Eat To Perform Blog

When we first started we did our deficit (dieting) phases similar to others in the space.

Basically they were three month cycles and then calories would move back to normal….

And that worked for A LOT of people.

But we found an interesting trend, at about week FOUR diet adherence declined in a major way. So we tested FOUR weeks to see if that was better. We found multiple problems within the four week cycle, here they are….

Even getting VERY aggressive it’s hard for a client to lose more than say eight pounds. A lot of people landed at about five or six.

Your body reacts to dieting QUICKLY, so after about week two your body has already adjusted a lot. Let me give you an example, let’s say you did quicker cycles for six months with one month off each time, here is what we saw….. (I hope it’s obvious everyone is a bit different and how they ate before they came to us is important, so keep that in mind, these are averages)

Scenario 1

Deficit month 1 client loses 6-8 pounds. Good result.

Normalize calories month 2, client stays weight stable.

Deficit month 2 (in the third month) client loses 4-6 pounds. Okay result.

Normalize calories for month 4, client stays weight stable.

Deficit month 3 (in the fourth month) client loses 2-4 pounds, some lose nothing. Bad result.

Normalize calories all the way back to normal.

For some clients this process netted them about 12 pounds of loss, good but not great and the third month is basically a waste of time. Here is hoo we fixed it.

Scenario 2

Deficit 6 weeks (will tell you more below) client loses 10-12 pounds. Great result.

Normalize calories for four weeks, client stays weight stable.

Second Deficit of 6 weeks, client loses 8-10 pounds. Also a great result.

See the difference? On the low side the first scenario you lose 12 pounds, with the second scenario you lose 18. On the high side you lose 18 in the first scenario and with the second scenario you lose 22 POUNDS!

In the first scenario it takes you SIX MONTHS! In the second scenario you are done in just over THREE! But let’s get into more details because that’s important.

“HOW DO PEOPLE STAY WEIGHT STABLE when calories are going up?” Good question

We use a proprietary method but like the picture says, faster is better, your metabolism adjusts quicker. That said, calories don’t come back all at once but you should be back over 2000 for women by about week 3 and for men it’s about 2300. Neither of which are a surplus. If we are all being real here we have learned a lot of bad habits from dieting. I remember when Whole 30 was a big deal, people would lose a few pounds living in a very restricted way but the problem was WHOLE 31. If you only lose 6-8 pounds and your weight goes up 4-5 pounds in one day that can be pretty demoralizing. This is the problem with super restrictive diets. A monkey with an abacus can do that part, people need coaching for the second part, WHEN FOOD COMES BACK. I don’t think there is any program out there that does it better than we do. We just have too many skins on the wall to not know what works and maybe more importantly what doesn’t.

“Why is 6 better than 4?”

First there is the science, the more you diet the worse you get at it. So extending the time period is a mistake.

But the big issue is that when you normalize food, especially without a coach “normal” doesn’t come anywhere close to normal. So people add a couple hundred calories wanting to keep their progress but end up dieting the whole 6 months, just maybe not as restrictive for the 3 months in the middle.

There is another point. Time DOES matter. What we found after 4 weeks was true but when we made the change to 6 weeks it really made a big difference. Most of the weight loss you get in the first two weeks tends to be water, so only 2 weeks focused on fat just isn’t enough. What we found is that our coaches could guide people the extra two weeks and often the net result was more fat loss, better body comp and almost everyone could stick to the additional 2 weeks knowing food would be back (in abundance) soon.

So while faster is better, keeping those extra weeks at the end not only made the full cycle shorter (and helped diet adherence) but it stops “rinse and repeat” dieting. Every situation is a bit different but let’s say you used scenario 1 (or worse, calories never went back to normal) and you wanted to lose 40 pounds, you would literally never get there unless you had, let’s say, 100 pounds to lose and if you have 100 pounds to lose your goal probably isn’t 40 pounds. With scenario 2 you could easily get there running one cycle at the beginning of the year and one at the end.

Which brings me to my last and most important part. EFFORT!

With scenario 1 EFFORT is going to be more difficult because food only “kind of” comes back. You can take all the caffeine supplements in the world and it will never do for you what ENERGY FROM FOOD and REST can.

Which is why scenario 2 is A LOT better.

Here is the last thing, we allow clients to do another cycle after three months, some have a lot of success with that and others struggle. The people that struggle often aren’t as aggressive with the EFFORT part and as a result their calories never get high enough to REALLY create a big deficit.

There are no secrets here, you lose more weight with the best math possible. Meaning the higher we can get “normal” where you are weight stable the more weight you can lose in the second cycle. The other factor is TIME. The more time you aren’t dieting WITH CALORIES HIGHER and staying weight stable. The better results you will get.

The secret of the pictures you see on our page is that most of the pics are AFTER the AFTER, when the clients are eating 2500-2700 as women and men are eating 3000-3500 calories.

This probably won’t shock you but most AFTERS from other sites are on the last day of a deficit, doing a plan that is unsustainable over time and AFTER THAT AFTER involves a lot more calories, much less effort, guilt and frustration. Or worse, the opposite.

And then the diet that failed them blames it on them.

If you think coaching might help you go ahead and click the link below and an Eat To Perform coach can walk you through what your exact plan will look like

https://www.eattoperform.com/

Also if you want to talk to a coach LIVE simply click the button on the bottom right of that page.