Weight loss: avoid plateaus and routines

If you have lost a significant amount of weight or have followed a weight loss plan for any length of time, you know that even if you continue to follow the plan perfectly, most people will come to a standstill by around 6 months. . This happens because your body, as Intelligently created as it is, learns to adapt to what you have been doing and no longer responds as before.

It is recommended that for every 10% of your body weight lost, you consume around 20% fewer calories if you want to continue losing weight. At a certain point, if you just kept doing this, you would find yourself starving! You can only reduce the amount of food so much before it backfires.

You want to continue to burn fat and build muscle, since muscle is more metabolically active and will keep your metabolic rate high enough that you don’t have to reduce the amount of food you eat as drastically.

Another adjustment you may find helpful is to increase your protein intake to minimize muscle loss. Protein is also more satisfying, so you’ll feel fuller. When looking to continue weight loss, you may want to increase clean protein to about 25% of your total caloric intake.

Also keep in mind that your body becomes more efficient as you go through your regular workouts. Add to that the fact that you expend less energy to do the same workout as you lose weight, resulting in fewer calories burned. I always recommend changing your exercise routine every 3 or 4 weeks: frequency, time, type of training, or intensity. Keep your body guessing and it will respond. Many fitness experts believe that “confusing” your muscles by varying your exercises from one session to the next forces them to adapt to constantly changing demands, thus improving growth and strength and allowing you to avoid plateaus.

While I’m on this topic of muscle confusion, let’s talk about grooves. Maybe you stick with the program but feel demotivated. Sounds like a routine to me. We all like a bit of variety. Well, I think that changing things up, both in your exercise routine and in your diet, can turn things around and renew your motivation, as well as make your body respond again.

You can change your meals. I mention several ways to do this in Today is Still the Day in the last section, such as the progression principle and carb cycling. You could try intermittent fasting and switch up fasting windows, doing an 8/16 window for a few days or a week and then doing a couple of 10/14 days and maybe a 4/20 day. Your body is shocked, and nothing will knock you out of a rut better than seeing your body respond again. With intermittent fasting, just make sure you don’t eat less, just eat less often. Also make sure a meal in your eating window is substantial enough to make you feel full, so your body knows you’re not starving. Otherwise, you will defeat the purpose and your body will keep the fat instead of burning it.

Do you have a preferred way to overcome a plateau or avoid a diet/exercise rut?