How to phase your fat loss so you never plateau or gain the weight back

You've lost weight before… so why does it always seem to come back?

If you feel like you're constantly starting over, this episode is going to change the way you think about dieting for good.

In this episode, I'm breaking down:

✔️ Why being in a deficit isn't enough if you don't know what comes next

✔️ The real reason dieting feels so unsustainable (hint: it's not your willpower)

✔️ How skipping phases is keeping you stuck in the lose-it-gain-it-back cycle

✔️ The 4 phases of fat loss - what they are, when to use them, and why the order matters

✔️ How to finally have a clear next step so you're never just "trying to lose weight" again

Once you understand how to phase your fat loss and build a strategy that works for your real life as a mom, you stop starting over and build a lifestyle change that sticks in every single of motherhood.

Want to connect with Christie?

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If you want to learn how to make consistent fat loss progress while balancing mom life (or you identified your struggles in this episode and want help) join my 3 day LIVE event Ditch The Diet: Mom Edition for free on June 9th-11th! Register for free here!

Ready to go ALL in on your goals with high touch, personalized coaching and strategy so you can lose fat consistently without restricting yourself or spending hours in the gym? Apply for 1:1 Coaching!

Looking for a low commitment way to get direct access to me and my expertise? Join my group coaching program, Strong as a Mother!

Transcript

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Hey friend, welcome back to Stronger Within, the podcast for women who are done chasing quick fixes and are ready to build real strength and lasting change from the inside out. I'm your host, Christy Magri, and here we talk about becoming stronger within in your body, your mindset, and the daily habits that shape your life. If you're ready to build a body and life you feel confident in for good, you're in the right place. I am so excited to talk about today's topic because I feel like nobody talks about this. And I truly feel like for most women, this is one of the missing pieces that continues to kind of hold them back. Because if I look back at my weight loss journey when I was really struggling to lose weight, I truly believe that if I had known this piece of information and all these things that I'm gonna share with you in today's episode, I feel like I would actually, I don't even feel, I know that I would have been so much more successful with losing weight. Because when we think about dieting, it's kind of overwhelming, right? It's a lot of work. And I I shouldn't even use the word diet really because I don't consider the way that I approach nutrition, the way that I teach it with my clients, I don't consider it dieting. I very much consider it a lifestyle change. The beauty of macros is that we don't really have to diet, we just have to build enough awareness and have enough structure to see results while not being restrictive or extreme. But nobody talks about what to do after the diet, or what do you do when progress stalls, or what do you do when you've been dieting for six months and you're so sick of tracking your food and you don't want to eat in a calorie deficit anymore. Nobody talked about that. And it's really important because if you have a goal, quite often that goal needs to be broken up into phases. And if you follow me on Instagram, you probably have seen me go through these phases where sometimes I'm in a calorie deficit, sometimes I'm in a reverse diet, sometimes I'm in a maintenance phase. But I am not dieting year-round. So today we're gonna be talking about what to do beyond the diet. Everybody tells you how to lose the weight, but what do you do when you're not focusing on weight loss? And one of the core things that I really teach too is not just how to lose the weight, but also how to keep it off. So in today's episode, we're gonna talk about that, how to handle things like vacations, different seasons of life with kids, how to move through these different phases without burning out and you know, feeling like you can't sustain it, um, and what exactly those different phases are, how you know it's time for each phase, and how to just know exactly what your body needs next so you can stop guessing and actually feel really confident in each phase or each season that you are in. But again, I I talk to so many women on a daily basis, and it's like, well, Christy, I've tried everything under the sun. I've literally done all the diets that are supposed to bring me fat loss success, but I'm still struggling. And in my time of coaching, I have found that it's really not so much about trying hard enough or doing more, but more about the fact that dieting can feel really unsustainable. So again, I think back to my weight loss journey when I would, you know, track my food for a week and I would get in my head like, I can't do this for the rest of my life. This is so freaking hard. I don't want to have to restrict myself from the things I love forever. That's a whole separate conversation. We're not gonna talk so much about restriction in today's episode. That was also a big part of my problem. But I went in with the mentality of like, this is just the way it's gonna be now. I'm gonna have to diet. I didn't have any timeline on it. I just knew that it was what I had to do to be successful with my goal of losing weight, which I wasn't successful. But there's this overwhelm with like, do I have to track my food forever? Do I always have to be so strict and rigid and on top of things? So maybe you're struggling to see results long term because no one ever taught you what to do after the diet. And what you do outside of the diet or the calorie deficit phase, we can use those terms interchange interchangeably. And what you do really determines whether you keep the results you saw in your deficit phase, or if you gain the weight back and have to start over again, which I see time and time again. So right now you might be stuck in one of those cycles where you're always trying to lose weight, but you never have that clear next step, or you're second-guessing everything you're doing, or maybe you've lost weight before, but then you slowly gained it back, you're eating less and less, but your body still isn't responding, or you feel like you're either completely on track, 100% in, or you're just like, whatever, I'm not even trying. If you have never been taught how to phase, how to use these different phases in your fat loss, I'm gonna teach you today. Today's episode is gonna be really good. So I want to shift perspective, first of all. So, like I said, we don't have to work harder, and this is another phrase that I love to use. Instead of working harder, let's work smarter. So instead of dieting harder, we diet smarter by working in phases because your body is not meant to diet 365 days a year. And this is a mistake that many women make is again, we go into this dieting phase with no timeline in mind. So we're gonna dive into the four different phases and what all they entail and when you know it's time for each one. So we're gonna just quickly list them off here and then I'm gonna go into each one. So, first one is a calorie deficit. We all know that one. Number two is a reverse diet, number three is maintenance, and number four is a calorie surplus. So let's get right into them. Phase number one is a calorie deficit. Now I'm saying phase number one, but that's not necessarily where you should be starting. In fact, I now in my coaching program, I've revamped everything. Nobody starts in a calorie deficit. First 30 days, we're keeping you at maintenance calories. We need to build a strong skill set of the habits that we need to be successful without jumping right into our fat loss phase. So, all of that to say, you know that it's time or you know, you can be in a calorie deficit when you haven't currently been dieting. You feel like your energy, your sleep, your stress are pretty manageable to a certain extent, right? Most of us are moms, so we can't always control all of those things. You feel mentally ready to be consistent. Now, don't confuse consistent with perfect, but consistent means like 90 to 95% or more adherent to your calories and your macros. Yeah, it is time to be in a calorie deficit when you're not already burnt out from dieting. Something that I see here is somebody will say, Okay, well, I want to lose weight, I'm gonna try again. And they're already burned out from the last time they tried to lose weight a month ago, and so now they're trying again, unsuccessful. They quit, and then the same thing happens month after month, and that's where it comes in where it's like we're make we're putting in all this effort, but we're not getting any results from the effort because we're so on off, on, off, on off that we're not seeing results because we're not being consistent enough of the time. And this is where it comes in too. Back when I was struggling to lose weight for many years, it felt like I was dieting all year, but I wasn't losing any weight. There is no worse feeling. And the other kind of like green flag, if you will, that you can go into a calorie deficit is if you're able to follow through during the week and the weekends. That one is big. It is not time to be in a calorie deficit when you're exhausted, chronically fatigued, maybe you are early postpartum, um, you are stuck in that binge restrict cycle or even that on-off cycle that I just mentioned. If you are undereating right now, or if you really struggle to stay consistent, don't jump right into a calorie deficit. You need to build the skill set of consistency first. A calorie deficit phase truly requires a dialed in intentional level of consistency with tracking hitting your calorie and your protein target most of the time. So typically in a calorie deficit, I will drop my clients like two to three hundred calories below maintenance. That's where we start out. And a calorie deficit really requires, again, that you have intentionality behind everything that you're doing because you're gonna have to do things like planning ahead, limiting eating out, making sure that you're tracking, even if you're going out to eat, weighing your things on a food scale, managing your weekends, like I just mentioned a second ago, like you really have to be intentional in a calorie deficit because it is so easy to pull yourself out of a deficit. And if you don't have that data from tracking your food, you're just not gonna know if you're actually in one. It is the most accurate, you know, quickest way to get the results you want to get. And let me be clear, this is not, I'm in a calorie deficit, so I'm gonna massively undereat and go into this huge deficit and eat as little as possible and hope for the best. No, we need intentionality, we need structure, and some of the common mistakes I see too, like I just said, is going into it too aggressively. We're going from doing barely anything at all, doing whatever we want, to like being super rigid, placing all these strict food rules that we can't freaking stick to. So what does that lead to? Burnout. Now we're like, oh my gosh, it's me, I have no willpower, I have no motivation, and we're giving up, and we're just gonna do the same damn thing next month. We can't do that. This is my third time mentioning this, but being on track Monday through Thursday or Monday through Friday, and then by the time Saturday hits, maybe you track your breakfast, and then you're off, you forget to track your lunch, and it leads into you just saying, like, whatever to the rest of the weekend. We can't do that. And then quitting too early because progress feels slow. This is a big one because it is so hard to stay patient in this journey. However, when we are making a lifestyle change, the progress is gonna be a little bit slower, but who cares? Because you're never gonna have to lose this weight again. So wouldn't you rather do it in a way that's not super rigid and miserable and actually be able to stick with it and have the progress be a little bit slower? And this is where I focus more on like the long-term health benefits and not just how much weight I'm losing day to day or week to week, because that doesn't matter so much to me because I know I have time and I know this isn't something where I'm gonna rebound from these habits, like I'm gonna sustain these habits for life. All right, so that was phase one, which is our calorie deficit phase. And the biggest thing that I want you to take away from that is we have to be consistent. We can't be half in, half out. Otherwise, you're gonna find yourself in that position where you feel like you're doing everything and you're spinning your wheels, yet year after year you're not actually seeing the progress you wanna make. So now let's dive into phase two, which is the reverse diet. So a reverse diet is where you gradually increase your calorie intake over a period of time with the purpose or the intention to gain minimal body fat or no body fat at all. So the purpose of increasing calories is to boost your metabolism because when you are in a calorie deficit, your body is very smart and your body adapts very quickly. And this is why women experience things like they are doing all the same things they were to lose weight, and that was working in the beginning, but now things plateaued and now things are not changing. Well, that's because your body has adapted to what the number of calories you've been eating. So now you have two choices. Choice number one is you can drop your calories further, which if you if you're not in a super big calorie deficit, this is an option. Now there's a number of factors that depend on like which of these options you'll choose, but that's the first option. And the second option is to go through a reverse diet where you are boosting your metabolism, working calories back up to maintenance. And remember that when you're in this phase, because I know it can be a little bit scary to some people, it's like I want to lose fat, Christy. Like, doesn't it isn't it a little counterintuitive to increase my calories? Not necessarily, and again, this is something that no one's ever taught us, so it's okay if it feels scary and unfamiliar, and you're like, I don't even understand how this works, but I promise you it works. So, um, and this is why a lot of women experience too, like they've been eating lower calorie and then they start reverse dieting and they actually feel leaner. Sometimes the scale starts responding in the way they like, and that's not to say that's the case for every single reverse diet, like not every body is the same, but just something to consider there. We have to remember the long game in mind, right? And if we are thinking about long-term results, well, we need to be really again. I'm gonna come back to that word intentional. We need to come back to the intentionality we have behind each phase. So if you've been eating in that deficit for a while, your body's not responding, you're doing all the right things, you don't want to drop your food anymore. Well, then go through a reverse diet and maintenance period. Right now, I am in a season of my of life where I still have like 20 more pounds I want to lose. That doesn't mean that I just dieted all the way through to when I was postpartum to now to lose all the weight that I want to lose. I've had to do it in periods. I go through, you know, a three to four month deficit, and then I work my way through a reverse diet, and then I'm at maintenance for a few months. Yes, I have more weight I want to lose, but long term I know that that's gonna be way better for me and my results than just constantly chasing exactly what I need right now or what I want right now, um, and really needing that like instant gratification. The reverse diet can be a very mentally tough process. So you know that it's time to go through this phase when you've been in a calorie deficit for around three to six or more months. Now, this is very dependent on the individual, how much weight they have to lose, a number of different factors. If your weight loss has slowed or stalled despite being low calorie, we just talked about that one. If you want more energy, especially if you're constantly feeling tired, if you're hungry all the time, thinking about food all the time, really fatigued, if you want more food flexibility in a certain season of your life, if you're really struggling to stay consistent or you keep falling off, we got to get you out of that deficit, bring you through a reverse diet. Again, it comes back to we have to build the skill set of being consistent, consistent enough in that deficit. And then if you feel out of control around food, especially at night or on the weekends. So this phase requires three things. Number one is patience, number two is trust in the process, because this is a mentally tough process. Again, I know it can feel a little bit counterintuitive when it's like, well, I have weight to lose. Why would I go through this phase in increasing my calories? If you know, we can do a whole other episode about this because it would I would be talking for way too long in today's episode if I went through like the science and how all of it works, but just trust me when I say you just need to trust in the process, and you'll be thinking me a year from now. So the third thing that you need is continued awareness and tracking. So just because we're in a reverse diet and not in a calorie deficit, and this is a big mistake that people make is when they're not in a deficit, they're in a reverse diet, a maintenance phase, etc. They're like, oh, I don't have to track my food, I can just do whatever I want. I'm just gonna wing it. No, we still have to be intentional. Every single phase requires a different type of intentionality. I'll probably say that word like 20 times in this episode. So this is not quitting fat loss. This is what allows you to keep going long term. So some common mistakes I see with this are fear of weight gain and then quitting too early. So you're stepping on the scale and you're seeing that the scale is going up a little bit doesn't mean that you gained fat, you are eating more food, your body's gonna hold on to food and water differently. Um, but there's that fear, right? So then we don't trust in the process, we bounce out, we try to go into the calorie deficit, things aren't working again, we're on off, on off. But I will tell you that if you can master the art of learning how to move through these different phases, even if it feels a little bit uncertain, even if it feels a little bit scary, you are gonna find way more success than you found up until this point. And this is what I help my coaching clients with too, because it's scary, it's uncertain. It's like I've never been through this before. This feels counterintuitive. How do I continue to trust in the process? It is so helpful to have that support and have someone holding your hand. So let's go through phase number three, which is your maintenance phase, and it is that is exactly what it sounds like. It's where you're not gaining or losing, you're right at maintenance. So it's time to be in this phase when you have reached a weight you're happy with or at least close to. You've completed a reverse diet or you need a diet break. So typically what I will do is I'll be in my deficit for three to four months. I will go into my reverse diet. Typically, I move my way through a reverse pretty quickly. This is dependent on the individual again. I would say I go through it in, you know, about two a month or two. It really just depends. Um, and then I hang at maintenance for a few months. It gives me that diet break that I need from being in that deficit. Um, or if your body is sending signals that it needs stability, again, coming back to like being tired all the time, a lot of chronic fatigue, things like that. And I love to use maintenance phases in seasons of my life where I want extra flexibility. So something I do going into every single year, and I also have my clients do this in January or rather in December to get ready for January. We sit down and we map out your year. So we say, what is gonna be going on throughout the year? Where do we want to be able to have more flexibility? So, for example, when I map out my year, I know that the holiday time that is a time where I don't want to be in a deficit and I don't want to be in a reverse diet, even. Like, I want to be right at maintenance, I don't want to have to worry in a maintenance phase. You know, it's dependent with tracking on the individual again. It's so nuanced. But somebody like me who has been tracking for 10 years, like I can be in a maintenance phase and not need to track every single thing. If you've only been in this journey for a little bit, you're newer to tracking macros, I would suggest tracking even in your maintenance phase, but you could simply go by, you know, progress pictures, what the scale is saying, how you're looking and feeling, and then if you know that if things are going maybe the way you don't want them to, your pants are fitting tighter or whatever, you know, like okay, I need to dial it in a little bit. Um, but again, I will map out my year because during the holiday time, I don't want to have to like be super on top of things, tracking every little thing. I want to be able to really enjoy that time and be present with my kids. And I know that the rest of the year leading up to the holidays, I've done what I've need to do, right? I'm about to jump into a 12-week deficit phase and I'm gonna work my butt off for those 12 weeks because I know once the 12 weeks is over, I'm going into maintenance mode. You can also go right from your deficit to maintenance. You don't have to go through a reverse diet, but we won't get too deep into that either. But all of that to say I'll have I'll know that I have done what I needed to do, and so I earned the right to be more flexible and to maintain easily later in the year when I want to. Um, and this really gives your body a break from dieting, which again, when we think about like the overwhelm when it comes to dieting and being so on top of everything, we know that we can let our foot off the gas pedal a little bit when we've put in the work, when we've been consistent for that four months or whatever it is, three months, four months, whatever it is for you. But most people are not consistent enough for that period of time. And so you're chasing these results, but you're not actually getting anywhere. You're literally like a hamster on a hamster wheel. But we want to get you to the point where you can be at maintenance. And sometimes maintaining is harder than losing the weight initially because losing the weight like is kind of addicting. It gets exciting when you see a new low-way in or your clothes are fitting better and you're like working really hard and you're following through on the promises you made to yourself. Maintaining's not as exciting. And so that's where a lot of people just kind of fall into this, like, eh, whatever. And then the weight gain comes back. So maintenance requires, you know, letting go of that always trying to lose weight mindset, which is really tough as women, and really just focusing instead on building a healthy lifestyle change. So let me be very clear that being in a maintenance phase is not just a free-for-all. It's not like I'm just gonna eat whatever I want, right? Like, we are building these strong foundational skill sets where we are fueling our bodies whether we're in a deficit or not. We don't want to have poor eating habits, we want to make sure we're eating enough protein, we want to make sure we're still doing all the right things. We're just changing the amounts of what we're eating. Where maybe we're having more flexibility, we can have the extra slice of pizza or the bigger ice cream or whatever. This phase really requires that you some build some self-trust within yourself around food and being able to eat at those maintenance calories without overdoing it. And this can also gradually pull you back from tracking where you can go into more intuitive eating. Again, if that's appropriate for the phase or uh like season that you're in, how long you've been tracking, um, the kind of awareness you have, right? And this does require that you still keep your habits consistent. You still gotta be getting to the gym or working out at home, whatever it doesn't matter. Strength training, getting in your steps, drinking your water, focusing on self-care and stress management and eating healthy, eating enough protein, you still have to be doing all those same things. So, some common mistakes I see panicking over the scale. That's a big one. If you, I will say this right now, I'm gonna do a whole other episode about the scale, but if you step on the scale and that number dictates if you're in a good or a bad mood that day, I want you to just put the scale away and just go based off of other forms of progress, like progress photos, measure. measurements, how you look, how your clothes are fitting, etc. Because it is not sustainable to let the scale affect you in that way. Um another common mistake is thinking you always need to be losing weight. So again this comes back to like you need to let go of the I'm only focusing on these things if I'm trying to lose weight. We're building a lifestyle change here. And we don't want to lose structure during this time. That's another common mistake I see. So then again you end up gaining the weight back. Maintaining your weight during different seasons or like once you've reached your end goal is such a huge success. Honestly I think maybe it's even bigger than losing the weight. But this phase is what really prevents that regain from happening. And then last phase I'm going to touch on super quick because most women don't really go in this phase or if they do it's not intentional. Let's say that you gain weight during a period of time well this is phase number four which is your calorie surplus. You are eating more calories than your body burns in a day meaning you are eating above maintenance and this can be intentional right if you want to build some muscle you want to look more toned you can't tone what you don't have and so you might need to focus on building some some muscle underneath and so you would need to make sure that you're eating enough for your body to be able to do that. If you want to improve your metabolism again just like a reverse diet or a maintenance phase the purpose of this really is kind of same as the other ones increasing your metabolism improving your body composition and building that lean muscle so with this I would really focus on strength training consistency specifically with progressive overload. If we are in a surplus because we want to put muscle on well we need to make sure that we are increasing well first of all following a consistent strength training routine you can't keep doing random workouts every single time you work out you have to stick to the same routine for eight to 12 weeks and then each time you go in the gym or each time you work out from home you are increasing the weight a little bit you're slowing down the tempo you're adding more reps you're adding an extra set whatever that looks like um and in this phase being in a calorie surplus if you feel like this phase it's right for you then you would be like two to four hundred calories above maintenance but some common mistakes I see like I just said skipping this phase but wanting that toned look again you can't tone what you don't have and so you might need to focus on gaining a little bit mass and that's even scarier than the reverse diet and the maintenance phase but you don't have to if you do this right way you won't be just like putting on a bunch of body fat you'll be putting on lean muscle so you'll actually look smaller. Alright so those are our four different phases there's the calorie deficit the reverse diet the maintenance and the calorie surplus fat loss and this whole journey as a whole is not just one phase. It's not just the diet it is truly an ever-evolving cycle and the women who lose the weight and keep it off are not the ones who are the most motivated they're the ones who know what phase they're in and act accordingly to that phase. So if you're honest with yourself what does your body actually need right now and what can you commit to because that's going to dictate your next phase. Alright friends that's it for today's episode thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode resonated I'd love for you to share it or leave a review. It helps this message reach even more women who need it. Until next time keep becoming stronger with it.