Three Steps to Restart Fat Loss.

IceDragon · 08-01-2009, 02:23 PM

Quote:

Fat loss is usually very easy to get started.
In fact, if you have excess fat you want to get rid of but you're having a difficult time getting started, or if you get stuck early on, you can almost always bet
that you have a problem with motivation, adherence, consistency, or under reporting food intake.

It's in the later stages of a diet that fat loss plateaus
and slow-downs are much more common. In this case, the reasons are often biological not just behavioral.

Once you start to get very lean or after you've been
on a calorie restricted diet for a long time, your body
sounds the starvation alarm.

If you think about it from an evolutionary (survival
of the species) point of view, it's not beneficial
to have very low body fat.
I was telling a competitive bodybuilder friend of mine the other day, after he was disappointed with gaining
back a bit of fat after a contest, "Don't worry - you're
still super lean and you look great, but it's just NOT
normal to walk around 'contest shredded' all year round."
When you start to get really lean or you diet for too long,
your body starts to fight back to conserve whatever
fat is still left.

Your metabolism decreases as you lose weight, and with
severe and prolonged dieting, your metabolic rate declines
more than can be accounted for by the loss of body mass.

Hormones responsible for keeping up metabolism become
suppressed, while hormones that increase appetite are
stimulated.

The result: fat loss plateau.

Many people enjoy a lot of success, dropping as much as
60 or 70 pounds without all that much difficulty, then WHAM! They hit a brick wall and the last 10, 20 or 30 lbs defiantly clings to their belly (men) or hips, butt and
thighs (women)

As a fat loss coach, probably my most important job is
not prescribing the initial fat loss program, but helping people tweak their programs along the way to avoid or break plateaus.

I've created plateau breaking checklists that are as long as 25 point-by-point items, covering all areas
of food, training, lifestyle and even mindset.

However, sometimes I feel that the subject of plateau
breaking has been overcomplicated with all kinds of
discussions of hormonal manipulations, macronutrient
ratio shifts, glycemic indexes, changes in exercise intensity, supplements and so on.

It dawned on me that the most obvious and simplest plateau breaking solution is almost always the correct one. That maxim may sound familiar to some people as OCCAM'S RAZOR.

At the simplest level, if you were losing fat, but then
you stopped losing fat (you hit a plateau), there is one reason, and one reason only:

You were in a calorie deficit, but you are no longer in a calorie deficit.
Am I OVER-simplfying? Well, you could say so, because
the reasons WHY you have lost your calorie deficit can
be numerous and extremely complex. Explaining all of them
could fill a shelf full of nutritional biochemistry, exercise physiology and behavioral psychology textbooks.

Nevertheless, the core issue remains: a plateau means you
are no longer burning more calories than you are eating.

When you understand and accept this, then you can see
how easy the fix is. There are just 3 simple steps to re-starting stalled fat loss and breaking a plateau:

1. Check your compliance and raise your accountability.

The FIRST thing you always do after a stalled week of fat loss is re-check your compliance. Look back at the
last week and ask yourself if you really followed your
original plan.

Then, immediately implement accountability strategies
to ensure compliance for the following week:
* Keep a nutrition and training journal (written or electronic)
* Weigh and measure your food. * Chart your progress on paper. * Weigh yourself and test your body composition.
* Take photograhps of yourself

Stop guessing and start measuring everything that you want to improve.
If you don't measure it, you can't manage it; if you don't manage it, you can't improve it.
Then, get an accountability partner or group to hold you to your commitments and turn in your results to them each week.

2. Re-establish your calorie deficit.

After your compliance check, if you feel that you did follow
your original plan faithfully, then you must assume that what used to be a deficit for you is no longer a deficit.
Rememeber those calorie formulas you used at the start of your program to see how much you should be eating? Well,
by no means do they indicate the calorie level you should follow forever. Your calorie needs can change and metabolism
decreases with weight loss.

Here's where the good old "eat less or exercise more"
advice comes into play.
The trick to avoid plateaus is to adjust your food intake
(calories in) and your exercise/activity (calories out)
in real-time each week to reconcile the difference between hypothetical (on paper) calorie needs and
actual (real world) calorie needs.

3. Get back to work with your adjusted strategy.

After you've chosen your strategy of choice to re-establish your calorie deficit, go back to work
for another week, with your new accountability
measures in place.

Then, measure your results again the following week. If your tweaks worked, keep it up! If not, repeat the process again.

Is that it? Could the solution possibly be that simple? Isn't
there more?

Well sure there's more.

In fact, if you want a real curve ball, there are even some
situations where the correct plateau breaking strategy
is to eat more, not less!
If you wanted to understand the hormonal physiology behind fat loss plateaus, appetite and your body's weight-regulating mechanisms, you could be studying this subject for a long time. It's been a lifelong pursuit of knowledge for me.
Just remember, you don't need to understand how electricity
works to light up your living room. You just need to know
how to flip the switch.
The next time your progress stalls, now you know where
to find the "FAT LOSS ON" switch.
Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto author of
Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle
Fat Loss - Burn The Fat Feed the Muscle

My plateau lasted eighteen months. If I'd have known how easy this was I'd have broken it months ago.

Easterling · 08-02-2009, 12:11 PM

Thanks for the tip

Three Steps to Restart Fat Loss.

Wanting to drop some extra bodyfat? Any questions you have post them here

Three Steps to Restart Fat Loss.