I thought id help share the three main things that helped me keep losing weight once I had felt "Stuck" and hit a major plateau. I ended up getting pretty severely injured in September. Could lift hands over shoulders for four months and now have to do a good deal of work to get back on track
1) Calorie Cycling:
I find that as I got leaner I felt much more restricted. This was partly due to the fact that I lost a lot of weight (70 pounds) and had gotten my calories relatively low but also due to the fact that I have a decently active social life. Between going on dates and spending time with friends I found myself with a lot of opportunities to consume alcohol and eat at restaurants. On my daily caloric intake this wasn't really possible and I ended up choosing not to enjoy going out rather than go over my macros and calories for the day. Once I started using calorie cycling this problem was pretty much solved for me.
My daily caloric intake was at about 2,500 calories per day and I would split it up like this:
| Day: |
Calories: |
| Monday: |
2100 |
| Tuesday: |
2100 |
| Wednesday: |
2900 |
| Thursday: |
2100 |
| Friday: |
2100 |
| Saturday: |
3300 |
| Sunday: |
2900 |
This would give me the same weekly caloric total and therefore deficit while allowing me two medium calorie days and one high day.
My Low days looked like this:
220p, 50f, 195c
My Medium days Like this:
220p, 50f, 395c
My High days looked like this:
220p, 95f, 395c
Some may not think these are big differences but for me that made a huge impact. I also felt like because I only has two day long low stretches that they really didn't bug me and my hunger wasn't that big of an issue.
I don't think this gave me any physiological benefit but it really helped my social life and helped me stick to my diet.
2) Diet Breaks:
I first read about these from a guy called Lyle McDonald several years back and started using them as I lost weight and my energy really began to suffer. I would do one week any my maintenance calories for every three weeks I spent in a deficit. Because I only had four low days as week as well I only felt like I was "dieting" for about 12 days every month while I was seeing great weight loss for three weeks at a time followed by one week where I would go up bit but return to my baseline weight by the end of the week followed by a big drop once my calories returned to normal.
Essentially I would eat my high days for seven days straight every month. If I Planned this right Christmas and Thanksgiving and my girlfriend birthday would both land on a high week. This made it so I didn't miss out on social events and I would even use calorie cycling to have a super high day on Christmas.
3) Tracking my Daily Steps:
This was something I had never done before but was an amazing way to raise my total daily calorie output. This way way better than jacking my cardio up super high and had a much smaller impact on my hunger. I started at 5k steps a day and got as high as 30k a day on hikes or nature walks. My target got as high as 15k per day. I had name brand fir bits die on my repeatedly and ended up using a cheap off brand step tracker that cost like $25 on Amazon.
I started getting my steps in by splitting them between the morning and the evening but also started doing little things throughout the day like park further away in the parking lot and try and get in a little walk after meals. The average person walks about 2k steps a mile and here are a bunch of charts that show you an estimate of how many calories you would burn at a given bodyweight.
Steps Charts:
4) Tracking Data
This was not only a huge benefit to helping me keep losing weight but it really helped me figure out what caused my weight loss and how I could keep my weight loss going by making the smallest adjustments possible. My position is that the more data you have and the more trends you can see the less you will end up getting stuck. Here is a picture of the chart I use to track my own data and the data of the people I help.
Note: working on converting this over to a google sheet to share but Numbers does not convert well and the google version is super ugly. Will update once its finished. Im also updating it based on a bit of feedback I received so feel free to drop your own feedback in the comments.
Progress Sheet
Also here is a picture of the progress I saw while dieting:
https://ibb.co/PjmMgHt
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https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/ex2sgi/four_things_ive_found_that_helped_me_keep_losing/
