Breaking a weight loss plateau

You've lost some weight already and things were flowing great in your fitness journey... until something changed. You're doing all the same things to lose the rest of the weight but now the scale isn't budging.

So where do you go from here?

Here's what most moms do: they panic. They drop calories even lower, push their workouts even harder, and cross their fingers that "more" will fix it. But that's usually the exact opposite of what actually works and it's how weight loss starts to feel really freakin' hard and miserable instead of sustainable.

There's another way. In today's episode, I'm breaking down why plateaus happen, what your body's actually telling you when the scale stalls, and strategy that can get things moving again, without starving yourself or living in the gym.

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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. Today's episode is actually inspired by a DM I got on Instagram the other week. Um, and the message said something along the lines of Christy, I've lost 50 pounds. I still have 30 to 40 pounds I want to lose, but the scale is not budging anymore. I'm fluctuating between the same few pounds over and over again. I'm barely eating anything at this point, nothing seems to be working. What am I supposed to do now? And this is such a frustrating place to be because when we look for fitness and weight loss specific advice, everybody tells you how to lose the weight initially, but what I find is not talked about enough is number one, how to maintain that fat loss, and number two, what to do when you still have more weight to lose. But the things that you were doing before to lose that initial 50 pounds or however many pounds you lost, it's just not working anymore. And this is a very frustrating place to be because those first 50 pounds, or again, that's specific to your situation, however much weight you lost so far, that proves you can do it, right? You know how to track, you know how to stay consistent, you know how to lose weight, and now you're stuck. And it's like, I do not understand. Like I'm eating less, I'm doing more cardio, and my body is just not responding. So in today's episode, we are going to talk about why this happens and how to fix it. I'm always gonna teach you the how, but I'm also gonna teach you the why because it can be a little bit hard to trust in the process of how to fix it without understanding in full context of why this is happening. Let's start out with the reason why this happens, and that is because we did not walk into the weight loss journey with a strategic process. Instead, you likely just left it as an open-ended run-on sentence when really your fat loss journey needs to be broken up into various phases. I find so often we focus on the fat loss, what we have to do day to day, but then the days go by, the weeks go by, the months go by, and we never took a break from that calorie deficit. Fat loss is not just a year-long phase. We've talked about this in multiple episodes, but it requires you move through various phases in the dieting process, diet breaks, maintenance, maintenance phases, etc. And this might not be what you want to hear, but if you're ready to lose those last few pounds, you're gonna want to do it this way. Sure, you could push your body harder, you could drop calories even lower, do more cardio, whatever, but you're also probably gonna be miserable, you're gonna struggle to stick with it, and now your body is going to start fighting you. So now, you know, you had your plateau, you tried to push harder, you didn't listen to your body, and now a lot of times I find women give up because they're like, this isn't working, they revert back to old habits, and this can lead to you gaining the weight back, which is obviously not what we want here. What you actually need right now, if you've lost a significant amount of weight, even like 10 to 15 pounds, that's a decent chunk of weight, depending on you know your body size, your dieting history, etc., there's a lot that goes into that. We can't say a hard number there, but what you actually need is a diet break for several months. One of the most important things to understand about your body is that your body is incredibly smart. So when you start your fat loss phase, there's usually a period where weight comes off fairly quickly and or consistently because you know you're eating fewer calories, your body is using its stored energy, everything feels like it's working, but then the longer that you diet, the more your body begins to adapt. I love to use this example when I talk to clients about this process because I think it can be hard for us to conceptualize, but first of all, you have to understand that your body is extremely smart. And so your body is going to do what it's designed to do, and that is to keep you, you know, in survival mode. Your body exists to keep you alive and to keep you surviving. Your body doesn't understand that we're in this modern day society with food readily available to us, and so if you are eating less calories, your body is going to adapt to that, and that's gonna become your new baseline. So, this example that I love to use is the movie Castaway, which uh it's funny because I'm totally the person who you'll ask me if I've seen a movie, and most times the answer is gonna be no, I'm not very much a movie person. Um, reality TV all day long, like I've probably seen almost every reality TV show. I'm watching Real Housewives right now. I just watched Salt Lake City in Rhode Island, but I'm just starting to get into that series now, so, anyways, I'm going off on a tangent. Anyways, there's a movie called Castaway. Maybe you've seen it, maybe you haven't. I have actually seen that movie. But, anyways, the movie is about this guy, he is played by Tom Hanks, and he works for FedEx. He's on a plane, plane crashes on an island, and he is stuck there for several years trying to survive. And in the beginning of the movie, he's a little bit heavier set, and as the time goes by of him being stuck on this island, you can see that he gets visibly smaller, but he is still a muscular man. He doesn't just like wither away and die, he survives. Our his body was extremely smart, and his body adapted to the food that it had available to it. Now, while we have evolved a lot as a species and we don't have to worry about where our next food source is going to come from, our body still exists as in the hunter-gatherer days, where if we are giving our body a certain amount of food, it says, Okay, this is my new baseline, and that is basically what it will, you know, function on. Your body becomes very efficient. So imagine you started your journey eating 2200 calories a day, and then you went into your deficit at 1800 calories, then you drop down to 170, 1600, you've lost 50 pounds in this process, your body is smaller, so your maintenance calories are also lower. That is something that comes into account. But you've been dieting for months, and with you trying to push harder than ever, at some point the body starts pushing back because your body has adapted and your body is literally built for survival. And so that's where these very strategic diet breaks come in. And this is where a lot of women have a hard time because all of this sounds completely backwards. It's like, hold on, you're telling me the fastest way to lose the rest of the weight is to actually stop trying to lose weight. Like, what do you mean? But when you have spent months dieting your body and your mind really accumulate fatigue. There's physical fatigue that being in a calorie deficit puts on your body. It's a stressor on the body. When we are intaking less calories than our body needs in a day at those maintenance calories, although there is absolutely a purpose for it, it fatigues your body. There's also the mental fatigue where you're thinking about food constantly, tracking feels exhausting, social events feel stressful, maybe your energy is low, your workouts are suffering, you're just feeling stuck. This is where a diet break can be incredibly valuable. Now, let me tell you what a diet break is not, because this is where a lot of y'all go wrong. If you've ever tried a diet break, reverse diet, etc., a diet break is not giving up, it's not binge eating, it's not eating whatever you want whenever you want, it's not taking a vacation from your goals. A diet break, like I've said, is very strategic. It is intentionally increasing calories back up to your maintenance calories for a period of time. And diet break can also go interchangeably with reverse diet, like same sort of concept here. Um, but the goal in this phase is not fat loss, and that is really hard for some of you to grasp because you have more weight you want to lose, and you're like, what do I mean I can't focus on losing weight? But the goal here is to recover your body, help your metabolism, right? Just like we've talked about, your metabolism has adapted. So you need to adapt it back up. So during a diet break, you'll find that your energy usually improves, meaning your workouts improve, your hunger becomes more manageable, your recovery is gonna improve, um, stress around food typically decreases because you have more calories in a day, your adherence improves, and maybe even most importantly, you get a mental break from constantly trying to eat less. So, this is not to say that you're throwing all your healthy habits out the window. Literally, the only thing that is changing is the amount of calories that you are eating in a day. If you listen to one of the episodes I shared recently, it was about I failed my last dieting phase and I chose to go through a reverse diet, working my way back up to maintenance because this season of life that I've been in with moving and vacation and so many different things going on, I just didn't have the adherence that I needed to be to be in a calorie deficit, and I had to come to terms with that basically. But that doesn't mean that it was a free-for-all. I strategically worked my calories up. I still weighed all my food on a food scale, I still tracked my food in my fitness pal. I still did all of the things that I did in my deficit. And this again is where a lot of women go wrong because they think, well, if I'm not focusing on losing weight, if the scale's not going down, then there's no point. They get really sloppy in the diet break. They think that, you know, it's just a break from dieting when really, you know, there's no quote-unquote breaks in this journey. If you find that you need a break from your approach to fat loss, then that is a red flag that there is something off about your current approach. You should never feel like you need a break. Maybe like a few-day break. If you're like, I am so mentally fatigued from tracking, I've been tracking every day for months. Sure, give yourself a weekend, but it becomes a problem where it's like weeks and months. So, anyways, we need to take a step back. We need to realize that sometimes pushing harder is not gonna produce better results. One thing I like to tell my clients all the time is we are not trying to lose weight as fast as possible. We are trying to lose the weight and never have to lose it again. And those are two very different goals. Anyone can do a restrictive diet, an extreme diet, and see amazing results short term. Usually those results don't last, but sometimes the most strategic and smart thing you can do is spend time maintaining your progress before asking your body to lose more. So really take a step back and take a look at how long have I been dieting. If you've been dieting for more than four to six months, you likely need a diet break. If you have lost more, like 50 pounds, for example, this message that was sent to me, absolutely time for a diet break was probably time for a diet break like 20 pounds ago. But um, a maintenance phase is not a setback. A diet break is not a failure. Sometimes that is exactly what's gonna allow you to continue progressing. And so if you've already lost 50 pounds or a significant amount of weight, the question is not how much harder can I push, what more can I do. The question really you want to ask yourself is what is my body trying to tell me right now? What does my body need from me right now? Because the strategy that got you here might not be the strategy that gets you to the finish line. I know this topic can be a little bit loaded and confusing. So if you have any lingering questions, please feel free to send me a DM over on Instagram. My Instagram name is tagged in the show notes. And or I do have a free training I made for my one-on-one coaching clients all about the reverse dieting process. So if you would like a copy of that, just send me over the words diet break over on Instagram. Again, my Instagram is linked in the show notes, and I will be more than happy to share that with you. And if there's one thing I hope you take away from today's episode, it's that there's nothing wrong with you if all the things you were doing before to lose weight aren't working, your body has adapted, your body is extremely smart, and this is where it becomes so important to have actual processes and strategy behind your weight loss goals. It goes so far beyond just eating less and moving more and the amount of calories you're eating in a day. Of course, those things matter, but you should have a yearly plan knowing when you're in that dieting phase, knowing when you're in a diet break. You should know what your plan is for the next three to six months. And if your diet is just one long run-on sentence that never ends, then that is probably the problem that you are dealing with right now. I hope this episode helped you today. If there is someone you think that this would also help, please make sure to send it to them. Share it on your Instagram, tag me, leave a review. All of those things really help this episode reach even more women who need it. And until next time, keep becoming stronger within.