How to lose that last stubborn 10 pounds of body fat

How to lose that last stubborn 10 pounds of body fat

The whole process of getting fit, losing body fat and building muscle tends to be a series of ups and downs. If we are doing it right we should be able to draw a straight line averaging out these highs and lows with one line going down representing our body fat and one going up representing our increased muscle mass. This should be happening no matter how old you are because we can get fit and build muscle at any age.

Losing 10 pounds of body fat for good whether it be that first ten pounds or that stubborn last 10 pounds can be a real challenge. When we get stuck in our weight loss efforts we need to double down and reassess our weight loss plan. But this doesn’t necessarily mean eating even less.

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How to lose that last stubborn 10 pounds of body fat
The first thing we need to do is look at the plan that has gotten us this far. Is there any areas we have start to let slip. It’s summertime maybe we are having a few more beer than we normally would have. Or we’ve started to have a dessert after dinner a couple times a week instead of once a week. Our portion sizes could be slowing increasing.

It might just be that we are not quite as active. This often happens as we move from summer to winter. With the colder weather coming we are just not as motivated to go outside and do things.

Once we have looked at our plan and have decided we have been sticking to it, then we need to look at the details. For example how fast do you eat? It sounds a bit like an old wives tail, if you eat too fast you’ll gain weight. But they did a study on a group of healthy men. And fed them a meal of ice cream. I know! Ice cream?! how does a guy get into one of these studies?

So they split these men into 2 groups with the one group having to eat all their ice cream in 5 minutes and the other group had theirs portioned out and were given small portions every five minutes for a half hour. The over all amount of ice cream eaten by both groups was the same.

Now what is interesting here is they tested various hormone responses after the ice cream was eaten. Including two that are well know to help us feel full and satiated. These are glucagon like peptide 1 and peptide YY. Both of these where substantially higher in those who took longer to eat their meal. Indicating the rate we eat can affect our feelings of fullness.

So eating slower will help us to feel full and in the long run encourage us to eat less.

Now if you’ve lost weight by simply eliminating processed foods and refined sugars from your diet. Or you might of had some success with intermittent fasting. But now you’ve hit a Plateau and just can’t seem to get passed it. It might be time to start counting calories. They did a meta analysis on 37 different studies involving over 16,000 people doing various different weight loss plans and what they found is after a year is those who tracked their calories lost on average 7.3 more pounds than those who did not.

Do you find that your regularly blowing your diet or over consuming food on the weekends? Something that I do different with myself and some of my clients is I adjust the amount of food or the calories I consume based on lifestyle, not training days. So traditionally you would increase your calories intake and in particular your carbs on your training days and eat less on your non training days. What I do instead is I eat less during the week when my days are more structured and it is easier to stick to the plan. Leaving a few extra calories for the weekends when I tend to go out more.

So for example if you are on a 2000 calorie a day plan reduce your calories Monday to Friday to 1800, allowing you an extra 1000 calories for the weekend you can either split them up over Saturday and Sunday giving you 2500 calories for each day or if you have only one day a week you tend to get off track then save all the calories for that day which would give you 3200 calories for the day.

One of the additional advantages to fluctuating the amount of calories you consume each day is it keeps your metabolism from slowing down as the higher calorie days keep the body from going into what they like to call starvation mode.

Hormone reaction to pace of eating. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/95/1/333/2835331

Meta analysis on different types of diets and weight loss. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12165