Can't Lose Weight Anymore? Find Out Why!
Are you dieting but can't lose weight anymore? Unfortunately, this is not always a linear process because your body doesn't like to be lean, and the leaner you get, the harder it is to shed any extra fat.
This happens for obvious evolutionary reasons because throughout human history, the ready availability of food was the exception rather than the rule. Therefore, your body doesn't really care about six pack abs, and it would happily keep the jiggling belly just in case.
Besides the physiological reality, the individual genetics may play a role as well, and some folks seem to stay lean despite their crappy nutrition habits. Their testosterone and thyroid base levels may be higher, they secrete less cortisol, have good insulin and leptin sensitivity, etc.
It's important to mention that this genetic distribution has a small standard deviation, meaning that most people fall within a median range, so it wouldn't be entirely righteous to blame mother nature that you can't lose weight (at least to a point).
If you are a guy with more than 10% body fat (which is roughly the equivalent of 15% for females), my guess is that you can't lose weight because you simply underestimate your calorie intake. (I know, it's not your case because you eat like a bird, and I'm wrong.)
However, getting to single digit body fat is a different story, and everybody, regardless of their genes, will hit a wall that seems impossible to climb. At extreme levels of leanness, your body does everything possible to keep its last energy reserves, and any further step seems like a big struggle.
You will remember about the beautiful days when you were a beginner, and you genuinely believed that if you were to continue the progress at the same rate, maybe you would go for Mr. Olympia.
Testosterone levels will plummet and cortisol will increase dramatically, which means that more protein will be broken down in the liver, and converted into glucose.
In other words, your body prefers to use muscle tissue (which is less valuable for survival than fat) to fuel its energy requirements so that you can live longer.
Within a week of calorie restriction, leptin may decrease by half, and this also has a negative effect on the different tissues because it signals your brain that you are not eating enough.
Simultaneously, another hormone called ghrelin, secreted by your stomach, will go up, and consequently you will feel ravenously hungry. Along with other chemical changes, there will be a drop in your sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which translates in a negative metabolic adaptation.
This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because your body thinks that you are starving to death, and will slow down any calorie expensive activity such as protein synthesis.
Conversely, the above adaptations can be partially avoided if you periodically increase your calorie and carbohydrate intake. This should be done in your workout days in order to refill muscle glycogen (otherwise you wouldn't be able to train intensely), and recover properly.
At some point, even these cheat days won't suffice, and you should take longer breaks from your diet in order to normalize thyroid (a sort of long-term hormone which is synergistic with SNS) output, and hence increase your metabolic rate.
So my point is that if you can't lose weight anymore, cyclical dieting may be the right answer for you.
In this case, when you decide to adjust your diet, make sure that you place the refeeds around workouts, so you kill two birds with the same stone - train hard, and also reverse the aforementioned adaptations.
As a final caveat, when you get to single digit body fat, your weekly calorie deficit should be reduced to a minimum. Good luck!
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