What happens when we have been consistently counting the calories and burning off more than we are taking in for several weeks, but we still can’t seem to lose weight?. And that happens even when you’ve been extremely detailed about making sure that every single day you body is in a calorie deficit.
What gives? So I wanted to quickly address this, because it has to do something called metabolic slowdown. One study showed that people who focus solely on hormones instead of counting calories lost 65% more weight than those who were just focused on counting calories every day.
Now, this doesn’t mean that keeping your body in a calorie deficit isn’t necessary, at least three or four days of the week to lose belly fat, but it’s not as important as addressing hormones.
So I want to talk about a couple things that you can implement into your lifestyle to prevent this from happening to you, which is a condition known as metabolic slowdown. And I want to reference a study that was done on The Biggest Loser contestants from season 8.
So six years after the show, they went and researched these contestants, and they found that their metabolism slowed down dramatically, and they were burning anywhere from 400 to 800 calories less per day than when they originally left the show.
Also, every single contestant but one weighs just as much or if not more than they did before they started the show. So only one contestant weighs less after six years. This is the perfect example of why extreme dieting and extreme exercise does not work.
It slows down the metabolism, it makes the body adapt. It’s called adaptation, so the body fights back, the metabolic rate slows down, and the body wants to store more fat. So the solution to this is addressing hormones.
Three Tips to Reverse Metabolic Slowdown
1 Increase your protein intake
There’s three things that you can do. The first one is increase your protein intake. Research shows that when you increase your protein intake, you hold on to more muscle mass and you increase your metabolic rate naturally through the thermic effect of food.
Remember, when your body digests protein, it burns more calories than when it’s digesting carbs or fats. So by increasing your protein intake, you prevent muscle loss, which keeps your metabolism going, and you also increase the metabolic rate at the same time.
Weight Training
The second thing you should do is weight training. It’s super important that you weight train. After 35-years-old, growth hormone levels inside our body start to decline rapidly. This is a condition known as menopause.
Also, men’s testosterone levels decline rapidly. When menopause hits women, their progesterone to estrogen ratio gets out of whack. So we need to address these issues, and one of the best ways that you can prevent muscle loss and optimize hormones is to weight lift or weight train, or bodyweight train at least three or four days of the week.
3. Use Patterns to Optimize your Metabolism
Now the other thing that you need to do is use movement patterns, rest periods, and intensity levels that are specifically designed to optimize hormones, like growth hormone. So somewhere around this post, you’re going to see our recommendations to do so.
Conclusions
So let’s recap on this. Increase your protein intake, use body weight movements or intense weight training three or four days of the week, and then optimize hormones using recommended protocols.
Remember you can change your body with the correct information and tools, everybody can. Expect the best!
