I tend to eat between 90 and 130 grams of protein and my fat intake is always high (which is probably not great), usually upwards of 48% of my diet. Unfortunately I am very bad with sticking to any specific plans which involve too much detail or inflexibility for very long. What makes it hard is that my days do not follow the same plan every day (my work schedule is somewhat varied and some days I'm a home body and some times I'm out running around crazy busy).
I'm honestly feeling like nothing is going to work anymore and that I should be satisified with this weight, but the bottom line is that I know I can eat the same amount, and exercise the same, and easily be able to maintain a 10 lb lower weight, so that's what spurs me on. If I can just get rid of this weight I can do the same thing and be happier with my weight. Any doable suggestions would be appreciated.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh
And sounds like you like flexibility.
However, to reach another level of leanness, you might need a more structured approach. Some sort of cyclical calorie/carb approach may be required.
Once our bodies reach its setpoint, it can pretty much refuse to give any more weight up. Create a deficit and bam, it downregulates relatively quickly to create a new lower deficit. Start eating more and it upregulates to give you a new higher maintenance. Sounds like where you are at.
To beat that, you need to fake it out.
And a cyclical approach is one such way of doing that. Make it believe it's well fed than hit it with a big deficit. Then ramp cals back up a bit. There are many iterations of such an approach and certainly no one right way of going about it.
Have I asked you how many calories you are consuming per day? I hate when I get into a post and am too lazy to open another browser to read your above posts. If not, how many are you eating?
You don't see me speak to a lot of relatively lean folk on this forum. Giving advice to people carrying a lot of excess fat is easy. But when you get down to where you are, the waters can muddy quite easily and quickly.
Let me speak some generalities wrt to dieting the fat off from an already lean (relatively speaking) state:
The essentials of it are that thermodynamics rules above all else. This means that once energy balance is negative, you're dropping body mass. The problem is, the leaner you are, the more dynamic your metabolism becomes. It adjusts a lot quicker, as noted above.
The idea is to shed some fat and maintain your muscle. And that's what's difficult at this stage in the game. A fatty can drop fat without worrying about a large drop in muscle quite easily. Just check out some of the transformations on biggest loser. They lose hundreds of pounds and are left with a nice muscular base.
The only real way around muscle loss is with training heavy with limited volume, as this sends a strong signal to retain muscle. Diet is another matter...you jack up protein intake to support both protein turnover in the body (dietary protein will be used for aminos before muscle) and for energy needs. Your protein is probably a bit low.
Fats, you need a certain amount of essentials. Preferences are monounsaturated and certain polyunsaturateds. Olive oil, fish oil, flax, borage, things of that nature. These will help with hormone profiles as well as certain aspects of partitioning (the P-ratio).
I like the cyclical part of it to come in with carbs. Many experts, and I agree, like to incorporate periodic refeedings, which are intervals of eating in an energy surplus, as opposed to a deficit. These refeeds provided the content and duration is proper (generally lots of carbs, and 12-24 hours in length on average) will reset leptin, which is your body's systemic regulator of energy intake.
Other than that, you can do things like emphasizing anaerobic endurance with things like HIIT which tends to be muscle sparing and fat-oxidizing to gain a further edge on your partitioning.
That's it in a nutshell.
You can see where you stack up against that and make some improvements. Let me check to see if you mentioned how many calories you are consuming above.
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