You know that you need a caloric deficit to lose fat and you have done the math to work out your starting calories.
 
Great stuff.
 
Fast forward a few weeks: You’ve been dieting hardcore and you’ve seen some losses… but now it looks like you’ve hit a plateau.
 
Well then, time to lower calories.
 
Wait a second! Is this really your best option?
 
It’s true: When fat loss plateaus, increasing the calories you burn or reducing the calories you eat will help you kickstart the process again.
 
However, opting to lower calories as soon as the weight on the scale stops moving might be overkill. So, in this article, I’m going to cover:
 

• What is a plateau?
• What tweaks can you make to get un-stuck before you lower calories? 

 
More often than not, these tweaks will help my clients see a change without touching their food.
 
So strap in and let’s get into it.

Regular readers of this blog will already know that fat loss requires a caloric deficit.
 
In most cases, if you are not seeing any fat loss, the reason is that you are not in a deficit. And yet, what if you have been dieting for some time and you have seen results, but they have just stopped coming?
 
Maybe the solution is not to diet harder, lower calories, and increase activity levels, even though this can sometimes be a viable strategy to get out of a plateau.
 
Maybe this time the solution is – gasp! – to take a break from the diet and enter a maintenance phase. Counterintuitive much? Hear me out.
 
In this article, I will do my best to cover:
 

• What maintenance is
• Why it is so important and when to do it
• Who can benefit the most from a maintenance phase

​A lot of us pursue fat loss at some point in our fitness journey.
 
But what is body fat and what is it for?
 
Where does it come from?
 
And how do we lose it?
 
This article is all about understanding the answers to these questions.

​“How can I stay full on my diet?”
 
In this article, I am going to do a deep dive into this topic.
 
First of all, a hard pill to swallow: Tips can help make you feel full for longer, but they will not completely stop the hunger.
 
The thing is, being hungry is your body’s natural response to a caloric deficit. When there isn’t enough energy coming in, the body triggers the release of hunger hormones, which in turn generate a desire for food.
 
Your body is trying to keep you alive. This simply happens to be very inconvenient when you are trying to stick to a fat loss diet.
 
So being hungry is an expected consequence of dieting, not the end of the world.
 
If you understand that some hunger is part of the process and that food will always be there, dealing with it mentally can become much easier.
 
That said, there are indeed food choices we can make and behaviours we can adapt in order to reduce the discomfort of an empty belly. Let’s get into them.

​In fitness, expectations can make or break your motivation.
 
When my clients want to embark on a fat loss or muscle-building diet, I like to give them an overview of the changes they might experience, especially in the first few weeks.
 
When something unexpected happens, or when they encounter their first bump in the road, they feel much more confident if I told them beforehand that this was a possibility.
 
In this article, I’m going to cover what could happen in your first few weeks of dieting for fat loss.