Is maintenance harder than weight loss?

For most people, yes. Weight loss on GLP-1 is unusually easy because the medication did three things for you: it suppressed appetite, quieted food noise, and slowed gastric emptying. Maintenance happens after those effects fade. Your total daily energy expenditure is also lower than it would have been at this weight if you had not lost mass, because the lean mass you lost during the cut is harder to rebuild than to preserve. The combination, returned appetite plus a lower maintenance calorie ceiling, is why most people drift up. The research bears this out. Loss data is published and impressive. Maintenance data is less impressive and rarely featured in marketing. Knowing this going in is the first step to beating the average.