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6 Tiered System: Win The Fat Loss Battle [Part 2]

Hey that Joe guy seems to know a thing or two about dropping fat eh? – Thanks Joe you covered off some excellent points which I want to round off for the audience:

Now I am going to take you through the last 3 tiers of our fat loss system; making tweaks, taking breaks and focussing on the process. Fat loss is a two-part battle, Joe has covered the physical side, now for the mental.


#4 Tweak as Necessary

Picture this, you’ve got a long car journey, one that’ll likely take you a solid day to complete if you were to drive non-stop without any disturbances. This is the ideal, you get to your destination in one day.

But what happens in reality? A couple of hours in your stomach starts rumbling and bladder starts quaking, you need to stop over for some grub and a toilet break. Once you’ve done that you’re good for a number of hours, but after 6 hours of driving you’re feeling very tired, so need to stop at a Starbucks for a coffee. Right now you’re caffeined up and good to go, but a couple of hours back on track and there’s a massive traffic jam, bummer!

motorway-service-sign-370171

So you’ve been travelling 10 hours, you left your house at 9am and it’s now 7pm – you’re hungry again, the coffee has worn off and so you decide you need to get some dinner and grab a bed for the night. – A journey that on paper should take a day, in reality takes two and there are many stop offs and hurdles along the way.

This is much like fat loss, everyone thinks it’s going to be easy, they create a caloric deficit and train, and after a couple of months they’ll have abs and ready for the beach. In reality there are many hurdles and stumbling blocks along the way – the key is tweaking things as necessary, to allow you to keep moving towards your destination.

So fat loss has stalled, you’ve hit a wall, the scale isn’t going down anymore. First I want you to be sure you’ve actually stalled, your body isn’t a car, it won’t just shut down and make a horrible noise once you’ve stalled out (well not most). To know you have stalled you need to be monitoring things correctly, so as Joe pointed out you want to be accounting for your calorie intake but you also want to be weighing yourself correctly.

How do you weigh yourself correctly? Personally I like daily weigh ins (minimum 4 a week) taken in the same place, under the same conditions and then averaging them out for the week. Once you start doing this you will notice your weight fluctuates quite a lot day-to-day, this is normal and expected, and because we weigh in frequently and take an average we level out these strange fluctuations.

For example:

1 Weigh in per week:

  • Week 1: Monday 166lbs
  • Week 2: Monday 164lbs
  • Week 3: Monday 163lbs
  • Week 4: Monday 165lbs

Now in this once per week scenario things are going nicely week 1 to 3, but in week 4 you wake up and are horrified at the figure you see on the scale, all your hard work has gone down the drain. Or has it?

Daily weigh ins with a weekly average:

  • Week 1 Average: 166lbs
  • Week 2 Average: 164lbs
  • Week 3 Average: 163lbs
  • Week 4:
    • Mon: 165 , Tues: 162, Wed: 163, Thur: 160, Fri: 158, Sat: 163, Sun: 164
    • Average: 162bs

In this scenario you can see that once we looked across the entire week there were some really nice low weigh ins, when taken into account with the rest of the week actually had the weekly average down on the previous week.

So now you see the importance of correctly identifying how your weight is progressing, because in the first scenario you might make changes when it wasn’t necessary. Now I would also like to point out that weight is only one tool of assessment, a very good one, but it should be used in conjunction with how we look, girth measurements and gym performance.

KEY POINT: The more tools you use to measure, the better your management will be.

Another point I think it is important to include is that of gender differences. Women, I’m sorry to tell you but losing fat is just harder for you; you’re smaller, have less LBM and are set up for survival from birth. Due to your hormonal cycle looking at weekly weight averages isn’t always enough, better would be to look at averages from the same weeks, month to month, this will account for weight fluctuations caused by your hormonal cycle.

OK, now we have that out the way, what do we do if we have correctly identified a stall. This is much like when you’re hungry on a car journey, you want to do something to keep your hunger at bay. However, when we’re dieting it isn’t about keeping hunger at bay, but keeping your calorie deficit intact.

You see our body fights fat loss, it drives down many aspects of our metabolic rate (see the image below) which combined with the fact there is less of us means we burn fewer total calories. So as we diet our calorie deficit slowly decreases overtime. So much in the same way as you could have a snack to keep you going in the car, you make a small adjustment to your energy inputs or outputs to keep fat loss flowing.

[bctt tweet=”as we diet our calorie deficit slowly decreases overtime” username=”revivestronger”]

Screen Shot 2015-12-18 at 17.45.01

What might this look like?

Say you hit week 4 and you were certain you stalled out, well it might be as simple as adjusting calories down by 100 to 200 and adding in an extra 400 calories of cardio. You don’t have to adjust both ends of the calorie equation (inputs and outputs) but I find this to be the most effective way to manage the situation.


#5 Take Pit Stops

OK so you’ve been driving like 5 hours now, the snacks were good but they’re not doing it for you anymore, you’re getting anxious because you haven’t had a proper hit of protein since breakfast! – At this point you seek out your next service station for a proper meal, maybe they have a subway and you can get double meat.

Much in the same way, as we diet there becomes a point where everything gets a bit overwhelming. Maybe you’ve stalled a few times and added some cardio and chopped your calories down, and you come to another wall. – You feel like you’re close to breaking:

“I have to drop my calories AGAIN”

“PLEASE no more cardio!”

I for one have been there, stress levels are starting to build and you’re on the verge of having a complete breakdown. Now stalling we can deal with, you just re-jig a few things and you’re back moving, but we want to avoid breaking down, because you have to get in the AA and we all know what a pain in the ass that is.

korel
My client Le Rok lost over 20lbs & maintained the loss, diet breaks were key to this

How do we avoid breaking down?

Just like in the car scenario, we need to take an extended break before things get real bad. This is called a diet break, and is something I have used with great success with many of my clients (read more about the example above). A diet break is a period of time, normally a week in length of eating at around maintenance calories. That means we’re not actively dieting anymore, we’re just maintaining our new lower body weight.

I cannot emphasise the importance of taking breaks enough, think about it this way, imagine you were driving and getting progressively more tired. Your blinks start turning into mini snoozes, you start swaying out of your lane a little, until WHAM you turn off into a ditch, or worse hit another car. – That could be disastrous.

OK so pushing your diet further when you’re really stressed isn’t going to take your life, but it is something you really want to avoid. Ever seen The Biggest Loser? They push the contestants to their breaking point, they drop tonnes of weight sure, but have you ever seen those contests a few years later? I have, and they’re back where they began, all the weight they lost jumps back on.

Why? Well a big part of it is because they don’t give their bodies a chance to re-gather, to adjust to their new lower weight. If they had taken breaks throughout the process, they’d probably avoid breaking down and would get to their destination and stay there.

KEY POINT: Taking a break doesn’t just give your body a chance to re-adjust, it also reinvigorates it.

You know all those metabolic processes that down regulated as you dieted, well they come back up! – This really jacks up your ability to burn fat again, just like a coffee enables you to refocus and get back in the car and weave through lanes like a magician.

So please take breaks, maybe every 16 weeks or so for a week at a time, they’ll allow your body to catch up to itself and rejuvenate it making fat loss sustainable.


#6 Focus on the Road Ahead

Finally when it’s all said and done you’re not going to be getting anywhere if you don’t look at the road right? If you forget to break, change gear, turn the steering wheel or actually even just look where you’re going, you’ll crash and burn. You get those drivers who are too busy looking at their fuel efficiency or getting a sweet exhaust pipe, when instead they’d be better off just focussing on the process.

The same could be said for dieting, if you get caught up in the details; should I be eating after 6pm? Is brown rice better than white rice? Everyones on that bulletproof coffee kick, maybe I should give it a shot? – When they should really just focus on hitting their nutritional goals for the day or week and getting inside the gym and pushing themselves appropriately.

KEY POINT: When you focus on the day to day, the stuff that really matters, putting the foot on the gas and staying in lane, you’ll get to your goal much more efficiently.

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“Am I there yet?”

SHUT UP – and just stick to the path, if you keep looking too far in the future you’ll lose sight of the road ahead, and that will lead to crashing. The more you can be process orientated the better you will be at getting to your destination. Focus on what will get you to your goal, rather than where you’re not.

Hit your nutrition.

Get in the gym and workout, do your cardio.

[bctt tweet=”The more you can be process orientated the better you will be at getting to your destination” username=”revivestronger”]

That’s your job, let those processes do the work. Obviously you need to check where you are on the map now and then, like you compare your weekly/monthly weight averages, to make sure you’re on track. But for the most part you just focus on what needs to be done day-to-day, making adjustments now and then.


6 Tiered System: Win The Fat Loss Battle

Read Part 1 here.

  1. Eat Less – create a caloric deficit

  2. Weight Train – resistance training is key for fat loss

  3. Keep Protein High – protein is the macro king for fat loss

  4. Tweak as Necessary – small changes go a long way

  5. Take Pit Stops – maintaining is the key to long-term fat loss

  6. Focus on the Road Ahead – focus on the process


WHAT NEXT?

Do you need any help with the above? Do you have any questions you need answering? Hopefully it gave you way to get you and keep you losing fat.

Join my free facebook group or add me on snapchat (revivestronger) and ask your question there, I will respond asap. Or if you’re after a fresh training programme I have a free 4 week plan using DUP that you can download for free here.

One more thing…

Do you have a friend who would love the above? Share this article with them and let me know what they think.

[bctt tweet=”6 Tiered System: Win The Fat Loss Battle” username=”revivestronger”]


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