean people in maintenance putting two or three tablespoons of butter on the broccoli.
- [13:14] My own breaks: a few days around Thanksgiving, Christmas and my sister's wedding, about fifteen days of planned celebratory eating.
- [14:49] Re-losing weight you gained on purpose still counts. Decisions, not mistakes.
- [16:16] Maintenance is the same work with no reward metric. Inches are the best measure, because composition keeps changing after the scale stops.
- [17:06] Buy yourself some clothes over the next year or two. The compliments stop, so reward yourself.
- [17:50] Expect criticism. People who watched you eat chicken breast now see ribeye, bacon and cream sauce.
- [19:17] Your first maintenance year is as hard as your weight-loss year.
- [20:54] Challenge the number you're attached to. Use more than the scale: resting heart rate, tape measurements, sleep, body-fat estimates.
- [23:26] Go back to tracking. It's feedback that you hit your targets when the scale gives you none.
- [24:17] Don't wait until you're starving. Eat a planned, on-script meal at the "I could eat" point.
- [25:50] Busy? Deli meat and a cheese stick, or a protein shake, with phone alarms at 11 and 2.
- [28:48] Write down five maintenance meals and five weight-loss meals, with the macros, in a small binder. The world's tiniest cookbook.
Watching this in 2026
The food side of this holds up. Protein and carbs stay where they were, and fat is the dial you turn up. That's the same thing I'd been saying from the start, that the goal of keto is low carb, not high fat (video cTGYIFOTPl8). It just took maintenance to explain where the butter reputation comes from. A year and a half earlier I was telling a beginner to keep the chicken skin and butter the food (nas-mxzb7065). By this Live, extra butter belonged to the maintenance phase.
The part I'd underline now is the warning that the first maintenance year is as hard as the losing year, because I proved it on myself. In March 2020 I said on a Live that I'd gained back a lot of my weight, and that it was because I drank too much the year before, not because I didn't know what to eat (live NILS3514). Fourteen months after giving this talk, I was back at week eight of a reboot. In the same Live I called my holiday allowance "lose weight 350 days a year," which is this video's fifteen celebratory days given a slogan (live NILS3514).
What the trials say about the long run
At [19:59] I said very few people find a rhythm and keep the weight off. The evidence pages for this site don't measure regain after keto directly, but the trials point the same way. In one early trial, low-carb dieters lost more at 3 and 6 months, the difference was no longer significant at 12 months, and few people stayed in either arm (Foster et al., 2003). Across 13 trials of a year or more, very-low-carb keto beat low-fat by under a kilo, 0.91 kg (Bueno et al., 2013). The advantage at the start is real but small by the end, and what you do in year two matters more.
That's why the protein advice matters. Protein increases satiety and helps retain lean mass (Westerterp-Plantenga et al., 2009), which is why I kept it fixed while fat moved.
Two cautions. If you take medication for diabetes or blood pressure, tell your doctor when you change how you eat, including when you bring carbs back. And if you have a history of an eating disorder, the tracking and body-checking in this video are things to work out with your care team rather than on your own. See medications and eating disorders.
Key points
- In maintenance, keep protein and carbs where they were and add calories back as fat.
- Activity changes after weight loss, up for some people and down for others, so re-check your numbers.
- The scale stops rewarding you. Use tape measurements, resting heart rate, sleep and body-fat estimates.
- Plan your celebrations and don't punish yourself for re-losing what you gained on purpose.
- A written handful of on-script meals is the simplest way to stay on plan.
- Expect year one of maintenance to be as hard as the year you lost the weight.
Related
- Guide: maintenance · moving to maintenance · habits that keep it off · recomposition · exercise · non-scale victories · how much fat · tracking
- Blog: will I gain it back? · is keto a high-fat diet? · losing inches, not weight · meal prep · cheating on keto · is keto sustainable?
- Videos: exercise, cheating and way of eating · beginner questions by a random guy · lean food log reply (2017 clip)