Once on our mission, we often see some quick progress within the first few weeks of creating a calorie deficit. But when you can’t remove yourself emotionally from the small picture, things start to fall apart. You start to focus more on “why the hell did the scale go up this week?” Things become a bit frustrating, even when we smashed the nutrition this week.

I’m here to convince you that fat loss is never (rarely) linear. This is what you want fat loss to look like:

This is what it actually looks like:

The Progression Isn’t Linear

My cut started on the 17th of March, and you can see increases and decreases in that graph. It’s definitely linear over time, but not week-in week-out.

There’s so much more to weight loss than just the number on the scale, and there’s a ton of other factors in play. We’ve become so obsessed about reading into the scale that when it goes against our wishes we become frustrated, and maybe give up. We need to stop using the scale as our only frame of reference.

When you start to look at biofeedback mechanisms such as hunger, how your workouts feel, your energy levels, your sleep, and really going deep into how your body is feeling and reacting, you begin to realize that the big picture is the best way to assess if what we’re doing is working. When you read the number on the scale, you’re analyzing only one variable. In fact, there’s tens if not hundreds of variables at play, so focus on the bigger picture is crucial.

There Are Ways to Smash Plateaus

Don’t get me wrong, plateaus are going to happen. It’s your body’s way of maintaining balance, and it is a survival mechanism to ensure you don’t do yourself any harm. Sudden plateaus can actually be a sign that your body is in a healthy state. It’s working healthily, changing your body mechanics to ensure you’re not losing weight too fast or hard, and protecting you in the process. Every cloud has a silver lining right?

There are ways to smash those plateaus and to ensure we keep downward progress of losing weight or getting lean. We just have to play the game that is our body—a complex system that wants you to hold as much energy reserves as possible.

Plateau Destroyer #1: Eat More

Yep you heard me, eat more.

Metabolic adaptation plays a huge role in your hormone output, and ultimately, your body’s ability to burn fat or lose weight. When you sit in a calorie deficit for a considerable time, your body wants to fight for survival. Hormone output is lowered, body mechanisms slow down (such as fat loss), and energy output is lowered. This is all in order to preserve as much energy as possible in the lower-calorie state.

Sadly, further lowering calories while your body is in this survival state will only accentuate this plateau, and possibly even damage your metabolism in the long run, hindering your pursuit of body composition goals. Instead, we have to manipulate our metabolism through eating more food. Yes, more! We do this with a controlled caloric increase.

The best approach, and my favorite method to increase calories for an individual like this, is through a structured re-feed. By definition, a re-feed is an increase in calories for one 24-hour period in order to bring your current calorie consumption close to maintenance, if not over. Typically this is achieved using an increase of 50-100g of carbs (200-400 calories).

This increase results in increased hunger throughout the day, increase in body temperature in the night and day, or can result in increases in hunger the following day. Through these biofeedback mechanisms being activated, and we know that metabolic function has returned to a normal healthy state.

There are “cheat meals” you can use to have a similar effect, but in my experience, they can often result in huge calorie gains because they’re not very structured. You’ll provide a metabolic spike, but I always advise a controlled increase from a weekly structured re-feed.

Plateau Destroyer #2: Control Volume of Training

The variety of issues that arise from under-fueling your body, surprisingly, can also arise from over-training in your sport. Hormone issues, especially adrenal issues, and various other symptoms are a more and more common sight in gym-goers and clean eating fans every day.

Little do they know that going to the gym exhausted is doing nothing beneficial for them, and that badge of honor they think they wear should be stripped off. You’d be much better served waiting to get over exhaustion before attempting to wear your body down through training.

I know it’s hard to keep up with training, but recovery is a huge part of the process. By wearing your body into the ground day-in and day-out without recovery, you’re also putting severe fatigue onto your adrenal gland, ultimately affecting your hormone output. This reduction in hormone production only ends up damaging your metabolism, ruining your hormones, and affecting your desired physique.

Plateau Destroyer #3: Know Your Body

It might sound really cheesy, but by far the best and easiest change to make is to simply listen to your body by monitoring a few body hints.

Try and dial in your hunger recognition and learn what it feels like to actually need food, as opposed to boredom or other triggers. Don’t let your blood sugar dip beyond healthy levels, but just learn to realize when you’re hungry or full. By being aware of this biofeedback mechanism, you learn when you need more food and can react appropriately. Hunger is a sign of a healthy metabolism, so don’t ignore it.

The same goes for monitoring your sleep. Sleep quality is a brilliant indicator of recovery. When we sleep, we want cortisol to be low, and then high when we wake up (cortisol assists us in waking up). When we overtrain, we increase the amount of cortisol hormone in our body and, as a result, will sleep poorly. Having a decent quality of sleep is a sign of good recovery and good hormone output.

Using feedback mechanisms like these allow you to assess whether what you’re doing in your nutrition or training is helping or hindering.

The Whole Food Factor

One other recommendation would be to really understand what foods you’re eating and how they’re affecting your body too. If you’re training and not eating so much whole food, you won’t be reaping as many benefits as on a whole food diet. The type of food you’re eating can affect your physique and water retention, especially if you react badly to gluten, dairy, or other modern-day allergens. Bloating and decreases in performance can be affected by such foods, so a food test would be beneficial to anyone having issues with digestion or constant bloating.

Please, Be Patient

Overall, there’s many reasons why you may not be progressing as you like in your fat loss endeavors, but I’m here to encourage you that fat loss is rarely linear and that patience is the route to success.

When patience fails you, it’s worth assessing whether you’re overtraining or under-fueling. A few tactics exist to shift those plateaus, like cheat days or re-feed days, but really getting to know your body, and learning how to react accordingly, will help you understand what’s keeping you from progressing.

Use a few of these tactics and you should see some progress through your plateaus. Be patient, but keep smashing those goals. Most importantly, keep your eye on what’s happening with your body. It’s complex, but gives you a ton of information.

The post Get Past the Dreaded Fat Loss Plateau appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We do this by putting our data into a generic equation and calculating every bite of food we eat. Then, we go to the gym and run as hard as we can for as many days as we can force ourselves to do it. This should allow us to reach our goals right?

The Truth About Low Calorie Eating

In 2010, Lucy Aphramor published an article in Nutrition Journal. This study was a literature review of articles in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics from 2004 to 2008. The author concluded by saying:

Dietetic literature on weight management fails to meet the standards of evidence based medicine. Research in the field is characterized by speculative claims that fail to accurately represent the available data. There is a corresponding lack of debate on the ethical implications of continuing to promote ineffective treatment regimes and little research into alternative non-weight centered approaches. An alternative health at every size approach is recommended.¹

According to the author, low calorie dieting has a high long-term failure rate for sustainable weight loss. Could continued low calorie dieting be dangerous? The research clearly states that it has the potential to negatively affect our health. Researchers have found that low calorie diets lead to increased cortisol production, our major stress hormone, and also an increase in psychological stress due to calorie counting.²

Increased cortisol can lead to insulin resistance, weight gain, and cardiovascular disease^.3 High levels of cortisol have also been linked to mood disorders such as depression. In one study, researchers concluded:

Hypercortisolaemia may be a predisposing factor and may interact with a low level of social functioning leading to depression.⁴

Does this mean everyone on a low calorie diet will become depressed? Absolutely not. However, if we have higher than normal cortisol levels, it could make weight loss even more difficult and bring about negative changes in mood. Do you get angry when you are hungry? Now imagine being hungry all of the time.

The Pitfalls of Starvation Diets

Ancel Keys and his colleagues did a study on the effects of human starvation from November 1944 to December 1945. This was known as the Minnesota Starvation Diet. 36 healthy young men were enrolled in the study, which put them on a 1,600-calorie diet and controlled physical activity. The subjects experienced hysteria, depression, self-mutilation, and hypochondria, as well as a preoccupation with food, hoarding food, loss of sexual drive, anger, decreased social interests, and lower leg edema due to the increased water intake to try to get rid of hunger feelings.⁵

We have known about the dangers of low calorie eating since World War II, but we are still advised to eat less and exercise more to lose weight. Personal trainers and nutritionists everywhere are trained to calculate a client’s resting metabolic rate (RMR) and to take away 500 calories per day to generate a pound a week for weight loss. This is based upon the assumption that 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat. Studies have consistently shown this to be false. We consume roughly 500 calories more per day now than we did back in 1970. That totals roughly 3,500 calories per week in excess. We should have gained 52lbs each year since then. Of course, that is not the case.

Low calorie dieting negatively affects our thyroid gland. Low thyroid issues have been linked to both depression and weight issues. In one study, a 1,200-calorie diet led to a 40% reduction in the thyroid hormone T3. The study also showed that thyroid levels remained 22% below baseline after a re-feeding period.⁶ The 1,200-calorie group did not have a re-feeding period, but I would be interested to see those numbers. This could explain one of the mechanisms by which chronic dieters continue to gain weight and weight loss becomes increasingly more difficult

In conclusion, low calorie dieting is not only inadequate for weight loss, but may be potentially hazardous to your health. Research has clearly shown that low calorie dieting is ineffective in the long term. The research has also shown that going low calorie can down-regulate our thyroid hormone, making weight loss more difficult. It can also increase our stress levels. The increased stress can induce insulin resistance, making weight loss difficult via yet another mechanism. The Minnesota Starvation Diet was a long-term low calorie study that increased mood disorders in the participants. This information can lead us to ask, “What should we do?”

This answer becomes clearer when we understand our set point. This is a group of hormones that work in synergy to control our hunger, satiety, and body fat storage. They also play a role in our energy levels and mental well being. We will develop an understanding of these mechanisms in my next article.

References:

1. Aphramor, Lucy. “Validity of claims made in weight management research: a narrative review of dietetic articles.” Nutrition Journal (2010). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

2. Tomiyama, Janet, et.al., “Low Calorie Dieting Increases Cortisol.” Psychosomatic Medicine (2010). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

3. Andrews, Robert and Brian Walker. “Glucocorticoids and insulin resistance: old hormones, new targets.” Clinical Science (1999). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

4. Tse, Wai and Alyson Bond. “Relationship between baseline cortisol, social functioning and depression: a mediation analysis.” Psychiatry Research (2004). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

5. Troscianko, Emily. “Starvation study shows that recovery from anorexia is possible only by regaining weight.” (2010). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

6. Wadden, TA, et.al., “Effects of a very low calorie diet on weight, thyroid hormones and mood.” International Journal of Obesity (1990). Retrieved on April 13, 2014.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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