What to do when you plateau.
How can we adjust our diet or activity when we hit a plateau?
Everyone hits a plateau at some point so we have to then do something to push through this plateau and make a change in order for us to continue to progress.
So a few things that we can do are
Increase your activity/Increase your NEAT(standing, walking, moving more).
So if our calorie intake to maintain our weight was 2,250 calories a day, this X by 7 = 15,750 calories per week.
This is the number of calories we need to maintain our weight. If we eat 2,000 calories a day then we’re creating a deficit of 250 calories a day but we can increase our activity such as more walking and moving more and that will pump up our calorie needs, therefore, creating a greater calorie deficit once again.
2 . Increase formal exercise so this could be training with your trainer by increasing the exercise duration or intensity so when we think back to when we talked about what is the best exercise for fat loss in a previous blog, well we said that the best exercise for fat loss is the one in which it allows you to do the most amount of work in the time that you have so you can do this by working harder in the 60 minutes that we have or increasing the number of sessions so instead of doing 3 sessions a week we can now do 5 sessions a week. Every time we do an exercise session we pump up our energy output and therefore it increases our calorie deficit and that is going to get us losing weight again.
3 . We can lower our calorie intake, this is normally the way as normal people get to a certain point where working out 3 or 4 days a week and doing quite a lot of working outside of the gym well this can hit a certain maximum threshold and there’s nowhere else that we can go.
The other option that we have is that we can lower our food intake. Instead of eating 2,000 calories a day, we have to bring our calories down further. This can be done through a few ways such as:
Lowering your calorie intake by eating less
Stricter tracking
Better portion control
Stricter tracking and/or better portion control basically comes down to making sure that we are eating the calories that we think that we are.
As we previously said in the underreporting blog, we tend to overestimate the amount of exercise that we’re doing and underestimate the amount of food that we’re eating so we’ve got to try and get a bit stricter with this.
4 . Change your dietary approach- This might be a time to get a bit stricter as you get closer to a social event or a holiday etc that you want to look or feel better for so you may have to change things up.
5 . Take a diet break- This is counter-intuitive for a lot of people so if you raise your calories up from 2,000 to 2,250 and now your intake matches your outtake and then you’re not actually going to lose any weight. You can do this for a week, a month or a few months and what this allows you to do is, it not only allows your body to recover so that you can start your metabolism and things moving again but it also gives you a break physiologically so that you can lose some weight and then look to maintain that weight loss but allow your motivation and enthusiasm to diet to come back and then you can start another dieting phase so you can do it in a step approach as opposed to just dieting straight through.
So, through this period you continue to exercise as it helps us keep our fat off, you raise your calories up a little and this removes diet fatigue so you can get motivated but also you can still look to improve. You can still develop your habits and you can still look to develop better meal preparation so that might be, by getting in some more vegetables into your diet, better portion control, better sleep, better exercise regimes. All of these things can help but as said before it’s all about the diet that you can stick to and it’s about having these short diet breaks where you can just stop thinking about being on a diet for 1 week, 1 month (whichever you choose) and then attacking it hard again, that will be brilliant in order for you to stick to a plan.