Do you want to lose weight?
Have you found it hard to lose weight up to now?
This post will show you how to speed up your metabolism so you can drop weight easier than before.
Typically, when someone goes to lose weight the advice they get is to ‘move more and eat less’ and that weight loss is a simple equation of calories in vs calories out.
Sound familiar?
So if that’s true how does it explain the ladies that come into us to start their 28 Day Transformation Challenge, weighing 140, 150, 150+ pounds, eating 1300 calories each day and doing 6-8 hours of exercising each week…without losing weight?
Going by the calories in vs calories out equation mentioned above, such ladies should be burning 2000+ calories per day.
How can they be eating so little without dropping body fat?
How can they start losing the weight they want?
Suck it up and undergo extra cardio? Running? More classes?
Even less food?
I’m going to break down this surprisingly common problem and show you how maintaining metabolic health is your key to consistent and simple weight loss.
Fat loss works by feeding your body less energy than it expends each day. The energy is measured in calories and when you eat less than you expend, you’re said to be in a calorie deficit.
That’s when your body will dig into your fat stores for energy which it’s not getting from your food intake.
So what dictates the level of energy (calories) your body needs each day?
Your metabolism.
For example, a 170-pound woman with 30% body fat and a healthy metabolism will have a basal metabolic rate of around 2,000 calories per day.Remove featured image
If the same woman exercises or has a job with high physical demands, she could expend up to 2,800 calories per day.
So as you can see, around 70% of an active woman’s total energy demands will come from her metabolism. That’s why maintaining good metabolic health is so important when weight loss is your goal.
When dropping your calories to lose weight, your replying on your metabolism to stay fired up and burning stored body fat. Exercise can help to increase your total energy expenditure each day but overall, your metabolism is the main driver here.
The slower your metabolism; the less food you’ll have to eat and the more you’ll have to exercise to lose weight.
The faster your metabolism; the more you can eat and the less you’ll have to exercise.
Pretty straight forward right?
You may have heard the term metabolic damage thrown around?
It involves dramatically slowing down your metabolic rate and fortunately it can be resolved.
It’s pretty commonly known that to lose weight, you need to eat less than you’re currently eating but most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible.
So what tends to happen?
The tendency is to dramatically drop calorie intake and increase energy output through many hours of exercise. You see this all the time with women taking up running for the first time.
Don’t get me wrong, this will work for a little bit. But ultimately weight loss will come to a grinding halt. Why?
Your metabolism wants to maintain homeostasis and will adapt to the energy levels you’re feeding it. So if you feed yourself 1000 calories a day for a prolonged period of time, your metabolic rate will start to slow down to that level.
Not good when fat loss is your goal.
By dropping calories to a level lower than what you burn, your metabolism will slowly start to creep down to that new low level. The more you restrict calories or the faster and more drastically you do it, the faster that metabolic drop will occur.
Fortunately, the opposite is true too so there are ways out of this vicious cycle.
Weight loss stalls when the calories are cut down to levels that match output. This is usually followed by further cuts and more exercise. And so the vicious cycle begins.
What happens after periods of deprivation and under eating?
Will power runs out and we scrap the whole thing and go back to eating as we did before the diet.
Dramatically increasing calories and binging on everything we can get our hands on. Everything we have deprived ourselves of during our under eating, low calorie diet.
Unfortunately, that’s a perfect recipe for rapid fat gain and often results in the dieter ending up with more body fat than when they started their diet.
What’s happening here is pretty simple and it’s also pretty simple to fix.
The woman has managed to drop her metabolic rate to the floor by cutting calories too fast and drastically and then overloaded her body with a surplus of calories during the binge phase I mentioned. The excess energy inputted into her body through a calorie surplus is stored as energy in the form of body fat.
She will have ended up with more body fat than when she started and with a slower metabolic rate. Meaning she has to eat very little to maintain a high body fat percentage.
Nightmare.
Dramatically and chronically slowing down the metabolic rate is called “Metabolic Damage” an d fortunately, its actually pretty easy to fix. Your effective weight loss is going to be determined by your metabolic health. If your metabolism is fired up before you start your diet, your weight loss be straight forward and consistent.
While losing weight, you want to wait until your weight loss comes to a halt before considering cutting calories for all the reasons mentioned in this post so far.
Our goal with our clients is to have them eating their total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) without gaining weight before their start their weight loss.
You can calculate your TDEE here.
If you’re eating less than your TDEE and your weight loss has stalled, you will need to increase your metabolic rate before starting a sustainable and efficient weight loss program.
Here’s how it’s done.
1. Train – Resistance training 3-5 times a week
Resistance training like the kind we do with our 28 day Transformation Challenge clients is an ideal way to boost your metabolism.
It can help to burn a huge amount of calories post workout and can help you build muscle, which increases your metabolic rate again.
Ladies, building significant muscle takes a lot of time and specific nutrition strategies. You won’t become bulky in any way from resistance training if building muscle isn’t your goal.
What you can expect is to get a lot leaner and make fat loss much more achievable.
2. Increase Calories – Slowly until your reach your TDEE
Some of you might freak out at the idea of increasing your calories for fat loss.
Hopefully having read this post, you will see the logic in the process and rest assured it’s to only way to achieve your goals in a realistic and sustainable manor.
The process of gradually increasing your calories is called ‘Reverse Dieting and it’s a very simple and effective way to speed up your metabolism.
The idea is to slowly and gradually increase calories by about 5-8% each week, which allows your metabolism keep up with the increase, resulting in little-to-no fat gain.
Obviously, if we decided to do it over night and increased calories by 500 for example, it would result in fat gain.
That’s not what we want.
Depending on the client and their circumstances, we generally increase calories by 5% each week.
Increases each week are subject to fat gain, which we measure through body fat percentages.
The macro nutrients (Protein, Carbohydrates and Fats) that make up the increases will be specific to our client.
3. Protein – Eat it
Protein is your friend.
Although you may feel that food is the energy, protein is not.
Protein is the building blocks of your muscles and helps us build small amounts of muscle to increase your metabolic rate.
We recommend eating 1 gram of protein per pound of lean mass at a minimum.
Your lean mass is your total weight less the weight of your overall fat mass.
The know this figure you will need to get your body fat measured but if that’s not an option then start at 1 gram of protein per pound of total mass.
4. Fats – You need them
Fats are your friend when your metabolism has the pace of a snail.
Dietary fats help to boost testosterone very slightly, which influences your metabolic rate.
Low dietary fat does not equal low body fat.
Almost the opposite.
When we reverse diet clients we generally look to include 30-35% of calories from fat.
When your metabolism is healthy, your weight loss will be much easier.
Make it your priority to eat your TDEE without weight gain before dieting for fat loss.
If you need help putting this all together, fill out our 28 Day Transformation Challenge application below and we will be in touch soon after.
Phil Giffney
Owner
Results Fitness
