Tired of doing ALL the right things and yet NOTHING is changing (not even a single pound down? Nowhere closer to your dream body?) Meanwhile your coworker over there is dropping weight faster than Taylor Swift tickets sell out?! It’s time to talk about why this is happening and how this one simple, crucial step will make your diet actually work.
If you want to read this… welp, you’re in the right place! 😉
If you want to watch/listen to this: Click here!!
Do you ever feel like you’ve been in low calorie land foreverrrr and you’re getting nowhere? You’ve lost some weight but you’re stuck in this plateau and are struggling to sculpt the physique you want. To be honest, there’s no more room to cut calories without starving yourself. I get it! And today I want to talk about why the ONE thing that might be missing in your current diet is actually eating MORE calories (I KNOW– it sounds crazy but bear with me). It seems counterintuitive, but this could be the one thing that you need to get the dream body you’re working so damn hard for!
Why? Because eating more allows you to restore your body’s metabolic capacity.
Buuuut, this concept can be a bit confusing so let’s use an example most people can relate to: Covid and paychecks. Taking it aaaall the way back to 2019 before Covid took over the world, most people were working in some form of consistency. You had your regular paychecks, and you might have even been contributing some money to a savings account. And overall your spending reflected your income.
But then Covid hit. A lot of people lost their jobs, and maybe you were in this suckfest boat too. Shit happens… and it SUCKS. And even if you did have some savings that looked bomb, likely your spending habits changed to reflect the new level of income you were bringing in.
Okay, Hannah, but how does this relate to dieting?
We tend to drop our spending habits to match what we’re bringing in, regardless of the status of our savings account. And our bodies function the same way. When we’re talking from a metabolism and energy expenditure standpoint, your body adjusts what it’s using based on what it’s bringing in. So whether you have 10 pounds, 15 pounds, or 80 pounds of fat stored on your body (like the savings account), your body isn’t looking at how much fat tissue you have stored up to make decisions on how much energy to burn. It makes these decisions based on the energy you give it, and the energy you’ve historically given it.
Which is WHY when you’ve hit a plateau and you try plummeting your calories again (even if there’s no room to give!) your body doesn’t care about what’s in the savings account (aka how much body fat you have to lose). It’s realized that it isn’t getting a steady income, so it drops its energy expenditure to make you more efficient and able to do more using less energy. (You might enjoy reading more about that process in this blog here!)
Your body is really damn smart.
It’s always paying attention. Its primary job is to keep you alive, and it won’t spend energy it doesn’t have to.
This is why I don’t recommend using calorie calculators for figuring this out (more on that in this blog here) most likely you’ll get different answers from every single one, and none of them take into account your dieting history. But your dieting history is really important in this process! If you’ve been in a calorie deficit for a long time, your body will recognize that it’s historically not being fed a lot on a consistent basis, which causes it to drop how much energy it’s willing to spend.
And this is where eating more calories comes into play. Just because you feel like you have fat to lose doesn’t mean your body is registering that. So when you begin to incrementally increase your calorie intake, you’re giving your body a chance to reset its spending habits. But the longer you’ve spent in low calorie land, the longer your body needs for this reset. So give yourself time (I usually recommend a MINIMUM of 3 months – but this is also very individualized!). The longer you can stay at a maintenance level calorie intake, the better your body will be at “resetting its spending habits” for when you drop calories again. You’ll be well on your way to your dream body!
To be honest, this is the part of dieting and weight loss that is NOT fancy.
It’s not flashy, and it’s certainly not tan-and-sparkly-in-a-bikini… but it works.
You have inadvertently turned your body into an energy preserving Tesla, and it’s time to get it operating like a semi-truck again. You want your body to be burning fat fast, and in order to do that you have to train it to spend the energy. If you don’t do this, your body will never burn more fat because it’ll be too busy being efficient.
So if you’ve hit a plateau, you’ve never been in a period of intentionally eating more, and you feel like you’ve been eating low-cal forever and ever amen… it’s likely time to start upping your calories. You’ll want to do this as strategically and structured as possible to get your dream body, which is where working with a coach can be really helpful. If you’re curious to learn more about our coaching methods, you can check it out HERE, or you can check out some pretty damn impressive and inspiring client transformations HERE!!
Heard enough and feel ready to kick this plateau’s ass?! Click here to apply for 1:1 coaching!
