Rethinking Calorie Deficits and Maintenance

Calories in, calories out sounds so simple! But more times than not it works against us. Baylee explains why you can't just "eat less" forever, and what to be focusing on instead for successful weight loss. 

If you have questions, or topics that you want to hear about, head over to our Instagrams https://www.instagram.com/bayleethedietitian/ or https://www.instagram.com/brianna.dietitian/ and send us a DM! You can also follow the podcast https://www.instagram.com/mocktailminutes/

Featured Mocktails: 

Poppi 

Click play, sip back, and be empowered.

Transcript

0:00

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of Mocktail Minutes. This is Bailey, and it's a solo episode today. It always throws me off because I'm used to, "It's Bailey," "It's Brianna," and then, yeah, it's throw- it throws me off a little bit anytime we do a solo one. But this week I am drinking the Shirley Temple Poppy. I don't think I've tried this one. I might have. But very good, very nostalgic. I enjoy it. It's a fun little drink to have. So doing the Poppy, but today I'm very excited for this topic. I am talking about the calories in, calories out method recommendation has essentially started to create the problem that it was meant to fix, and I am seeing this time and again. I reverse diet so many people, and this is where reverse diets often come in. So the irony of eat less, move more, the strategy is supposed to create a calorie deficit. But when we take it too far or too long, it actually causes the body to adapt in ways that make the deficit smaller and smaller over time. So number one, your metabolism adapts. When you lose weight, your body doesn't just become lighter, it also becomes more efficient. You burn fewer calories because number one, a smaller body just requires less energy. You start naturally moving less without realizing it, especially if you have a very large deficit, you're low on energy. Your body becomes more energy efficient during exercise, and digestion requires fewer calories because you're eating less food. So someone who started dieting at twenty-five hundred calories may eventually maintain their new weight at two thousand calories or less. This is what's called adaptive thermogenesis. It's your body's attempt to conserve energy. Now, the other thing that happens is your NEAT goes down. NEAT is that non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and it's often a huge hidden factor. So this is like fidgeting, standing, walking around, changing positions, like household work. When calories get too low, we subconsciously move less because we don't have the energy. For example, you used to take the stairs, now you're doing the elevator. You sit more, you park closer. You stop pacing while on the phone. These small changes can actually reduce your daily calorie expenditure by hundreds of calories. So many people think "I'm eating less and exercising more. Why am I stuck?" But their body has quietly removed much of the deficit through just reduced movement. Now, another thing, hunger hormones increase. So as body fat decreases and dieting continues, hunger hormones increase, and fullness signals decrease. Food becomes more rewarding. This is kinda like a survival response. The body doesn't know you're trying to fit into a smaller pair of jeans. It interprets prolonged calorie restriction as a potential threat to energy availability. So it leads to those crazy cravings, more food noise, binge restrict cycles, and even that weekend overeating. Weekends are just as important as those weekdays. Next thing is your recovery suffers. Many people respond to a plateau by adding more cardio, more HIIT, more workouts. But if calories are already low, recovery is now compromised. So you may have more fatigue, poor sleep lower training performance, reduced muscle retention. The result? You burn fewer calories during workouts, you preserve less muscle, and you feel worse. Which brings me to my next point of muscle loss lowers calorie needs. If weight loss is aggressive and protein or resistance training is inadequate, some weight loss is going to come from lean tissue, and muscle is metabolically active tissue. Lean muscle means lower, less muscle. Less muscle means lower resting energy expenditure, less strength, and the reduced ability to maintain that weight loss long term. So now the person that has a smaller metabolic engine, it's n-- So now the person has a smaller metabolic engine than when they started. So the deficit eventually disappears. So here's what often happens. Let's say maintenance is twenty-five hundred calories. You start eating two thousand, you're losing weight. Months later, that maintenance is gonna adapt to twenty one hundred calories. You're still eating two thousand. So we went from a five hundred calorie deficit to a four hundred calorie deficit. Sorry, not f- five hundred calories to a hundred calorie deficit. And so instead of reassessing, many people think, "I need to eat less," because calories in, calories out. So then they drop to seventeen hundred calories, then fifteen hundred, then thirteen hundred, and at some point, there is just very little room left to reduce their food further while maintaining nutrition and performance and just overall sustainability. This is why this creates weight loss resistance What many people call weight loss resistance, it's like years of chronic dieting repeatedly lowering calories, increasing exercise, metabolic adaptations, reduced NEAT, increased hunger, poor recovery, difficulty maintaining a meaningful des-deficit. The body isn't broken, it's just adapted to the environment you've given it. What actually works better, so rather than just constantly eating less and less and moving more, is you need to build up calories when appropriate. So this is where I am doing a lot with reverse dieting. A reverse diet or maintenance phase will improve energy. It helps your training performance. It increases your daily movement. It reduces that food focus, and it just creates a better starting point for future fat loss. It's like you're supporting your body to be able to lose fat better. You also need to preserve your muscle. And so resistance training, prioritize protein, avoid aggressive deficits, and make sure you get enough carbs. You need to do all those things in order to preserve your muscle. After age thirty, we do lose muscle every year We also want to utilize maintenance phases. Fat loss is not meant to be continuous. We have strategic periods at maintenance that can help reduce diet fatigue, improve adherence, support performance, and make future deficits more effective. We want to create the smallest effective deficit. So instead of asking, "How little can I eat?" The right question should be, "What's the most food I can eat while still losing weight?" This approach is usually more sustainable and leads to better long-term results. So the problem isn't that calorie deficits just don't work. The problem is that many people respond to a plateau with more restriction. We've stayed in deficits for too long. We're already in a deficit. We don't need to deficit more, and eventually, they've dieted themselves into a corner, just eating very little, exercising a lot, feeling exhausted, and still not seeing the results they expect. The solution isn't always a bigger deficit. Sometimes it's rebuilding that foundation so your body is willing and able to lose fat again. So when we think in terms of weeks, so week one to two, most of that initial weight loss is glycogen depletion, water loss, and reduced food volume in just your digestive tract. At this point, you don't really have a lot of metabolic adaptations. However, hunger signals may start to change. Week three through six, this is where we can start to see adaptations. So you might see less meat, more hunger more cravings, less energy, a smaller rate of weight loss. More-- Most people are gonna lose more weight at the beginning than as you continue on. Not a bad thing. In reality, the body is simply just becoming more efficient. So then week six to week twelve, this is where adaptations become even more noticeable. Around twelve weeks is where I cons-consider, okay, do we need to pull you out of this deficit? Because the goal, too if you are not in this huge deficit, you shouldn't be feeling super hungry. I want you to recover well. I want you to be able to maintain your workouts. I want you to keep going forward without feeling like trash. So- Week six through 12, may- if workout performance declines, you have more food noise, you have increased fatigue, you have reduced recovery just like that lower daily move-in, difficulty maintaining this is often when the psychological side becomes more challenging than the physiological side. We have more adaptations. Now, week 12 through 16, this is where many people begin accumulating significant diet fatigue. Food noise get- can get high, motivation drops, sleep drops, strength starts declining, mood changes, and adi- adherence becomes a little bit harder. I do not like to put anyone on a fat loss phase over 16 weeks. Some people are eight weeks, some people are 10 weeks, some people are 12 weeks. Kinda just depends on the person, but the goal is not to be in a deficit forever. In fact, what really, what we really wanna consider is after you reverse up to your maintenance needs, after maintenance, you're gonna stay there for a few weeks, and then you do a calorie deficit for your fat loss phase. You do that, and then when the time comes, we pull you back up to maintenance for a few weeks This is to rebuild that metabolism back up. So then essentially, you switch between maintenance phase and fat loss phase back and forth until you're at your goal weight. You don't just stay in a deficit until you are at your goal weight, and this is where timing is different for everyone. It depends on your starting body fat. So someone with a higher body fat generally will tolerate a longer fat loss phase. So if you have forty percent fat, you can diet longer than someone with thirty percent fat. Why? Because you have ener-- more energy reserves available. The size of the deficit also matters. A two hundred and fifty calorie deficit creates less stress than a thousand calorie deficit. Someone losing point five percent of body weight versus one point five to two percent can maintain it differently. Aggressive deficits accelerate that ad-adaptation. That's why I also don't do aggressive de-deficits. Training performance is also one of the best indicators. If strength is stable, improving, and recovery is good, the diet is likely to still be tolerated. When strength starts to decline across multiple lifts despite the programming, it's often a sign that fatigue is accumulated. Hunger and food noise is also a major kind of marker. If someone is thinking about food constantly or just struggling with those cravings just planning their entire day around food, the physiological and psychological cost of the deficit is also increasing. And then adherence. Can you still adhere to this plan? If you are hitting calories, protein, steps, workouts, everything consistently, you may not need a break. If it's falling off, more restriction is not the answer. So this is things I kinda consider. Where do we need to go out of a fat loss phase and into a maintenance? So maintenance phase is needed when weight loss has stalled despite compliance. Now, this is not just one week. This is over three weeks. With accurate tracking, steps are consistent, training is consistent. What I often will see recovery become poor, so more soreness, less sleep, more fatigue, and hunger is more disruptive. Those constant thoughts about food, increased urges to binge, difficulty concentrating, strength is declining, especially multiple lifts. Mood changes, like being irritable, low motivation, increased stress, and you're running out of calorie cuts. This is a huge one. If you started at twenty-seven hundred and now you're, like, eighteen hundred, there's probably more valual-- value in going back up to maintenance than cutting further. So that way, we don't just keep dropping you and putting you in this very low area. So eight to 16-week blocks is what I think about. For many of my clients, this range works because it allows good progress, mana- manageable fatigue, better adherence, and easier transition to maintenance. So this is like your fat loss season, and then we might need a maintenance season. So we kinda switch back and forth So what I think about, we continue fat loss if you're losing weekly, hunger is manageable, strength is stable, recovery is good, adherence is high. We consider maintenance if we've been in a deficit for twelve to sixteen weeks, food noise is increasing, performance is declining, fatigue is accumulated, and weight loss has slowed substantially. We end if you are just exhausted, if recovery is poor, relationship with the food is deteriorating So one of the biggest mistakes coaches make is assuming that a plateau means the client needs a larger deficit. Often, the plateau is actually the body and the brain signaling, "I've been dieting for long enough." Sometimes the fastest way to lose more fat isn't another calorie cut. It's spending enough time at maintenance to reduce diet fatigue, restore your performance, increase your movement, and make the next fat loss phase productive again. A good fat loss phase doesn't end when weight loss stops. It ends when the cost of continuing the deficit exceeds the benefits of staying in it. I hope you found this episode helpful, gave you some good insights as to why you have m- maybe heard us say you might need to crease- increase your calories in order to lose weight. This was a better e- not a better. This was a deeper explanation as to why calories in, calories out is not wrong, but it could be misused or not appropriate for everyone at this time. Hope you have a great rest of your day, and we will be back next week with a brand-new episode. Bye.