Maintenance through a house move and a redundancy

My maintenance has had two wobbles in it, both around big life events, both of which passed. I mention them because a smooth account would be a dishonest one.

I have stopped tracking almost everything and kept exactly one habit, which is writing two lines on a Sunday. Everything else fell away and nothing bad happened.

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

Gently disagreeing with Gitta, or rather adding the other half of it.

Maintenance is where the non-scale things came into their own for me. All the things I noticed in year one turned out to be the things that stayed.

Two years in and the only thing I actively do now is a note in my phone once a week and a review once a year. Everything else has become automatic.

There is a particular kind of quiet grief in maintenance that took me a long time to name. Something that had been the centre of my attention simply stopped needing it.

My honest account of maintenance is that it took about four months to stop bracing. I kept waiting for something to go wrong and nothing did, and eventually I put the brace down.

Not a solution, just company.

I would say to anybody approaching this stage: decide what you want your ordinary week to look like, because nothing is going to arrange it for you once the novelty ends.

The conversation I found hardest in maintenance was about how long. My prescriber's answer was that we would keep reviewing it, which is honest and was not what I wanted.

I reduced, held, and then reduced again eight months later, both times slowly and both times after a proper conversation. Neither move was dramatic and both were fine.

The best description I have read of this stage was in this circle and it was simply: nothing happened again, and that is the news.