How To Break Through A Fat Loss Plateau

What is up everyone? Welcome to today's video. Now a client asked me a question recently and it was, you know, how do I get through this fat loss plateau? Plateau? Plateau? Today it's going to be plateau. There's a lot of kind of things to address before you simply just say, you know, drop calories, add cardio. And today I'm going to be going through these things. Not to mention the leaner you get, the longer you diet for, the harder things are going to get. So no doubt at some stage you're going to see a stall in progress. Usually if it's just a stall for a week, I wouldn't worry about it. But around 2 weeks, then it's time to start implementing some protocols. Let's get into the video. Alright, so these are in no particular order. They're all different protocols. Some even kind of contradict each other. We'll get to that in a little bit, but we've got to start somewhere. The first thing to do is track all your food accurately. And you know, you may be saying like, oh, I'm doing that already. Sometimes you got to be honest with yourself. If you pick up a biscuit off the table, you know, reach into the fridge, throw a few grapes in your mouth, maybe you're at a social event or in the supermarket and they're giving out samples— yes, samples still count. So just get a bit more strict and track everything, because anything that goes into your mouth counts. Number 2: Make an effort to move more. And by this I mean NEAT— non-exercise activated thermogenesis. And this is basically the calories we burn when we're not exercising. So just simply moving more, like taking the stairs, parking a bit further away from work so you have to walk more, cleaning your house, literally anything. And this is actually crazy, NEAT, because it's throughout the whole day and the whole week. So these calories really add up. Imagine you burned an extra calorie a minute. Unlike cardio, where you have to motivate yourself to go and do a session that you really don't want to do, NEAT just happens. You don't even have to think about it, and it's effortless when you develop these good habits. I always suggest all my clients are work in like a 9-to-5 office environment to every 20 minutes get up and stretch, go get a drink of water, go chat up that hot secretary that you had your eye on. Number 3 is stop eating out. And you know me, if you watch this channel, you know that I'm not against eating out per se. I think it's good to be social with your food, but sometimes when you want to get a bit more accurate, you may have to take a break from eating out, especially if the restaurant you're in doesn't have the nutritional information It is the chef's job to make that food taste as good as possible. He does not give a shit about your abs or your macros or your progress. There's actually a burger place in California, and I heard they put sugar in the burgers. They like fried the burgers in sugar to give them like that caramel taste, kind of like make them caramelized. Sounds amazing, but it's not going to help your progress. And even places that do have the nutritional information and they're quite healthy options, like, you know, Chipotle, you see a lot of YouTube YouTubers going there, or Talteca like we have in Ireland, when you ask for like brown rice or something, they just throw a scoop of brown rice. You really don't know how much you're getting. Same goes for any other fast food or restaurant. The next one is take a diet break or a refeed. And now I spoke about diet breaks before on this channel, but I really don't speak about them enough because they're such a good protocol in getting next level lean. I've read into the research on them and I've also kind of applied this research to myself, and I've only really learned about them in the last year, and they are a powerful tool. Basically, a diet break is when you return to maintenance calories for 1, 2, maybe even 3 weeks. Seeing as you're just going back to maintenance, you won't gain any fat. You'll offset all the negative adaptations that occur when dieting. So for example, any metabolic adaptation— your metabolism will go up slightly, you'll gain back a lot of strength in the gym, you'll completely replenish muscle glycogen, you get that full look back All your hormones will go— that take a dip when dieting will return to baseline levels, and you'll be a lot mentally and psychologically refreshed to go back to dieting again. So think about it as taking one step back but two steps forward. Next tip is chill the fuck out. I'm serious. When we're stressed, our cortisol rises, and this, you know, is not good for our body composition. Basically, when our cortisol increases, our water retention also increases, and we may be still losing fat, but we can't see it because we're stressed and our our cortisol is up and we're holding a lot of water. And then people often reduce calories further, and this stresses them out even more. So my advice is simply de-stress. Get to bed earlier, sleep more. Sleep is just powerful. It affects your appetite, your energy, your workouts, your strength, your motivation levels, your cognitive function, everything. Sleep is powerful. Go out, see a movie with your friends, go fishing, literally anything that calms you down and lowers your stress levels. Even go out for an untracked meal in your favorite place to eat. And I know that goes against what I said earlier on, but like I said, these are all different approaches. Oftentimes when I get my clients to de-stress or do something that calms them down, often what happens is something called a whoosh. Look up Lyle McDonald's whoosh effect. It's actually really interesting. This is when we see a big kind of flush in water and we lose a few pounds overnight. Next is look at your weekend habits. This is a downfall of a lot of people. People think, okay, I'll just, you know, be super good during the week, but then the weekends I'll let my hair down, and they forget it's not exactly about daily intake, but it's more so about weekly intake. I've seen people erase a week's worth of progress due to their weekend habits. So this kind of goes back to the first point of being more accurate with your intake. You just got to be honest with yourself sometimes. So now that we got those protocols out of the way, then the obvious options if fat loss has truly stalled— I usually recommend a drop in calories. About 250 calories should do the job. These calories should come from fats and carbs. Leave protein where they're at. The ratio of fats and carbs that you lower is really down to the individual. Some people do better on higher fat intake, some people do on lower fat intakes, and vice versa with carbs. And then the next thing I'll do is add in one additional cardio session. So guys, that's the video. Leave it a thumbs up if it helped you out. I just thought I wanted to get just this out there to help you guys out. I'll catch you in the next one. Keep it real, I'm out of here. Peace.