@pjlla
By Tom Venuto
There are four primary reasons you lose your calorie deficit and hit a plateau:
The first reason you hit a plateau is because your metabolism decreases while dieting and losing weight. While this does not completely stop fat loss, it does slow down fat loss. If you’ve been cutting calories, especially if you cut them severely, your body adapts by decreasing the metabolic rate. That’s sometimes known as the “starvation response” or “adaptive thermogenesis.”
The second reason is that you need fewer calories after you lose weight. Calorie needs are directly tied into your body weight. One problem is that after people lose a lot of weight, they tend to keep eating the same way they did when they were heavier. But when you’re a smaller person, you don’t need as many calories as before, even at rest (your basal metabolic rate is lower).
The third reason is that when you move that smaller body, you’re not burning as many calories. If you strap on a weighted vest or heavy backpack and go out and hike up a hill, you can tell, obviously, that if you’re lugging around extra weight, it’s a lot more work, and you’re burning more calories.
The fourth reason is that most people don’t stick closely enough to their nutrition plan and they forget to record part of their food intake. This one requires a lot of self-honesty. Even if you don’t do it intentionally and you don’t “cheat” per se, (a lot of eating behavior is directed unconsciously), we’re not very good at estimating how much food we eat when we simply try to guess. Some studies have exposed under-reporting calorie intake as much as 50%. You say, “I’m only eating 1,200 calories a day, but I’m stuck at a fat loss plateau!” But you’re really eating 1,800 calories a day which doesn’t give you much of a deficit.
ll of these reasons for plateaus get amplified in the later stages of a diet, because biologically speaking, your body is doing everything it possibly can to get you to go off your diet and to get weight to stabilize.
After a long period of dieting and after a large weight loss, your body cranks up the appetite, stimulates cravings and tries to trick you into moving less and eating more.
The leaner you get, the longer you’ve been dieting and the more aggressively you cut calories, the more your body tends to defend its weight, and hold on to remaining body fat.
So it’s really common to hit a plateau when you’re dieted down and leaner. Usually it’s nowhere near as difficult for the overweight person to start losing weight as it is for the lean person to get even leaner. The last 10 pounds is usually a lot harder than the first 10.
If you think about it, it’s pretty unnatural from a biological perspective to walk around with really low single-digit body fat. It’s not beneficial from a survival-of-the-species point of view to have low body fat. So this metabolic adaptation becomes more pronounced the leaner you get and you have to be prepared for some hard work and strict discipline to achieve it.
When you’re dieted down, you’re also at a higher risk of losing muscle, because extra muscle is not economical when there’s a calorie shortage. Carrying extra muscle is like having an engine that’s bigger than you need – it’s a gas guzzler.
The ultimate answer to why you plateau, why that last 10 pounds is so hard to lose and why it’s hard to break into those single digits is that you were in a calorie deficit before, but for all the reasons mentioned above, you’re no longer in a deficit.
The way to break the plateau then is to:
1. Re-stimulate metabolism and re-set fat-burning and starvation hormones (if necessary)
2. Re-establish the deficit.
3. Keep after it! (persistence, persistence, persistence)
Before you think about what strategies you’ll use to re-establish the calorie deficit, there’s one thing you might want to do first. If you’ve been dieting a long time, give your body a short break from all the calorie restriction. Raise your calories to maintenance level for at least one week and up as long as two weeks if you were seriously depleted.
During this diet break, you’re obviously not going to lose fat, and you might even gain a little scale weight from water and glycogen. You have to be okay with that and think of it as one step back for two steps forward.
A week or two at maintenance calories has mental and physical benefits. It gives your body a physiological break from the stress of dieting, which makes it easier to stick with your nutrition plan when you go back to it. The diet break also resets the “starvation hormones” and stimulates your metabolism.
Then, when you go back to the calorie deficit, your body starts responding again like it’s supposed to and you can make that final push to a six-pack abs level of leanness.
Another strategy you could use is carb cycling, where you take one or two higher calorie “reseed” days every week. The refeeds only last one day, but they can make dieting more tolerable, help improve muscle retention and help reduce the odds of hitting another plateau.
Because so many people underestimate how much they eat, if you hit a plateau, you should start tracking your food intake. Work off a meal plan on paper, with the calories and macronutrients subtotaled for each meal and totaled for the day. Then weigh or measure your food portions to be sure you are hitting your daily calorie and macro goals.
You may have been told many times by a lot of different experts that you don’t have to count calories to lose weight and you may even know people who lost weight simply by estimating portion sizes. That’s fine if you’re successfully losing fat, but if you’re stuck at a plateau, I consider it mandatory to stop guessing and start getting serious about doing your nutrition by the numbers.
The Best Ways To Re-establish Your Calorie Deficit
Once you’re tracking everything you’re eating, so you’re sure about your compliance to the correct calorie intake, then if you’re still stuck or you hit a plateau again later on, what you need to do is re-establish you calorie deficit. In other words, you need to eat less, burn more or a little bit of both.
You can work on the nutrition side (calories in) by reducing your food portion sizes and choosing less calorie-dense food types. Or you can use the exercise side (calories out) by increasing training volume. You have many choices on the training side.
You can increase your cardio duration (burn more calories by working out longer) or increase your cardio frequency (burn more calories by working out more often). You can also increase the intensity of your cardio so you burn more calories in the same time you’re already spending (a good strategy for busy people). That’s three different strategies for cardio alone (duration, frequency and intensity).
If your weight training has been low in volume or frequency, you can do more weight training as well. A three day a week program can be expanded to four or five, sets and exercises can be added, more metabolically-demanding exercises can be used and intensification techniques can be added.
The whole idea is simply to expend more calories (and stimulate your metabolism) or pull back your calorie intake, which re-establishes or increases your calorie deficit.
You could make one change at a time like adding an extra day of cardio, or make multiple changes all at once, like increasing both cardio frequency and intensity, plus reducing portion sizes at the same time.
Which strategies you choose depends on what makes the most sense given your current situation. And always remember that there are two sides to the energy balance equation, not one. There’s more than one way to break a fat loss plateau.
. Then next weekend is another birthday celebration with my family and then the weekend after that is happy hour with coworkers for, you guessed it, a joint birthday celebration. Oh and then that Saturday I'll be going to a wedding (solo, scary)
I hear you about the solo being scary on the wedding front - I don't know how things happen at weddings in the US but here after the Bride/Groom have waltzed, then the bridal party, parents - they ask all couples to join them on the floor for a slow dance - I hate the couples joining in part - nothing highlights being along more than that for me - so if they do - do that maybe go to the restroom, outside or the bar while that is going on to distract you - or if you have another solo friend or family member grab them for a dance.
I really appreciate that. Being hard on myself definitely half of my battle.
