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    Up calories and less excercise to help lose weight?

    Posts: 205 Member
    edited February 23 in Health and Weight Loss
    I have stalled (again) for about 3 weeks....lit was suggested by a few people to up my calories a bit and do a bit less excercise for a week or two....then start excercising and eating like I am and perhaps I'll start losing again....anyone ever tried this?

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    • Posts: 2,463 Member
      I have stalled (again) for about 3 weeks....lit was suggested by a few people to up my calories a bit and do a bit less excercise for a week or two....then start excercising and eating like I am and perhaps I'll start losing again....anyone ever tried this?
      Yes, it's called taking a diet break. You eat at maintenance and roll back on exercise a little bit for about 2 weeks. It helps if you have been eating in a deficit for a prolonged period of time. You may gain a little weight when you do this but it will be water/glycogen not fat. You can't gain fat at maintenance. The idea is that giving the body 2 weeks at maintenance helps reverse any metabolic slowdown or hormonal changes that can accompany long deficits.
    • Posts: 8,680 Member
      http://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/truth-about-metabolic-damage
    • Posts: 205 Member
      show previous quotes
      Yes, it's called taking a diet break. You eat at maintenance and roll back on exercise a little bit for about 2 weeks. It helps if you have been eating in a deficit for a prolonged period of time. You may gain a little weight when you do this but it will be water/glycogen not fat. You can't gain fat at maintenance. The idea is that giving the body 2 weeks at maintenance helps reverse any metabolic slowdown or hormonal changes that can accompany long deficits.


      What exactly is considered a "long time" I've been at it for about 10 months....and how do I know what your maintenance calories are?
    • Posts: 2,463 Member
      http://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/truth-about-metabolic-damage
      That article is garbage! "Eat less and exercise more can easily lead an advanced lifter into a state of metabolic damage." Seems very relevant to OP as most the people on this forum are clearly advanced lifters with 6+ years of weight lifting experience..

      Furthermore in the example he writes about, the person metabolically adapted to dieting in 1 week. That is PURE NONSENSE! Then after 2 weeks of dieting the person in his example is in full metabolic shutdown and he gains 15 lbs in a week. This simply doesn't happen in reality. Why not save t-nation articles for the t-nation forum. The majority of the advice on that website is geared for advanced lifters running PEDS. They allow PED discussion in their forums, and the T in T-nation stands for testosterone. The site simply isn't relevant at all for 99% of the people who post here including the OP.
      What exactly is considered a "long time" I've been at it for about 10 months....and how do I know what your maintenance calories are?
      10 months is certainly a "long time". I would do the diet break. What are you currently eating for calories? Usually adding 4-500 to that is good.
    • Posts: 8,680 Member
      show previous quotes
      That article is garbage! "Eat less and exercise more can easily lead an advanced lifter into a state of metabolic damage." Seems very relevant to OP as most the people on this forum are clearly advanced lifters with 6+ years of weight lifting experience..

      Furthermore in the example he writes about, the person metabolically adapted to dieting in 1 week. That is PURE NONSENSE! Then after 2 weeks of dieting the person in his example is in full metabolic shutdown and he gains 15 lbs in a week. This simply doesn't happen in reality. Why not save t-nation articles for the t-nation forum. The majority of the advice on that website is geared for advanced lifters running PEDS. They allow PED discussion in their forums, and the T in T-nation stands for testosterone. The site simply isn't relevant at all for 99% of the people who post here including the OP.
      show previous quotes
      10 months is certainly a "long time". I would do the diet break. What are you currently eating for calories? Usually adding 4-500 to that is good.

      You are taking the article too literal. A lot of how guys lose weight can be used by girls also. If a beginner gets down the habit to the lifestyle change it will make the rest of there life that much easier to maintain. I know for a fact that whenever doing your weight loss before you started weight training that you had to keep eating less and less to maintain the scale weight loss each week.
    • Posts: 4,138 Member
      If its been 3 weeks, and you're consistently weighing/logging everything - just keep at it. The body (especially for females) has annoying tendencies related to stress, time of the month/hormones, sodium, etc. The scale, for me, stays steady or goes up for approximately 2 weeks following the start of my period. (OThers see similar results before their cycle starts.) Your body has its own routine, and it will take longer than a few weeks of consistency to see it.

      Be consistent - if you're not weighing everything now, that's the place to start.
    • Posts: 93 Member
      Here's my anecdote - I took a 2 week diet break after 6-7 months of calorie restriction. I upped my calories from 1600 to 2100 (still below what my calculated maintenance is) because I was starting to feel weak at the gym and didn't have any energy. I fully expected to gain several pounds from increased water weight and glycogen stores. The complete opposite happened - in those 2 weeks I went from my stalled weight of 184.7 down to about 178. My best guess is that, although losing fat during my "stall", I was increasingly retaining water. I think eating at a comfortable level let my body flush the water and reveal the weight loss that it had been masking. Upping your calories will not cause you to somehow lose more fat, but it did give me peace of mind that I was still losing, and it gave me a much needed mental break after prolonged aggressive calorie restriction.
    • Posts: 26,368 Member
      If its been 3 weeks, and you're consistently weighing/logging everything - just keep at it. The body (especially for females) has annoying tendencies related to stress, time of the month/hormones, sodium, etc. The scale, for me, stays steady or goes up for approximately 2 weeks following the start of my period. (OThers see similar results before their cycle starts.) Your body has its own routine, and it will take longer than a few weeks of consistency to see it.

      Be consistent - if you're not weighing everything now, that's the place to start.

      +1
    • Posts: 2,463 Member


      You are taking the article too literal. A lot of how guys lose weight can be used by girls also. If a beginner gets down the habit to the lifestyle change it will make the rest of there life that much easier to maintain. I know for a fact that whenever doing your weight loss before you started weight training that you had to keep eating less and less to maintain the scale weight loss each week.
      Of course you have to keep eating less. You're body becomes smaller and requires less energy to run on. You are making a point no one is attacking. What does not happen is a full on metabolic stall like described in the article. How can you take an article supposedly written to be "scientific" too literal? If it was scientific it should be able to be taken 100% literally, otherwise it's nonsense! Also where did I say that weight loss advice for men is not applicable to women? I said that advice from a website dedicated to advanced lifters, many of them are on PED's does not apply to the vast majority of people who post on the MFP forums. I never mentioned gender once...
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