Are you struggling to lose weight and don’t know why? Before you take a drastic step and slash your overall caloric intake or eliminate a whole food group from your diet, check to make sure you are doing everything below.
Ask Yourself These Questions
- Have you had at least 5 servings of vegetables a day consistently for 2 weeks?
- Have you drunk half your body weight in ounces of water daily for 2 weeks?
- Have you had 20-25g of fiber daily?
- Have you averaged 10k steps a day?
- Have you exercised your regular amount?
- Have you gotten at least 6-8 hours of sleep consistently for two weeks?
- Have you practiced nasal breathing most of the time and for most of your workouts?
- Have you done all the above for at least 2 weeks with NO change? (not just scale weight)
If you can confidently answer yes to all the above and your weight or measurements have not changed. Then it may be time to look at cutting back calories a little bit. I recommend a 5% decrease in calories from carbs and fats.
However, if you can’t answer yes to all of the above questions, then stop! I recommend fixing the variables that you are not answering yes to. When we cut calories and eliminate food groups, we are essentially down regulating our metabolism and stressing our bodies out. Our bodies go into survival mode when we choose to not feed them the calories they need to thrive. It’s ok to do this every once in a while, to meet short term goals, but once this becomes our normal, our bodies will fight to stay alive. They will lower your metabolism to meet the new caloric intake.
Going straight back into a deficit creates a yo-yo dieting habit that we want to avoid. We want to stabilize our bodies and allow them to settle into a happy place that keeps all our systems functioning optimally.
The more we cut calories and diet down, the more we are stressing our bodies out and making everything work harder.
-Hunter
