I have been maintaining for two years now, so I cannot claim to be an assured success yet. Keeping a food journal has surely helped me. I think the biggest help has been experimenting with all the foods I want to eat, so that I know how much of them I can eat and be satisfied by. By finding out which foods satisfy me, I was able to devise a maintenance diet that does not feel like a slimming diet. I never feel hungry, despite eating vastly less than I did before I lost my weight. So, to my surprise, there have been no crises.

I remember reading an article about long-term maintainers, which said that they are rare and tend also to be weird. I do not get the impression the maintainers on this forum are weird. But I do think we share a ruthless streak. You have to be really hard-nosed about maintainance to make it stick.