Week 16 was maintenance week — also called a diet break — and the honest result is that the scale went up a little. Before anyone panics, let me explain why that was expected and why it doesn’t change anything.
Maintenance week means eating at the calorie level you’d eventually maintain at your goal weight — bigger portions, two snacks instead of one, back to 2,500 calories. The purpose is to reset the metabolism so it doesn’t adapt too comfortably to the deficit. You eat more for a week, then go back to cutting, and the weight starts moving again with a fresh reset. A small gain during maintenance week is part of the plan.
That said, a couple of things made the number look higher than it probably was. I had conference meetings two days that week where lunch and breakfast were provided — just pasta, hard to control portions on someone else’s food. There was also a boba run. And on the official weigh-in morning I forgot to weigh before breakfast, which added to the number. Two days before that I was still at 241, right where I left off the prior week. The trend line is fine.
The meals themselves were a mixed bag in the best way. Surf and turf was the highlight — six ounces of steak, six ounces of shrimp, and I still wanted more. That’s the diet working even on a maintenance week. The pita pizza was excellent — whole wheat pita base, goat cheese, mozzarella, spinach. Not Domino’s, but genuinely satisfying and diet-friendly. The hong shao qie zi (红烧茄子) was wonderful — two big Asian eggplants that cook down small but pack serious flavor in garlic sauce. And the dan dan mian (担担面) with protein noodles was worth trying — different texture than wheat noodles but the spicy sauce with cucumber still delivered.
The Tuscan stuffed chicken was the one miss. Without the oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes it lost some of that rich depth. And the sheet pan vegetables — I’ve confirmed I just don’t enjoy them. Full but not satisfied is not the goal. The goal is satisfied, just not stuffed.
One lesson from this week that applies to anyone dieting long term: don’t obsess over the daily number on the scale. The day, the time, what you ate that morning — all of it affects the reading. Look at the weekly trend, not the daily fluctuation. One week up doesn’t erase sixteen weeks of progress.
