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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, good morning. How are we all doing today? So I want to cover something today that's very important actually. It's a question I get a lot. My weight loss is stalled?
Speaker 1:Am I in starvation mode? How do I keep my weight loss going, I feel like it's not working anymore, do I need to increase my calories or do I need to decrease my calories, what the hell is going on? And the first thing is we need to look at what actually is happening here. So when you go into a deficit and you go into weight loss phase, starvation mode is a myth, but adaptation isn't. So your body does adapt to being in a deficit.
Speaker 1:It does make it essentially harder to get into a deficit. You burn less calories subconsciously, some hormone levels change, your hunger levels go up, it kind of fights back in a sense. When it fights back it makes it more difficult but not impossible. So starvation mode doesn't exist but adaptation does. There's a research done in 2013 in January on the weight loss and changes in this adaptation, females and males, physique athletes.
Speaker 1:And these athletes lost a lot of weight, so basically the women went from 26% body fat, which is relatively lean for a woman, to 12.6%, that is really super low, like not recommended, and the male group went from 15 to 4.7%. That's super low, super super low. And they looked at basically the calories they consumed before they started their diet, the calories and macros they were on one week before the competition, and then post competition. The men So this is what they were doing. So their energy intake for the men before they started the diet essentially was 3,254 calories.
Speaker 1:Their calories one week before was 1,892. That's nearly half the calorie intake they started off with. And then post competition, went to 3,339, which is basically back to where they were. The women went from 2,600 calories starting to 1,700, one week before and then back up to 2,006 afterwards. What's important from this study is that they showed that the adaptation was quite significant.
Speaker 1:What do I mean by that? When you look at how many calories or your maintenance, so there's something called your maintenance, which is your maintenance calories. This is essentially everything you do all day, your exercise, your movement, your eating, everything. Okay. What's the maintenance?
Speaker 1:If I were to eat that, I would remain the same weight. No loss in body fat. I'd remain the same. So this adaptation basically is saying that these predictions from calculations are very accurate to someone that hasn't been dieting. They're very, very accurate.
Speaker 1:You're like, bam, you're within 5%. We think your maintenance is 2,005, actually it's 2,480. It's pretty much there. What they found in the research was at the end or a week before the competition, they did this analysis again, their prediction was 200 well, between 150 to 230 calories higher than the actual. So that means the body had adapted this thermogenesis reduction of about 150 to 230 calories.
Speaker 1:So say, for example, they thought, well, your maintenance is now 1,008. In reality, it was fifteen eighty. So why is this important? Well a lot of you listening, some of you might have been trying to lose weight for weeks and months and you might start seeing this in your progress, you might start thinking my fat loss is slowing down, my weight loss is slowing down, my calories have dropped a bit but I'm still not losing like I used to. Completely normal.
Speaker 1:When you first start off from a fat loss phase when you've been eating at maintenance or more, The first few weeks tend to be easy, there's no really adaptation at that point. You're creating the deficit very easily. As time goes on it gets harder and this is part of the process. This isn't when you give up. This isn't when you say it's not working.
Speaker 1:This is when you say it is working and the reality is the adaptation is happening. So what do I do about the adaptation? There's a few things. There's clever people in the industry. Someone like Lyle McDonald for example came up with this diet break concept where even in the research I just mentioned, when those competitors went from a really extreme weight loss phase down to a tiny percentage body fat levels, When they went back to maintenance, everything went back to normal.
Speaker 1:And I mean hormones were back to normal, immune system back to normal, reproductive kind of systems went back to normal. Because when you go that extreme, especially for women, they lose their periods. For men, their sperm count goes down, their testosterone levels plummet. This is not good. But once you go back to maintenance and above for a bit, the systems bounce back.
Speaker 1:You're back in action. So you don't have to worry about these long term effects of going into deficits. You just need to understand the adaptation happens and for some people it's quicker than others. But what do do when it does happen? A few options.
Speaker 1:Like I said, Lyle McDonald, Diet Break. We know that if you go back to maintenance or above, even if it's for two to three days, you can see a positive rebound in some of the hormones, in some of the systems. So one solution is every two to three weeks, you go to maintenance for a few days. So say, for example, every other weekend, you go to maintenance. Now people have taken this and they call it cheat days, cheat weekends, and that's not what this is about.
Speaker 1:This is not about that. It's more about refeeds. It's more about let's go to maintenance, let's not go beyond, let's not eat silly amounts of food, let's just go to maintenance, still eat essentially the same diet or the same foods but increase my intake. Some people do it for a week, so you could say I'm going to go into a deficit for four weeks and then for my fifth week I'm going to go off to maintenance for a week and then I'll go back into a deficit. This is a way of kind of stopping this cycle of adaptation going too aggressive.
Speaker 1:Some people say they can do it in one day, a one day refeed or even one meal, and that's maybe cutting a bit fine, maybe as you get leaner as possible. So you've got these options. The other option is you say, well, I don't mind the adaptation after four weeks. I've got a lot of momentum going. I don't want to stop the momentum.
Speaker 1:I don't want to go to maintenance because I struggle with maintenance. I want to keep going. But I'm not losing fat right now, my weight loss has stalled. First thing is patience. You have to be patient.
Speaker 1:You're likely still in a deficit, but the deficit might be smaller. So you might want to say I'll increase my steps for this week, so instead of 9,000 steps a day I'm going to do 10,000 steps a day. Then you try that for the week, and if it doesn't work, you go, okay. Maybe I've reduced my calories by a 100 for this week, and I'll increase my steps. And I'll try that, and you keep going.
Speaker 1:And your weight starts and come down, and then you think, well, my body's in a stress right now. I'm in a stressful state. I'm stressed about my weight, stressed about work, stressed at everything. It's caused me to hold on to more water. My water intake is low, so maybe I need to address the stress.
Speaker 1:Okay? And you address the stress and magically weight comes off some people when they don't want it to happen. When they're not expecting it to happen, it tends to happen. It's because they're so stressed about weight. Weight isn't everything.
Speaker 1:But you have to understand what's going on in this journey, otherwise you're going be confused and you're going to give up and go back to extreme plans. And they're even worse in terms of these adaptations because they're asking you to eat like a thousand calories a day and they're not even explaining to you what the hell is going on. So you have these things happening, you understand what's going on. The most common thing to do is likely to take a break, take a week of maintenance or even a few days or a weekend of maintenance. Just go over your calories, ideally go over carbohydrates, get some energy in you.
Speaker 1:And just be patient with this game, it happens. These studies are on physique competitors, people who have to do a sixteen to twenty week prep to get super shredded. You listening, you and me, we we don't wanna do that. But we have to learn from the experiments they do. We have to learn from the strategies they adopt.
Speaker 1:We don't have to adopt such extreme strategies as them. God, you could even do one maintenance day a week if you wanted to. You don't have to be losing the same amount of weight every week. Take your measurements, look at your photos. But what this really shows me is that even though we can adapt negatively to losing weight, which happens because the body doesn't really want to lose weight, the body's a phenomenal machine and it bounces back quite quickly.
Speaker 1:Now there is something that can negatively impact you for long term and that's if you do extreme diet plans and you don't eat enough protein and maybe there's no exercise at all in your regime, you're going to lose muscle mass. So a lot of people lose muscle mass and lose fat mass at the same time. So as you lose, say, you lose 10 pounds of fat, you've also lost five pounds of muscle. But when you rebound, which typically happens on these diets, the 10 pounds of fat goes on, but maybe only one pound of muscle goes back on. So you're net down four pounds of muscle every time you try and diet.
Speaker 1:And in the end, as the years go on, you've got less muscle mass, more fat mass, and therefore more body fat percentage. Now this is a really bad place to be. This is definitely a long term consequence of diets and yo yo diets, and that's where metabolically you're much worse off. So it's important when you're thinking about this stuff as well is, am I eating enough protein? Potentially, should I be doing one or two strength workouts a week, which means body weight, which means some resistance bands, which means dumbbells?
Speaker 1:You might be listening going, I don't have the confidence to do that. I have no idea what to do. This is why you might wanna go to your local gym, local leisure center, make it your main task and say, do you know what, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to book in three sessions, three sessions with the PT and I want the best PT there. And I want them to go over the exercises with me so I know what I'm doing, even if I'm going to do them at home. I'm gonna do dumbbells, I'm gonna do the barbell, I'm gonna do the bands, I'm gonna do the machines.
Speaker 1:And once you do that, you'll be confident to do it at home. And if you can do the calories, protein, and and weights, you know, you're gonna retain muscle mass at least, which is very important, and I'll touch more upon that in the future. But I think don't stress, understand the adaptation, and potentially do something something about it, or just kind of take a a maintenance weekend or a less aggressive approach, don't try and lose weight too quick because the adaptation becomes even tougher. And that's the problem a lot of people face is they go too hard too fast and the bounce back is tough, very, very tough. Here's some negative things that happen.
Speaker 1:There's a decline in rest and heart rate, there's a temporary suppression of immune system, temporary suppression of the reproductive system, decreased level of systematic inflammation, and repressed mitochondrial oxidative function and protein translation. Many big words there. Basically, there's a lot of stuff that goes down when you're dieting aggressively. But if you're doing it kind of like the app tells you to do, smoothly, slowly, patiently, eating the food you like, all this type of stuff, then you're less likely to have these bad adaptations happen. But if they do happen, because they will, if you've been doing it for a few weeks on the bounce, just chill out, get in touch if you need help about it, but understand what's happening.
Speaker 1:So have a good day. Get you one big thing done, and I'll see you back here tomorrow.