Do you know what your #1 tool is, to healthy and sustainable fat loss?
It's eating plenty of protein. Most women overlook this important macro, but this is really the key that you must have, if you want do lose body fat safely and effectively. Get my FREE guide here and get started: https://kerstenkimura.lpages.co/fit-physique-formula/
What Happens After Fat Loss?
Most women know, of course, what fat loss means, and how to do it — eat less food, to put it really simply.
However, oftentimes they don't have any idea what they should do after the fat loss phase is over. The common mistake I see is staying in deficit for months or even years, and as a result, slowing down our metabolism and developing hormonal issues.
I have done several episodes on this topic. Check out videos HERE and HERE to learn more.
But what should happen after the fat loss phase?
What Happens After You've Lost Fat?
There are several phases that follow a fat loss phase:
Diet Break
Diet break is absolutely necessary if the goal is healthy fat loss — I'm not for quick fixes, I want you to maintain your results.
Losing fat is not a bad thing, but continuing to eat low calories is. With a strategic diet break, we can avoid metabolic adaptations and slowdown, as well as hormonal imbalances.
A diet break should be taken after 12-16 weeks of being in a deficit, and it should last 1-3 weeks, and it should be done strategically and still counting macros — not eating anything and everything in sight 🙂
Fat Loss
Then, we can do another fat loss phase, if we didn't previously reach our goal yet. This too can be 12 or max 16 weeks at length, but no more than that — even if you feel like you have more fat to lose, you need to stop there to keep the body healthy.
Reverse Diet
The next step should always be a reverse diet.
That means, gradually and slowly, increasing our calories until they are at a point where our energy intake and expenditure match. In other words, if, through your exercise and basal metabolic rate, your body burns about 2300 calories, this is how much you want to eat my the end of your reverse diet.
Sounds scary? It isn't. If you don't increase calories overnight but do it gradually, and continue lifting weights, you're going to experience a lot of positive things, like increased energy, improved strength, and more muscle.
Will you gain weight? You may, a few pounds. But this shouldn't be the focus. Your measurements stay close to where they were, and you maintain similar level of leanness.
Maintenance
Once you've gotten your calories up again, you have 2 options:
You can just stay there! You don't have to change anything different. You're maintaining. And this is where you should be most of your life. No, I don't mean you have to be tracking every day. But use the tools that you learned during tracking, keep the protein high and track more intuitively.
The other option is to do another fat loss phase if you want to, but here's the important part: You need to maintain at least as long as you were in a deficit. If you were in deficit for 24 weeks, this is how long you should maintain before trying to cut again.
Bulking
What? You want me to bulk?
It's not a bad idea. I know that women are so scared of it because it sounds like a lot of food. But you know what, it's not a bad thing! Bulking is a great option if you want to put on muscle mass. It's a great thing to do to increase your metabolic rate, and may be very beneficial for your hormones.
We're not talking about eating 3500 calories if your maintenance is 2500. But we may add 100-150 calories to help you build some awesome muscle. During that time, you may gain some body fat, but if you keep lifting heavy and NEAT high, you're going to see great muscle increase.
And muscle, of course, is the tissue of health and longevity.
The Full Cycle
As you see, there's so much more to macros than just losing fat. Ideally, I want all my clients to go through the full cycle (bulking is not absolutely necessary) but they should do at least reverse and maintenance, to make sure that their results last.
What questions do you have? Leave them below!
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