Why The Last 10 Pounds are the Hardest to Lose
Why The Last Ten Pounds Are The Hardest To Lose
1.) A Smaller Body Burns Fewer Calories
This makes perfect sense when you take a step back and look at this situation logically, but when you start to view the bathroom scale as your nemesis and feel confused and frustrated, it’s easy to let emotions take over.
The less you weigh and smaller your body is, the fewer calories will be burned to support your tissues, organs and daily movement.
Both body fat and muscle mass require calories to maintain and if you lose a significant amount of either one, or both over a period of time the body doesn’t require as many calories to maintain them.
Solution: Stay Around Your Ideal Weight
Prevention is always the best measure, and not allowing yourself to get too far out of shape in the first place will remove a lot of the temptation to use extreme diet and exercise to achieve your goals.
Maintaining low levels of body fat year round isn’t really conducive to a fun and full life so if you can stay within five to seven pounds of your ideal body weight you’re in a great position to lose with a few small changes.
By staying closer to your ideal body weight you also have a much better idea of how much you need to eat to maintain, or chip away at calories if you’d like to lose a few pounds.
2.) Slip Ups Add Up
As you’re getting deeper into your weight loss diet you’ll have less room for slip ups and overindulgences in your nutrition.
This doesn’t mean you need to live like a nun or monk and only eat chicken and broccoli, but the smaller details of your nutrition, and portion/calorie awareness get increasingly important.
The cruel joke is the longer you’re dieting to lose weight the stronger your hunger, cravings and fatigue will be, making you want to overindulge in foods.
However those small slips ups over time can add up to a stall or plateau without you even realizing it.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that the longer you’re on a specific nutrition plan the more comfortable you get at estimating or guessing, but those guesstimates can be coming back to bite you.
Solution: Take Inventory And Recalibrate
Choose a period of one to two weeks and commit to a period of tracking every last thing you drink and eat to make sure you’re actually eating the same amount you think you are.
As you go on dieting there’s bound to be samples, bites, snacks that sneak in and when you catch them it helps you to rule out the low hanging fat loss fruit.
This also helps you connect how much you’re eating with how much you’re losing to determine what changes you need to make.
If you’re not and you’ve been accurate with your food intake then I’d recommend reducing your calories by 5-8%.
3.) Your Patience Will Be Tested
When it comes to weight loss if you can’t be patient in times when progress is slower, you won’t reach your goal.
I know you expect to step on the scale and see a lower number consistently but having worked with hundreds of clients I can tell you it doesn’t work like that for anyone.
What you have to keep in mind is that you gained this weight over years, and while it might not take you years to lose the weight, it won’t happen in a few weeks either.
Commit to the habits and the process, and you will achieve the outcome.
This is where having top level coaching like we do at DM Elite to help you stay on course and keep chipping away at your goal is absolutely crucial to your success.
Solution: Shift The Focus To Habit Based Goals
In any weight loss journey the reality is you don’t directly have control over the outcome, but you have control over the habits that influence the outcome.
You can’t control the number on the scale, but you have total control over your habits.
By shifting your focus to habit based goals you allow yourself to see progress on a daily basis, and celebrate the real wins that add up to your weight loss goal.
When you use habit based goals you can celebrate daily wins, and feel good about the entire process rather than waiting to see a number on a scale.
4.) You’re Nutrition Plan Isn’t Sustainable
When you’re trying to lose weight and get healthy it helps to eat mostly unprocessed whole foods.
This ensures you’re managing your appetite, and staying full while getting lots of fibre and micronutrients.
You can go too far with the ‘clean eating’ craze though so it backfires.
When you get too strict with your nutrition and deny yourself any of the foods you enjoy eating, eventually that restriction catches up with you.
Cravings will increase, you’ll start to think about the foods you want but have denied yourself this whole time and there’s a point where most people will go off the rails and have a “cheat day”
You’ll compensate by trying to eat as clean as possible and go back to restricting until you have another “cheat day.”
In the end this unplanned and “cheat day” can undo the weeks progress and leave you feeling annoyed and frustrated.
Luckily like we do in our Reboot Challenges at DM Elite we’re covering how to fit foods you love into your plan so “cheat days” don’t sabotage progress.
Solution: Use A More Flexible Approach
At the end of the day when it comes to fat loss you need to be burning more calories than you’re eating to lose weight.
There is no one food that can stop you from losing weight when you’re burning more calories than you’re eating.
This isn’t to say that food quality doesn’t matter because, it absolutely does and you should be eating a diet that’s mostly nutrient dense whole foods.
500 calories from Chicken and Veg is better than a slice of Dominos.
By recognizing that there is no one food that can stop you from losing fat, it means you don’t have to be so restrictive with your nutrition and can fit in some foods you really like.
To do this you track how many calories you need to be eating on a daily basis to lose weight, and strategically fit in some of those more fun foods inside those calories.
If it causes you to go over your calories for that day, you can borrow some calories from tomorrow, and end up at the same place calorie wise at the end of the week and with the same weight loss.
To do this it might mean you mostly focus on lean protein and vegetables for the day so you have a calorie buffer for that meal or dessert.
Long term using a more flexible approach will lead to better results because you’ll still have the calorie awareness but less temptation to have those uncontrolled cheat days because you haven’t deprived yourself.
5.) You’re Exercising At A Lower Intensity
As you eat less and go to the gym you’re giving the body less fuel to use, yet asking it to work hard and burn more energy which is a scarce resource at the moment.
As a way to make your body more efficient when there’s less food being eaten, your body will actually make you burn fewer calories during exercise.
Muscular contractions and intensity become more efficient, meaning you’re not able to contract your muscle as intensely causing you to burn fewer calories.
With any weight loss diet there will times when you’re more fatigued and as a result motivation and intensity will be lacking.
Due to lack of motivation and fatigue you might miss a few workouts, cut sessions short, or not put forth the same effort as before.
The calories burned in the gym add up over the weeks, months and years which can chip away at your fat loss goals.
If any of these signs sounds like something you’ve experienced when trying to lose those last ten pounds then let us know and reply to this email if need any particular help with the above ^
Solution: Optimize Pre Workout Nutrition
A big part of the fatigue and decreased motivation when it comes to training can be solved by having your pre workout nutrition squared away.
Part of it is physiology, but also psychology too!
Eating a pre workout snack leaves most people with more energy and pop in their training session so let’s look at what you could eat.
Caffeine can be great pre workout to give your workout a boost, and help to fight off any fatigue you may have.
It’s one of the best known and studied performance enhancers and helps with energy, endurance and alertness during exercise.
Usually somewhere in the realm of 100-200mg of caffeine like you’d find in a cup of coffee is sufficient, but depends on your individual tolerance.
Next up is carbs, from a physical and psychological standpoint people tend to perform better in the gym when they have some carbs around their workouts.
The source of carbs you do best with is going to be an individual preference but a few things that work well for a lot of people are things like rice, rice cakes, toast with jam or even a carb drink.
Usually 30-50 grams of carbs is enough to get you through a normal sixty to ninety minute workout with some pop on your training.
Having some protein is can help with making sure you have amino acids in your system for muscle repair too, and something in the realm of 20-30 grams of protein pre workout is a great option.
To help maximize things having 100-200 mg of caffeine and 30-50 grams of carbs and 20-30 gram of protein can really help shake off some of that fatigue and give you the energy to keep pushing in the gym.
In Conclusion
There’s a number of reasons why the last ten pounds are the hardest to lose, and most people will repeat the same dieting cycles without ever breaking through.
You now have the solutions and actionable steps for the most common problems you’re going to run into when it comes to losing that last 10 pounds.
By using these solutions and putting them into action you can save yourself a ton time and headache wondering why progress isn’t happening.
As always to get the fast track, with the support and guidance necessary to reach your goals without all the confusion and frustration ask us here at DM Elite for help.
Thanks for reading 🙂