How to Eat For Maintenance and Building Muscle?

When I spoke with my doctor about where I was– she (I am paraphrasing) said I needed to be comfortable testing things out. She reinforced what we talked about last time, which is that I definitely should be incorporating some higher carb days and that we should NOT be 100% hard core keto all the time forever– that it’s not ideal for our mitochondria. She encouraged me to at least once a month have a good “cheat meal” (like get real cheat foods if you will) to let the body reset vs. just doing more rice and veggies. I’m like ok boss! No problem. Then she had said let’s add more carbs/calories. Well over the next month or so — I did. In the form of: acai bowls (edited to have far less honey than I used to make them with– now I make them with allulose and only 1 TBS honey) and I let myself have oatmeal with eggs and was a bit more liberal with my rice intake and was allowing myself some apples. I didn’t necessarily increase my calories/amount of food, but I was not recording every morsel of food in My Fitness Pal. Well– Steve and I then decide — because we are both committed to upping our game with working out/getting leaner/more buff etc. – to start weighing daily again and getting our diets back on track with more salads and more veggies etc. So we get a new scale (our last one wasn’t working well so we got an updated Greater Goods scale, I highly recommend them) and I finally step on after probably 6 months of not weighing myself and GULP– the scale says— 144!!!!! That’s 6lbs higher than my goal weight and 10lbs higher than my lowest weight I’d hit previously! I OF COURSE freaked out. Then I remembered what my doctor had said to me- she said “You have to be ready for the scale to show weight gain of 5-7lbs right away and remember this will be water weight, you have to be ready for that.”– and I also have been reading this in my research, that when you start eating more carbs, carbs will attract water to be retained into the body vs. when you are more strict keto, you don’t retain the water. (Think about a bikini competitor on stage, they have eaten no carbs or water prior to getting on stage so that their muscles pop just right, and when they go off stage and eat– they can literally gain 10lbs overnight). It was NOT easy to see that scale number– but I also had noticed for sure that 1) my boobs had definitely gotten bigger again and were filling up my 36D bras again– which I LIKE vs. 2) before- they were kind of shrinking and getting so much smaller I was concerned I’d be going down to a 36 C so I think a lot of my weight gain is there. 3) I took my measurements and most all are the same with the exception of a 1/2 inch gain on my hips. So– what am I doing now??