If you’ve been dieting for a while — say about six months — and you’ve stayed around 1,500 to 1,700 calories while doing a lot of cardio and losing weight consistently, when you hit a plateau and someone tells you to do more cardio and eat less, don’t take that at face value.
I highly recommend that you think about taking a maintenance break, where you aren’t eating at your deprivation calorie level. Instead, you’ll eat at your maintenance calorie level, and then go back to that 1,500 to 1,700 calories range.
Continuing to cut calories might give you immediate results on the scale, but eventually you’re going to hit a place where you won’t lose anymore and the only option you have is to go up.
One of our community members was eating 900 calories a day. He had to do a metabolism reset; it took two years to get back up to where he needed to be. I’m sharing this with you because if there’s just one person I can help avoid getting into that rut, I would feel like it was worth it.
If you’re eating less and less and less to lose weight faster, it will work for a short period of time, but it’s not going to see you through till the end. It’s better to take a week off, eat at your maintenance calorie level, then go back to the slight cut that you were doing before. Adding in more cardio isn’t always the answer.
Change up your workouts and see if that helps. Once you come off that week of maintenance, weigh and measure everything. You might be shocked; just those two things might kick-start you back onto the road of losing weight.
Don’t just take my word on it. I always say do your due diligence and do research on your own. People will often jump to that conclusion:
Do more cardio, eat less, get results.
I’m here to tell you that might seem on the surface like it makes sense, but long term — six months out, a year out — it isn’t going to give you the results you want.
I’d love to get this message out. It’s not about eating less and moving a lot more. It’s really about being smart about the process so you can see it through till the end and come out the healthiest version of yourself.