Mini Mikkipedia - Maintaining that weight loss

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Transcribed with AI transcription; errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification

00:11
Hey everyone, Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And today I want to follow up on my mini episode last week, talking about the red flags of the Amway diet with maintaining weight loss once your goal has been achieved. And this came on the back of a listener question. Thank you, Michael, for emailing it in to me because I thought it was, you know, I've done similar episodes like this in the past, but it's always good to have a good refresher.

00:40
And, you know, this will be also really helpful for people who are currently doing my Monday's matter plan. Of course, we are only in week two. So I do encourage people not to think too much about the what next sort of piece of the puzzle when it comes to being on a plan, because it's always good to sort of dial in and focus what you're doing to achieve your goal and a bit distracting to think, yeah, but what else? What next? However, if you were there, if you have met your body composition goal,

01:10
What are the steps that allow you to maintain that weight loss? The reality is, is that the number of calories needed to maintain your weight loss is going to be lower than what you started on. And that makes sense, right? Because there is less mass, you've got less fat mass, maybe a little bit less lean tissue as well. For example, your organs might reduce in size with considerable fat loss.

01:36
Hopefully you haven't had too much muscle mass loss because you haven't followed a diet like Amway to get to where you wanna be, but regardless, that might have happened as well. So the number of calories it takes for you to maintain it, that weight will be lower. And that can be a little bit confronting for some people who generally speaking were used to eating a certain amount of food or a certain way, and then they shifted gears to lose the weight with a short term focus on that particular goal.

02:04
This is one of the reasons why I do suggest that whatever fat loss approach you use, try to get it as close to your forever diet as you can. So you don't necessarily have to change your habits or have to change your behavior. It's just the amount of food that you have to change. The first thing I want to talk about is your weight. So you've achieved a certain goal here and what you see on the scales isn't necessarily your long lasting actual scale weight.

02:34
One of the reasons for this is because when you are in a fat loss phase, you're oftentimes you are glycogen depleted. So glycogen is the carbohydrate stored in your muscles. And when you diet, you are in a calorie deficit. And therefore you're exercising and being quite active on low carbohydrate intake. Even if you're not, you know, particularly following a low carb approach.

03:01
your carbohydrate stores can still be depleted and will still be depleted. Also when you've got less food, in general you'll have less mass going through, be it vegetable volume or fibre or whatever. So when you hit your goal weight, it might not actually be where you end up staying, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. So from here you should expect a slight uptick in the scales.

03:29
in the long run. So let's say you end your weight loss at about 61 kilos, pulling a number out of the air, potentially for you maybe 62 or 63 is where you quite comfortably sit when you lift your carbohydrate and your calories and you have more food in your stomach in any given time because your muscles will fill out and of course your digestive tract will be will carry more mass than it otherwise would.

03:56
Now upon saying that though, of course for some people, they actually lose weight after the weight loss diet. And for these people, it's because a lot of the time, there is stress on their system due to diet fatigue. And when you remove that diet fatigue and you take the stress of that calorie deficit off them, their body's water regulation, which is often what it comes down to, it changes. And so stress hormones drop.

04:24
water weight drops and actually the scales can be a little bit lighter again, but ultimately you should expect, even if it happens in the short term, that your sort of comfortable long term goal will be maybe 1-2 kilos above your sort of lowest point of your fat loss approach. Now, in terms of what you add in with regards to food, ideally what you'd be doing is just layering on more of what you're already doing.

04:54
for people who do not have metabolic challenges that mean that they have to limit carbohydrate, you do actually wanna increase your carbohydrate intake. And one of the reasons for this is when you diet, you naturally become more insulin sensitive, which is a good thing. So your cells are much more receptive to taking on board glucose and fatty acids and delivering them to where they need to be or to where they are stored. And so you finish your fat loss phase,

05:23
you're insulin sensitive, which is great. If you increase your carbohydrate calories, then the carbohydrate that is digested will be stored back into your muscle and that's where you want it to be. So it's a readily available fuel source when you're hitting the gym, hitting the trails, hitting the pool, whatever it is you're doing, you've got that fuel on board to help with that session. Now, if you just relied on increasing dietary fat,

05:52
and you can do it, the potential problem is that you will readily store body fat again actually. So with every 100 calories of fat you eat, you will use one of those calories in terms of digesting and absorbing dietary fatty acids, but 99 of those calories are stored and fatty acids are stored in the fat tissue. So for many people, they can experience overshooting of their body fat levels.

06:21
when they start to move into that weight maintenance phase. Instead, one of the recommendation to increase predominantly carbohydrate calories will almost offset a little bit of this. So the other advantage to this is suddenly you've got a little bit more carbohydrate on board stored in your muscles that will then help you to fuel your workouts a little bit better as well. So you'll be able to hit those workouts harder and feel a little better doing it.

06:48
Now actually that does remind me that one of the other reasons why some people can notice a further decrease in their body weight is that overall when you take on board more calories, you can reverse some of that metabolic adaptation that occurs during the diet phase and your workouts begin to feel better so you're able to push harder and you're able to

07:09
increase that energy expenditure at that time. So you can end up burning more calories and actually losing a little bit of weight. And if that happens, it just means you have to add in more calories. Now I did say there was sort of a caveat to that. And so people who are severely insulin resistant or who do have blood sugar management issues and adding an extra carbohydrate isn't an option for them, don't worry about it. You know, it's not going to be hugely

07:37
different for you, but it is just worth pointing out the difference between what happens with carbohydrate and what happens to fat. I guess the thing is as well is that your maintenance diet calories might not be that different from your diet diet calories actually. And one way to know how to do this is you wanna treat this initial maintenance phase like the diet after the diet. So it takes just as much consideration and probably just as much discipline. In terms of how many calories

08:07
would increase too. Well, there's a number of ways with which to work it out. You could just directly go straight to an online calculator and you could work out how many calories and maintenance calories range would be for someone of your current weight at your height and activity level. And you could even start there as a bit of a baseline, expecting the differences in your weight to manifest as I've just previously sort of talked about. So that would be one way to do it.

08:36
and probably the easiest way. But what you would want to do is after the initial few days of the bump up in weight or down, depending on how your body responds, you then wanna keep within 1% of your body weight. So you're not aiming to increase your body weight too much. Now, of course I will.

08:56
Also acknowledge that the guidelines of not increasing your body weight too much is for your general person who's just lost weight. It's certainly not for a physique competitor who has reached their lowest possible weight competing on stage and then has to and should gain significant weight to get healthy again. I'm just talking about the general person that might join my program and have to try and navigate their way out of that diet situation. Another thing you could do is if your diet has, like Mondays Matter does, some...

09:26
protein-sparing days or very low calorie days, another example would be the 5-2 approach, it would be any kind of fasting protocol, then you could just remove the days that you spend in that protein-sparing fast or that sort of very low calorie day, because ultimately across the week, you will be increasing the number of calories both on average and also just across the week. And so we're shifting you out of that calorie deficit.

09:54
and back into that, a maintenance calorie range. And again, it's sort of up to your own monitoring to determine where you should sit in terms of your calories. And if you are someone who likes good detail, then I do recommend tracking your calories, weighing your food, weighing yourself, and keeping an eye on that, so your weight doesn't really extend beyond 1% to 2% of your target range. If you're not that person though,

10:23
It's okay because you can still keep a breast of what's happening and not lose control and sort of spiral downwards to where you were before. So my advice to those people who aren't interested in tracking or haven't really tracked their calories, and you don't need to, the first one is of course, take out those fasting days if they're part of your fat loss approach, because those fasting days in most plans are a tool for fat loss. If you no longer need to lose weight, you just take them out.

10:51
The second thing to do is to add back those carbohydrate calories in the form of fruit, a potato, kumara or sweet potato, rolled oats, maybe even rice, like use general serving sizes for these things and add it onto your meals. For some of you, you will need to reduce down the vegetable content of your meals to allow for more room with carbohydrate. And for some of you, you might actually need to drop your protein as well.

11:21
requires a higher protein target for most people to enable them to regulate their appetite because less calories are going in and also to preserve that muscle and bone mass. But in fact, that preservation of muscle and bone can really occur as long as you're at that threshold for muscle protein synthesis, which as discussed previously will be anywhere between 30 to 50 grams depending on your age.

11:47
But also the minimum amount of protein required at that point might only be even 1.2 grams per kg of body weight. Although to be honest, I would never recommend anyone go that low unless of course you have severe appetite restriction, you know, taking some sort of a Zempik style medication, then you just wouldn't want to drop lower. But generally speaking, even at 1.6 grams per kg body weight, that could be sufficient. So if you struggle to get in extra calories, then I would...

12:14
First drop down the vegetable content of your meals, and then I would look to drop down a little bit of the protein, and then replace those calories with carbohydrate calories. So you're adding in fruit, you're adding in potato or sweet potato. Rice is another one which has very little going for it other than starch, but it does have starch and calories, so that's not a bad thing. And you would just add it in in smaller amounts. So if you're adding in a piece of fruit, let's say 200 grams of cooked potato,

12:44
and let's say a cup of rice, then we've added in about maybe 300 calories for the day, which for some people will shift them up into maintenance range, which is awesome. For others, it might be a little bit too low and you may need to sort of play around with it. But that's a really good first guide. In addition to the diet changes and the self monitoring, which even if you're not interested in tracking your food, weighing your food, et cetera, I would still look to weigh myself.

13:13
several times that week, just so you can see the changes that occur. And also that you don't freak out as well. And that's the thing with monitoring is that the more you weigh yourself, the less tied to that number you can become. And then you'll just be able to see it for what it is and look at the trend across a week, because one weigh-in never gives you the full picture. In addition to that, so strength training is how, as you know, you build muscle.

13:41
and muscle is where we store carbohydrate. The more muscle you have on your frame, the more carbohydrate you can store, and the more carbohydrate you can eat and still remain healthy. So if you're currently not strength training, if you did the diet that lost the weight yet did not include strength training, now is the time to start. And if you are someone that was strength training, then you would just continue to do your strength training, progressively overload and

14:10
continue to build muscle. That of course means that we'll be able to store that carbohydrate where it's supposed to be and then use that carbohydrate in our workouts to get a really great workout. So you don't wanna change anything there. With regards to cardio, like if you are an athlete and you're training for an event, then it's likely there's not a lot you can do to sort of shift that down at all to do sort of less training to help maintain your body weight.

14:40
at the current weight, but also there's probably no need to as well. Adding in more food, I think that's really always going to be the way to go. But if you are someone who is just doing cardio for cardio's sake, which is awesome, and you're struggling to maintain weight and you're noticing you continue to lose weight, then maybe backing off that cardio a little bit wouldn't be the worst idea in the world. So if you're currently doing four sessions of 60 minutes of steady state,

15:07
Maybe what you do is you go to four sessions of 50 minutes steady state, that kind of thing. Because your metabolic rate will increase with the added calories and that metabolic adaptation will reverse somewhat. So you will and still should have some energy to burn. Continue to walk, I think that's really important and continue to get your steps up. But if you're having 20,000 steps a day, that's sort of unnecessary in terms of health. And maybe you could drop that back to say 17 or 16,000.

15:36
which is still huge, but I'm just thinking you don't wanna drop it right back to 8,000 because one, you'll probably feel rubbish, and two, you may get this overshoot in fat gain because your energy expenditure has reduced quite a bit. So we've talked about adding cales and adding carbs. We've talked about protein requirements and maybe changing them, reducing your protein to allow for more carbohydrate calories.

16:01
Potentially reducing the vegetable content to reduce the overall volume to allow you to eat more food and feel comfortable Something else and I do this in Mondays matter and in my flow plan and the man plan is that we Have a metabolic reset meal once a fortnight where you eat whatever you like But you enjoy it and then you move on, you know, you don't feel stuffed. You don't feel guilty You don't feel ashamed. You just do it. So

16:28
What you could do is add in another metabolic reset meal. So you're adding in another meal, maybe it's once a week now as opposed to once a fortnight where you're just enjoying whatever it is that you like, but you're still implementing those behavioral tactics around that meal of eating to feel satisfied and not stuffed. And I guess importantly is what you wanna do is you've just had a period of setting yourself up with habits and behaviors that

16:58
in the long term are optimal for your health, if you've done it in a way that I suggest. So you don't wanna then throw them out because you're no longer needing to lose weight and it's really easy to become complacent here. Food prep, planning, setting your alarm early to go to the gym, prioritizing yourself, all of these things are super important and I really encourage you to have a look at what strategies you use to allow you to achieve your goal and keeping them in your usual

17:27
routine. And for a lot of people, food prep is a huge one, and meal planning is a huge one. And it's very easy to just sort of go, oh, I'll get onto that next week. And then very quickly, you can slide back into some of these old habits and behaviors that do not align with your ultimate goal with regards to your body composition is all your health. So keep those same habits and behaviors in that allowed you to lose weight. You're just doing it with a bit more food.

17:57
Alright team, so those are just some tips for you. Michael, I hope that answers your question and I'll see you next week. You can catch me over on Instagram, threads and Twitter @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and book a call with me if you want some further clarification for you and your individual needs. Alright team, have the best week, see ya.