Maintenance Approach......3 Basic Choices

I would choose 2 and agree with the previous posters that 1 is not the way to go if you want to keep your restriction.  The only issue I have with frequency is that I learned over the holidays that I have to be really careful about grazing.  Eating small meals often for me leads to me eating way too much so I have to be diligent about adding every bite to My Fitness Pal and really being conscious of how much I eat.

I am struggling with the last 8 lbs despite never increasing my calories above 750 nor my carbs over 30 since the beginning (except for adding about 100-200 extra calories on a few of the days over the holidays but I'm human lol) but I'm starting to think I might have to rethink my goal weight as i think I probably have 12 lbs of excess skin on me :(

Great post Frisco, i think it's great for people to know the strategies ahead of time so they can figure out what works for them!

I've been (badly) doing maintenance since the fall/2013...I've not done it "well", though I am maintaining (well, more like up 2, down 3, up 3, down 2, etc etc).  I have noticed a marked change in "capacity" though I am fully aware to be careful about this and "try" to undereat my sleeve.  Which has seemed to become an increase in snacking.  It feels as though I can eat quite often, the same "small" amounts, but just more often.  I feel worried about it, because it is at it's worst at night - which is always my problem time.

I am not certain how my restriction is....is there a good solid way to "test" it out?  What should it be at, at one year out?  For these purposes, how many ounces of chicken in one sitting, by itself?

This is a struggle for sure!

I use a combination of all three methods as each has its merits and potential pitfalls. Increasing quantity per meal doesn't necessarily mean stretching your sleeve, if you incorporate sliders into the meal (and not the commonly thought of chips and twinkies kind of sliders, but also many fruits veg, and whole grains have sliderish qualities to them - YMMV.) The under-eating your sleeve idea is premised on the mental model of the stomach as a fixed (or somewhat stretchy) vessel that we fill and subsequently empties over time, which works well for our meats and other firm proteins alone, but not so well for sliders; the quantity that one can safely consume varies depending upon the composition of the meal. Sauces ("meatlube") also influence the character of our stomachs as a "throughput" device rather than a "fixed capacity" device. I can have substantially more salad with meat, or a stew, than just the meat by itself, yet my capacity for basic meat is about the same now as it was six months out.

Simply adding richness (or fats) to the diet is an easy way to boost calories, but can come at the expense of other needed nutrients (and as with carbs and proteins, some fats are better than others.) We need the fats, but also need many of the things that are often left out by weight loss diets.

Adding feedings per day is another easy approach, though can lead to grazing if one is not careful - some docs insist that we do no more than three meals per day (and maybe a small snack if really needed) out of fear of falling into a grazing habit. Usually sticking to regular meal times and specific meals/snacks or servings (rather than grabbing the bag of nuts...) provides enough discipline to handle that problem. Changing up the number of meals can help as well - some find that with more routine meals, their bodies come to insist upon those regular spacings which make cutting back when needed more difficult.

Which of these methods, or combinations thereof, one uses also greatly depends upon how much one needs overall during the day - someone who is maintaining at 1000-1200 calories per day will work these techniques somewhat differently than someone who needs 2000 calories or more (or somewhere in between.) At 2000 or so calories per day, I only need a bit more than 20% of my diet to be protein, so my ratios look somewhat different than Frisco's or Kairk's (and will vary some meal to meal.) About half comes from fruit/veg with the other half being meats, dairy, nuts, grains and starches.

During the loss phase, my ratios were pretty similar to Frisco's maintenance numbers - a bit less than 50% protein with the rest being split as reasonably as possible to maintain some semblance of variety and balance between fruit/veg, grains and others within the caloric limits. Philosophically, there was little difference between weight loss and maintenance phases other than calories - there was no real distinction between "weight loss" and "maintenance" foods - and that substantially eased the transition to maintenance, and likewise makes adjustments for minor gains or losses easier.