Maintaining is about long-term strategies that are sustainable. Many people just replace one form of eating that in unsustainable with another when they are attempting to lose weight. So instead of eating too much they just force the loss by eating too little. Then when it comes time to stop losing there is no way to maintain. Or they push so hard that eventually you fail. What you are trying to find is a natural balance were you don’t really have to count calories or worry about it day to day.
I found this by realizing that this was a long term change and not just a diet to lose weight. And the timeframe I did it on didn’t matter. It was all about making changes that I could keep doing long term. So for me that was staying away from weighing and scales and just focusing on the things that work to lose weight. Having realistic expectations of how fast the weight will come off. In your case you are close to you weight goal to start so this is much more a refinement of what you are. Personally, for me goal like a beach vacation are not a good motivator as they don’t happen very often. So instead of hard goals like that I just made an overall goal that I wanted to get to. Plus by setting a hard target for yourself you may end up employing unhealthy strategies to get there. I get why people do it as you have to have motivation but to me that is a strategy that often times can lead to failure and frustration when you don’t hit those goals. For me most of my change wasn’t really physical but, the mental change that needed to happen, to look at my life in a more healthy way.
I can only speak to personal experiences, but I made choices that I could keep up long term, rather than just to lose the weight. Coffee with milk was never something I would give up forever, so started using unsweetened almond milk. Stuck to 18:6 (tried Omad, made me bingey), but Fri/Sat I don’t have a cutoff. So I don’t eat till noon, but say we go out or just eat late, I don’t worry, just wait to eat the next day till I’ve hit my 18hrs. I also stick mostly whole foods, and less of real stuff (cheese, ice cream, bread, etc) than having more of the low cal stuff….I wanted to be able make better portion decisions than be able to eat a tub of ice cream. I lost the weight in about 6 months, and have kept it off about 2.5 years now just doing the same things, only eating higher calories now