You undoubtedly know at least a few fellow trainees who have hit a wall in their training (be it weight loss, weight gain or performance) and if you at least semi-regularly read fitness magazines you must have come across the term at least a dozen times. It seems as if body transformations weren’t taxing and frustrating enough, we also have to fight these built-in biological mechanisms eventually stagnating our progress. And did you know it happens more often the leaner you get? And did you also know that we NEED this mechanism to survive? It’s true, even though you may feel like you’d rather be without it at this point. The good news is that all personal fitness trainers worth their hourly rate will be aware of this and instruct and advise you accordingly to help you minimize them. If you haven’t got the benefit of a professional by your side, here a basic way to work it out yourself.
We are complicated creatures, chameleons in fact, in the way that we adapt to our environment and our food intake whether it be optimal or not. But, just because we can adapt doesn’t mean that we work well having to adjust to circumstance or poor habits, just that it won’t kill us or immediately cripple our performance (so to speak). In terms of weight loss, if you found yourself lost out in the woods, would you like your body to kill you off as quickly as possible? Not likely. No, you’d like to hold on as long as humanly possible (and preferably a little longer) so that you could save yourself. Now, do you think our bodies, instinctively, can differentiate between losing weight for aesthetics and health, and a life-threatening situation? Absolutely not. This is why it won’t let you drop tons of weight without interference. And the leaner you get the more critical it assumes your situation to be as you are running out of fat stores for keeping warm, functioning and staying alive.
Keep in mind that this is nature and we can do nothing about these mechanics and nor should we. We can however be smart about it and utilise this knowledge to find loopholes in the walls we hit. It is called weight loss cycling. It can be done in several different ways, but by far the easiest is to only keep your weight loss regime running for four weeks followed by two weeks off. In the two weeks off you do not go berserk and binge out, no, but you slowly increase you food intake to the point where you stop losing weight, and once you found your sweet spot you keep it until the two weeks are up and then you go at it again. If you have a lot of weight to lose you may even be able to go for six weeks before taking your two weeks, but the learner you get the more careful you want to be. Because going for too long while not burning optimal numbers is a waste of time compared to not losing for two weeks and then go back to maximum effort again. It also allows you to get a mental break and recharge for another four weeks. Just remember, again, it’s not two weeks of whatever you want – you keep eating healthy, but in larger quantities to outsmart our survival mechanism.
