How to Bust Through A Fat Loss Plateau
Getting shredded. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Sure, losing a few holiday pounds from your office party pig-outs is simple enough, but getting cut up like an old credit card and sporting sexy slabs of muscle to be the most aesthetic specimen on the beach or the gold-winner at your physique competition is a different story altogether.
That’s a path few dare to venture down, and far fewer actually reach the Promised Land and achieve that level of leanness they’re looking for.
Doubt creeps in, the scale stalls, and the hunger is high.
Is the diet working? I’ve stalled out!
Motivation wanes and desire to fall for fancy carb cycling, fat loss supplements, and buy into hormone hypotheses or medical mumbo jumbo is high.
It happens to the best of us. So to keep your fat loss humming along to reach the shredded oasis, here I’ll dish out what you need to do to get over that fat loss plateau and get to where you wanna be. As you’ll soon find, it’s all about energy balance and sticking it through.
- RULE OUT WATER RETENTION
- CHECK CALORIC INTAKE
- INCREASE DAILY ACTIVITY
- REDUCE CALORIES
- INCORPORATE REFEEDS
- DEPLOY A DIET BREAK
Don’t skip around at will. This is a step-by-step fat loss plateau busting process.
RULE OUT WATER RETENTION
Before anything else – make sure it’s truly a plateau.
The scale may not budge, but for the 2 millionth time, the scale isn’t the only measure of progress.
Water retention will skew your results and you may see no changes on the scale for 2 weeks or more. This is normal while dieting.
Trust in the program, stay on your grind, and instead lean on your picture updates every 2-4 weeks to check your progress. Stay away from relying on the mirror here. Continue recording your weights every morning to check the averages over time.
If weight stays constant and you’re not seeing any visible differences in pictures, THEN you can move to the next steps.
CHECK CALORIE INTAKE
Secondly, ensure that the caloric deficit that you think you’re creating is actually there. Mis-measurements in food intake will wipe out your “theoretical” deficit in the blink of an eye.
Check to see how everything racks up on the scale and be diligent with recording your daily intake matched to your estimated daily calorie burn. Poll over your diet to identify any potential problem areas*. A little bit here. A little bit there. It all adds up.
People tend to greatly underestimate their caloric intake, and tightening things up here will qualify you to move to step 3:
*This is why cutting diets are traditionally so bland and simple. It’s more consistency and less margin for error. When you’re at this stage, eating out needs to be eliminated due to variability and I advocate staying away from foods that can swing wildly in energy content regardless of your measurements (i.e fattier meats).
INCREASE DAILY ACTIVITY
After dieting for an extended period of time, you will burn less calories than predicted by your original calculations. Don’t trip. This is completely normal. This occurs due to:
- Reduction in basal metabolic rate
- Reduction in subconscious activity
- Decrease in overall daily activity
- Reduction in exercise intensity/volume
All of this combined can lead to sizable decreases in your daily caloric burn.
When you get lower in body fat and are eating less over extended periods, you won’t be as high energy and torching calories like you were. This isn’t the fabled starvation mode fairy-tale; it just comes with the territory.
As you get leaner, you’re already running a smaller caloric deficit to spare lean tissue and maintain gym performance, so after you combine a reduction in energy output with mis-measurements in food intake, you can quickly see why you’ve “stalled out.”
HOW TO FIX IT
To remedy these adaptations, there are 2 easy ways:
CONSCIOUSLY MOVE MORE THROUGHOUT THE DAY
If your NEAT is bringing you down and your energy is low, you can artificially make up for it. Remember, NEAT is largely subconscious, so if your body is bringing it down, you can consciously bring it back up by doing the things your body isn’t doing on its own anymore.
- Set an alert on your phone or watch to go off every 20-30 minutes to get up and walk around for a couple minutes to clear your head and get fresh.
- Park further away.
- Do all the little soccer mom diet magazine tips and tricks like walking the stairs and drinking more water to get up more.
- If you have a smart watch or pedometer, track your movements to determine how often you are getting up and moving and how much.
Make it a game.
5 minutes of moving around for every half hour of your work day is 40 minutes of extra moving that you weren’t doing while in dieter’s Shadowland where all you want to do is be lazy and make it to the end alive.
Plus, you’ll be keeping your body healthier by avoiding tissue creep that drives poor posture, mental haze, and other things that knock you off your prime. This is my preferred method.
Don’t overdo it and pretend the chair is hot lava, but it is a sure-fire way to pull you from a diet plateau.
INCORPORATE CARDIO
Then of course, you can reach into your bag of tricks and start implementing dedicated cardio sessions.
Cardio should be released into battle strategically during a cut, and generally speaking, you should do as little formal cardio as you need. But when the tide of the war is turning against you, you can unchain the cardio beast and allow it to go kick some ass on the frontlines and get fat burn going again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=637VzLSh8CA
2-3 sessions a week of low intensity cardio of 45 minutes is more than enough. Make it productive. Don’t watch some brainwashing TV or broadcasted gossip about someone’s life that isn’t your own. (Even if it was, it doesn’t matter). Get up, get outside, and listen to audiobooks or podcasts that develop your mind instead.
And voila. After this step, you’re golden again.
Understand these two things and you’ll see why figure athletes always say cardio or fat-burners are a must to get lean. It’s not that deficits stop working or the energy balance equation is busted. It’s that adding in a bunch of caffeine and cardio replaces the deficit that was lost from a down-regulation in factors influencing calorie burn. But that’s none of my business.
REDUCE CALORIES
Cutting calories or cutting veins?
Notice how far reducing calories further is on the list. This is where people aggressively hack away from the get-go, but this is actually one of the LAST things to tighten up.
During a dieting phase, you want to keep food intake as high as you can while being satisfied with your diet. Making simple changes in your daily habits to make up for the drop in calories burned during the day can get things moving again, but you can only move so much. Sometimes, the calories simply have to drop.
To do this, start small. 100 calories a day combined with the above methods is a good place to start. Monitor and adjust as needed.
INCORPORATE REFEEDS
Refeeds are periods in the diet where you raise calories – primarily from carbohydrates – to maintenance levels or slightly above (100-200 calories). Going higher is where people get into problems mentally and develop bad habits.
Refeeds are excellent for psychological reasons, can help boost your performance and get you training harder and moving around a bit more, and it gives you a chance to test-drive how your diet will be once you’ve hit your goal. You should do this with everything in your life. Preview the future you wish to see. Don’t wait.
While the physiological benefits are rather transient and minor in the grand scheme of things, in practice they’re very effective and their real benefit is in saving you from the mental grind of dieting and keeping adherence and motivation high when you need it most.
You should be refeeding at least once per week when you get into the lean trenches. If not, start. You can see how to seamlessly incorporate them into your nutritional program in the section on calorie cycling in the nutritional part of the book.
And note: These are not cheat meals. Losers cheat. You’re a winner and make calculated moves for success.
DEPLOY A DIET BREAK
Lastly, if you’ve been dieting for 2-3 months or more, you are in prime condition to take a diet break. No one ever wants to do it, but once they do, they’ll wonder why they never did this before. During a diet break:
- Raise your caloric intake back to your new maintenance levels -10% or so to factor in the different adaptations we just talked about.
- Ensure sufficient carbohydrates as outlined in the Nutrition section in the book. More than 1g/lb bodyweight. Minimum.
- Cut back on all your extra cardio.
Then, relax. Don’t go psycho over the scale. Don’t check the mirror every 5 minutes. You will gain weight, but this will be water and stuffing your muscles with more firepower.
Enjoy the physical and mental break from the grind of dieting down, and watch as the magic happens. Start your diet earlier so that you can take advantage of these periods and make the cutting process more enjoyable and sustainable. It’s ALL about the process.
You’ll come back fresh, energetic, and training hard once more. Don’t be surprised if you fill out, look even leaner, and start dropping body fat like a charm upon your return.
*first learned this approach from Lyle McDonald several years ago
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s no magic tricks and voodoo potions here. Just identifying the culprits and adjusting accordingly. Energy balance reigns supreme.
So when you encounter a fat-loss plateau, take a deep breath and remember these simple tips. Stick to it and you’ll be shredded in no time.
What plateau?
Still stuck? Contact me for a 1 on 1 consultation or full, customized coaching here.
For more on the art and science of building the aesthetic physique, check out my book, Architect of Aesthetics.
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