Q: I’ve lost a decent amount of weight on a calorie deficit with running and weight training, but I have stopped losing weight the past few months. What am I doing wrong?
A: Too much of a good thing can become bad quickly, so please be objectively sure you’re still over your healthy weight. We all know the magic mirror lies and makes us do silly things.
If you show all your cards at the start you’ll lose the game. No, this is not a hapless active health writer trying to infuse strategy into something as banal as eating less and getting smaller. It is, in fact, true. If you go all-out at the start you will run out of runway and have nothing left when you need to turn up the dial.
When you want to lose weight you will be tempted to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at the pursuit. You’ll likely cut as much food as you can and exercise as long and as hard as you can. You may even enjoy it for a while.
But you will eventually hit a wall, or a plateau. And when you hit the plateau, you must have something left to give. If you’ve already given it all, you’ll either stop losing weight or start hurting yourself to lose it.
If you are eating as little as you can, and exercising as hard and for as long as you can, there’s very little you can do that isn’t harmful besides a cheat meal or two to try to trick your body into believing that the famine is over and a feast has begun.
A cheat meal will cause a leptin spike which makes your body increase its metabolism, causing you to burn calories faster and, you guessed it, burn fat. However, anyone who’s invested all their mental energy into depriving themselves of food to lose weight will tell you how difficult it is to eat a cheat meal without berating yourself. A life lived in these extremes is not good for your relationship with food and mental health. Don’t even flirt with it.
Which brings us back to strategy. You can lose weight off a small deficit and increase in physical activity. Then, when you hit a plateau, you can shave a small amount off one meal and add a few hill sprints. When you plateau again, you can shave a small amount off another meal and add high-intensity sessions once or twice a week. This way you are able to cumulatively build onto the calorie deficit, with enough runway left each time until you reach your desired weight.
As your body weight decreases, so do your maintenance energy requirements. Simply put, you need fewer calories and so the previous deficit may not be enough now because you weigh, let’s say, 10kg less. Similarly, you may have become conditioned and more economical in how you move, which — with a lighter body — is using less energy than it did before and so you may need to “turn the exercise up a notch”.
Stress will become your weight loss enemy — cortisol may well be important from an evolutionary perspective but it can frustrate fat-loss goals. Stress can be psychological or physiological. Is your boss a tyrant? Do you exercise excessively or starve yourself? These will all work against your weight-loss goals.
A calorie deficit is not the only way people lose weight. Some people cut out entire food groups, such as the Banters who rely on the effect of insulin and its role in weight loss and gain. Others manipulate their carbohydrate intake between high, medium and low days. Some will buy blood-type books while others will spend money on controversial DNA tests. Nothing will work like magic.
Perhaps it’s time for a reset, where you stop and work with a trainer to design a training and eating regimen that is measured and reasonable, with space to move when the inevitable plateaus arrive. Manage your stress, don’t starve yourself and get enough sleep.
Sustainable weight loss should be a long-term strategy that does not exhaust you mentally and physically — and fry your nervous system and play havoc with your hormones.
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