0 VotesPlateaus
Believe it or not, but plateaus can and most definitely do occur for reasons besides the starvation mode.
One of the key problems is the method by which people are identifying plateaus. Most people resort to the number on the scale. If it moves in the desired direction – VICTORY! If it doesn’t – FAIL! If the scale isn’t budging, they’re in a plateau. Pair this with the unrealistic expectations in terms of how quickly it should happen, and you have a recipe for a misidentified plateau.
Case in point, all kinds of crazy stuff can happen with glycogen and water weight when dieting and training. The scale’s measuring everything from muscle and fat to poop and water. Some of these variables can be rising while others are falling. It’d be nothing to retain 3 lbs of water while losing 1 lb of fat over the course of a week.
The shortsighted dieter who bases success or failure on the number portrayed on the scale would write this off as a flop. Tangentially, she’d probably get so stressed and frustrated that she’d binge the following week. This would be followed by feelings of guilt and she’d diet hard the following 2 weeks. At the end of the four weeks, she’d only remember the good weeks and think she “earned” a loss for the month. When the actual weight for the month is breakeven, she’d be flabbergasted and totally disregard the one full week of binging and the possibility of fat loss being masked by water storage or whatever.
See how destructive this mindset can be?
Plateaus do happen though. I’m not naive. In my experience, the most likely culprits are as follows…
Most commonly they’re caused by inaccurate calorie estimates. People tend to overestimate the energy they’re expending and/or they underestimate the calories they’re consuming. We discussed how to minimize this error in the calorie section above.
The lighter you are though, theoretically speaking, the less wiggle room you have for error. Suppose you’re 125 lbs. Your maintenance intake is likely 1,750. A reasonable deficit would be 25%, which would lead to a daily calorie goal of 1,300.
As there are 3,500 calories in each pound of fat, assuming you lost nothing but fat while dieting, the above deficit would lead to a 1 lb loss every 8 days or so.
Now what if this person was underestimating their intake by 5% or so (there’s research showing people underestimating by as much as hundreds and even thousands of calories) and overestimating their expenditure by 10% or so. This could add another 200 or so calories to their daily intake, thus reducing the actual daily deficit to 250 calories.
Using the same assumptions from above, the actual deficit would lead to a 1 lb loss every 14 days. I’m being conservative in this example and this person’s expectations would be off by as much as 50%.
In this case it’s not that you’re deficit isn’t working… rather it’s that you’re eating closer to maintenance than you realize.
Second, many people forget that as they get lighter and lighter, their initial calorie deficit becomes smaller and smaller. A very generic calculation for BMR, which is merely one component of energy expenditure, is 10 calories per pound of body weight.
If you were once 185 lbs, it’s likely that your BMR was close to 1,850 calories. If you’re now 135 lbs, it’s reasonable to assume that your BMR is in the neighborhood of 1,350 calories. If you never adjusted your calorie intake from then until now, it’s pretty easy to see how a plateau might arise. Eventually, if enough weight is lost, what was once a deficit can become maintenance.
The simple solution would be to adjust your calories downward at regular intervals as you lose weight – maybe every 10 lbs or so.
Third, I know it’s all the rave to suggest that you can’t gain muscle while being in a calorie deficit. And I get it… building muscle is a costly project and if you’re not eating enough to maintain the tissue you currently have, your body isn’t going to like adding a bunch of metabolically expensive tissue such as muscle. It makes a ton of sense on paper.
However, I’ve seen concurrent body composition changes enough times to know that it does happen. The more untrained and/or the fatter you are, the more likely this possibility seems to be. It’s not necessarily something you should expect. And if you’ve been training for a long time and you’re reasonably strong, it’s likely not going to happen to any significant degree.
But if you’re losing fat and you’re gaining muscle, the fat loss can be masked on the scale by the muscle gain.
Of course there are other possibilities. Maybe you’re on a medication that screws up your water balance or metabolism. Maybe you have a medical condition that causes metabolic rate to be depressed… something such as a thyroid problem. Maybe you are in fact experiencing the starvation response. Maybe you’re at a point where refeeds or some cyclical approach with carbs makes sense. Or maybe you simply need to give your body a break, bring calories up to maintenance, and rest for a couple of weeks.
[This is part 5 of 6. Please stay tuned for the next installment]
Steve Troutman
body-improvements.com
