We read the studies. You get the answers.

Payment for the gym goes out on its usual day, and the club still lists your name among its active members. You can't say when the last session was, only that it came before a run of late nights at work, and that nothing about it felt like a last one.

Somebody else's kitchen is where the diet ends, and you can already picture it. It is a hungry evening a few weeks in, the pizza boxes are open on the counter, and turning down another slice feels like a bigger job than the whole diet. The exercise plan leaves without making a scene. A packed week keeps the gym bag in the car, and a knee still aching from the last session keeps it there. Your question, whether it is easier to stick to a diet or an exercise plan, is a bet on which of those endings arrives later.

Off come the rules, the food scale back into its drawer, the calorie app left unopened for a week, the Friday dinners out allowed back onto the calendar, the dessert rule quietly retired, until a single habit from the diet is still standing because you decided it stays, and that habit is protein. Protein earned that spot. Through the hungriest weeks, the meals built around it were the ones that carried you to the next meal, and the maintenance advice you keep reading says to hold it high. What you want settled now is whether a high protein diet actually helps you keep weight off, or only helped you take it off.