Evening 😊. Lots of interesting talk here. For me, exercise is the best way to be able to eat a sustainable amount of food. I track my calories and my calorie burn and have been for a very long time now. It is quite obvious that maintenance for me requires the 3 hours of weights and the 3 hours of cardio that I do per week.
I'm 41, 5ft2 and 61kg. My bmr is 1350. I maintain on around 1900 and my excercise calories burned are averaged at around 500 per day (900cals x 3 each week for my exercise sessions and the rest from neat). Those exercise cals are making up 385 cals of that.
So yes, for me, they are SO important to keep me maintaining without feeling restricted.
I'm now 9 months in to maintenance. For the last 3 months I took my cals down a little each day to account for special occasions. That's worked well for me, and I'm maintaining in my target zone despite quite a few occasions where I've been not eating to calories over these last 3 months. I've noticed of late that I'm now naturally eating less in the days following these occasions. I've fallen in to what is hopefully more of an intuitive eating pattern. I'm able to stop when I'm full, and say no to things I'd ordinarily find hard to resist.
All in, I'd say things have gotten easier as my body has adapted to this way of life. I've been off medication since early July - and it's become easier even since then. It's actually fascinating to me!
I've just been through my biggest test. I've had a horrific 5 weeks - my dad collapsed, I rushed 200 miles to him. Came home when he stabilised after a few days. Two days later my DH was admitted to hospital (with a 32 hour stay on a hospital chair in a&e for us both as I was unable to leave him as he was so sick, but care was so poor) with a perforated bowel. Completely unexpected given hes fit and healthy . Within a week of this, while my DF was still in hospital (they thought it was Encephalitis which was bad enough) they realised their initial diagnosis was wrong. He was diagnosed with stage 4 Gliblastoma (brain cancer) and given a terminal prognosis at age 69 with no previous medical problems. It has been a huge, huge, huge shock. A real testing time. I've been off work, travelling up and down the m6/m5 back and forth trying to be there for both, plus my kids! I can only describe it as a living nightmare. My DH is well now, but needs follow up to see if he will need life changing surgery. He also has to eat a low residue diet and low fibre. It's a nightmare. He is gaining weight as that diet is unhealthy and he's always hungry as a result. He worked so hard to lose 3st, and now for his health he has to eat no fruit other than banana, white breads/pastas, well cooked veg that have no skins (so no peas, no mushrooms, no salad items), basically a shit food diet other than the fact he can eat lean meat and eggs. But without fibre, he's starving!
Anyway, despite all of the above - I'm still in maintenance, and actually have managed to take it down to the low end of my target zone in this time too. I really have to keep this up, although this is going to be an incredibly testing time. One of the things I did was to take all my food with me. And an air fryer. So I managed to eat my normal diet. I have also sought out a local gym (they live rurally) that I can pay for one off sessions once I've done an induction. So if I'm there for any prolonged period, I can try to keep active.