Aidan:

Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. My name is Aidan Muir and I’m here with my co-host, Leah Higl. And today we’re going to be talking about reasons why your calorie deficit might no longer be a calorie deficit. As in you might be doing similar actions or attempting to do similar actions and it was working for fat loss and then maybe it is no longer working.

We are going to be making the assumption that you have some decent knowledge about fat loss and the theory behind how it works and everything like that. If not, we do have heaps of content on that. The one I recommend the most is we have a nutrition for fat loss blog. If you just Google nutrition for fat loss, ideal nutrition, that will come up. We also have a three-part podcast series. So like you can go back to that. But apart from that, we’ll be talking about what we’re talking about today.

Leah:

The first reason as to why this can occur is that the actual loss in body size that you experienced during a deficit leads to reduced energy expenditure just by being smaller. So when total body mass reduces, it typically does require just less energy. And this can come from the form of like directly. So literally talking about us burning fewer calories at like our maintenance, just the maintenance of muscle tissue or other passive functions.

So like our basal metabolic rate just becomes smaller in terms of how many calories are burnt there because we have less things to sustain less body weight to sustain. Then indirectly, this could also mean fewer calories are expended during things like walking around during the day, fewer calories expended during exercise, because we have less mass to move around.

And this is something we absolutely see when people are in a deficit and they do lose a significant amount of weight, why this kind of just stalls out eventually if they don’t change their caloric intake or their energy expenditure in some way. It’s because they’re they’re literally just the output is not as high anymore.

Aidan:

On the topic of the basal metabolic rate, think one of the most interesting ones on this topic for a lot of people is the concept of metabolic adaptation. So a portion of it is due to physically being smaller. Another portion is that metabolic adaptation side of things, which is your metabolic rate literally can slow down in response to being in a deficit.

This is partly due to your body trying to conserve calories because there’s fewer calories available. It will spend less calories or less energy on certain functions, usually less urgent functions will be spending less on. This is a very real phenomenon, I would say that in many cases, it’s often not that big of a deal. It rarely accounts for more than a couple of hundred calories per day. I like to point out that that in isolation is almost never the reason for a plateau.

Because in almost all cases if I’m working with somebody I would be giving them more than a couple hundred calories of a deficit but it is still a real difference. The other very positive thing about it though is that it goes in both directions. If you do increase your calories for a while back up to maintenance or beyond it goes in the other direction and it doesn’t take that long. So it is still a factor that’s relevant here but it’s just one of the factors.

Leah:

Another factor could be a change in incidental movement. So when we are consuming higher calories, we do naturally tend to move more and skew more towards movement across the day and therefore more calories burnt through this incidental movement. There is actually a pretty huge variation between people when it comes to calories burned through incidental movement. Like it can be a small amount, it can be a large amount depending on their overall lifestyle and kind of lifestyle choices.

But also things like fidgeting and just moving around, like just moving your body. These are things that can change depending on how much energy we have coming in over a period of time. So if we are at maintenance or in a surplus, we have access to plenty of energy.

So we are more likely to fidget and move around and have more energy to take the stairs instead of the elevator or do certain things that, maybe if we had less calories coming in, so let’s say we are in a deficit for a prolonged period of time, that fatigue is starting to set in, we’re just not being quite as generally active overall, and then this can reduce how much output we have through incidental movement. And how much this is going to impact is very person to person, but we do see this happen, you know, a bit.

And it’s a large reason as to why a lot of coaches, particularly in bodybuilding and those areas of health and fitness have step targets for their clients. It’s to try and control this variable of incidental movement, a, like it’s stagnant. So we don’t also have your calorie output reduced through a reduction in incidental movement. So we can’t really control things like fidgeting less or fidgeting more or doing those like more subconscious things, but we can control or at least track things like a step count, which is also a huge part of our, or can be a huge part of the calories burnt through incidental movement. So it’s something that we consider in talking about this concept as a whole.

Aidan:

I’m going to talk about the thermic effect of food, which is relevant in a few ways. Talking about what it is, is basically the concept that our body burns calories in the process of eating and digesting food. I often say it’s around 10% of our total calorie intake that gets expanded in this process.

But it obviously depends on a lot of variables. For example, the type of food, higher protein, higher fibre food, less processed food is typically going to lead to more than that 10% of a number. Whereas the further you get from that, the lower it’s likely to be. But let’s call it just 10% to keep it simple. If I was eating 3000 calories and then I decreased down to 2000 calories, that is probably going to be like 100 calories of energy expansion that just goes missing through the thermic effect of food. So that’s one angle here.

Another one though is you can change the types of food you eat. Like let’s say you were tracking, and this would be a rare thing to go to this extreme, but let’s say you were tracking in my fitness power or an equivalent and for weeks on end, you were having heaps of minimally processed food, high fibre, high protein. And then you change, you still kept hitting the same macros and calories.

So you kept your protein high still, but you went lower fibre and had more processed food, your thermic effect of food would decrease a bit and your energy expenditure and response that would decrease a bit. This is probably one of the smallest or least relevant variables here, but still something that’s worth kind of factoring in as well.

Leah:

One that can be quite a large variable for some people is the domino effect that an increase in hunger and cravings can have. So when you’re consistently in a caloric deficit is common for hunger and desire to eat to increase over time. And this is due to for a couple of reasons like we have actual hormonal shifts that happen to our hunger and satiety hormones but it can also be very psychological in that the restriction over a period of time can become harder to manage the longer we are doing it for some people and this means that as we progress through this deficit it becomes harder to stick to the deficit because we have this hunger, this desire to eat, these cravings starting to kind of sneak in and get greater.

And if we don’t have some kind of structure that ensures that we are still consuming the same amount of calories, regardless of this increase in hunger and desire to eat, then for most people, it means that their intake is going to go up over time. So they may have found it easy to stick to the deficit initially or easy enough, but then over time, they have kind of slowly increased their caloric intake.

And it could even be down to just, oh, you know, I’m just having that extra optional snack a little bit more often, or I’m eating out a little bit more often because it’s harder to say no to things because of these feelings and physiological changes when it comes to hunger. So this can reduce the size of your deficit. I’ve also many times seen it erase the deficit entirely and people just completely stagnate.

And then at that point, potentially considering something like a diet break becomes a conversation between a client and myself to kind of reset these hunger hormones and psychologically reset. But absolutely one of the things that can lead to you initially seeing progress and then stalling out.

Aidan:

It’s also one big reason why I am pretty big on structure. Like it can be a flexible structure, but some form of structure that allows troubleshooting because if hunger and desire to eat is increasing and there isn’t a form of structure in place, it’s highly likely to lead to an increase in intake, whether that is through snacking, whether that’s larger portions or whatever it is. And it’s usually pretty like subconscious, like not really that noticeable, particularly because like the size of a deficit in many cases isn’t usually that large.

It doesn’t take that much to either eat into it noticeably or erase it completely. On that topic from another angle, because that’s hunger, desire to eat, that’s a bit more physiological. The other angle is inconsistent or unintentional routine changes just in general. And this could be like from a mental perspective as well. The common example I see or think of in my mind is, let’s say you start a new routine and you are very, very consistent with it.

Over time, living a normal life, I assume, you might think that it makes sense to like balance your life a little bit in some way and you may not be as rigid as routine oriented and all of those kinds of things. And there could be a few little changes that slip in because that, you do need to live your life long-term, but at the start of a deficit, you may or may not have had those things in there.

These could obviously reduce the size of a deficit. There could be many explanations for why there could be small routine changes and stuff like that, but whatever the explanations are, it’s obviously a common factor here too.

Leah:

One of the trickiest things about looking at this concept of kind of stalling out in a caloric deficit is that there is rarely one explanation. It’s rarely that rare that you can point to one thing on this list and go, this is what it is. So this is the action plan. Often it is a combination of factors that is wiping out the caloric deficit.

So if this is relevant for you, you kind of have three options regardless. The first one is to reduce your caloric intake further. So either this could be through improving consistency with things or literally just changing the plan to reduce the amount of calories that you’re aiming for per day. You could also look at increasing your caloric expenditure. So again, this could be through incidental movement. So we could look at things like increasing a step count or adding a step count.

Or we could add some more formal exercise. So just some way to increase that caloric output. The third option would be to take the emphasis off fat loss for a bit and have a period of time where you are just aiming for maintenance or maybe you go into a bulking phase depending on what you’re doing. But just taking that focus off fat loss for a little while, allowing yourself to kind of physiologically and psychologically reset before giving it another crack.

And you can also use a combination of all three of these or two out of three of these. It doesn’t just have to be one. But these are the options that you have. And what you end up doing is really going to come down to case by case individual basis, whatever makes the most sense for you. But if you are at a plateau and you’ve been there for a while, and I’d say a while would be over four weeks, then it makes sense to make a change.

Aidan:

I like the last caveat because every now and then somebody DMs me. And they say they’ve hit a plateau and I’m like treating it like really seriously, like given a thorough response. And then like we’ll get to end there like, thanks. It’s been a week.

Leah:

I’m so bad. That’s why I wanted to add that. Cause like the length of the plateau, feel like people will be like, I’ve just plateaued for the last five days. I’m like, yep, that’s going to happen. Especially if you have a menstrual cycle, it’s very normal to see the kind of like plateau for two or three weeks and then a drop, plateau, and then a drop. So it’s, there are a lot of variables there, but I’d say four weeks is a good timeframe for most.

Aidan:

Yeah. And I don’t know if anyone like listening to this is a little bit disappointed by how like simple the kind of things we’re pointing to, like in a perfect world, I do wish there was a more magical solution. Like for example, I know a lot of coaches like really push like reverse dieting and a few things to like solve this. If you go back to what I said about metabolic adaptation and how like quickly that can be reversed, like it’s not like reverse dieting is a magical approach there.

The reason why I find this game, so to speak, interesting is it is the troubleshooting. It is like, say we’re like, let’s push ahead, let’s reduce the calorie intake further. Let’s not increase any exercise further because we’re already at a level that we want to be at so on and so forth. We don’t have to be like, how do we do that? How do we reduce it? Like, we do something with the plan? Do we do stuff with, how do we reduce the stuff that’s off the plan? How do we, so on and so forth. That’s the interesting challenge and I do like working in that space. So it might be a little bit not magical, but that doesn’t make it interesting still.

Leah:

Yeah, it’s the logistics, hey? Like the logistics are the things that can get complicated. It’s the theory itself is pretty simple. And I think most people are in this space or that have thought about fat loss for long enough, probably see that yet this is kind of what does happen. It doesn’t make the logistics that easy. That can still be a process in itself.

Aidan:

This has been episode 206 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. As always, if you have not already, if you could please leave a rating and a review, that would be massively appreciated.