How old are you?
With your body stats, that amount of physical activity and the number of calories you’re eating I’m guessing you’ve got both water retention and metabolic adaptation going on.
How big of a bite did you take out of your maintenance calories at the start of your new cutting cycle? If you’re aiming to lose more than 1% of your bodyweight per week with your calculated calorie deficit, then you’re probably going to hard. Unless you do something like a blitz approach for a maximum of 4 weeks (which is definitely not advisable for everyone), I would always recommend staying between 0.5-1% of bodyweight loss per week on a fat loss cycle ranging anywhere from 8-12 weeks. Also, the leaner you get the closer you’re going to pull that number towards 0.5% or even 0.25% once you get under 12%.
What’s the quality of your diet? If you got a lot of processed foods in there on top of being in a caloric deficit and you don’t counter this with enough fruits, vegetables, grains and healthy fats (minimize omega 6, prioritize omega 3 and 9) to get in those vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, you might experience increased inflammation and hold more water in your body. That does not mean you can’t get lean on processed food. You can, but because of inflammation in the gut it might take longer for you to see your progress underneath all that water. As long as you’re in a deficit, you’re still losing tissue but the scale and the water retention make it seem like you’re not losing weight.
One of my mentors actually performed an experiment on one of his healthier clients to prove that’s it’s possible to get shredded on crap food alone. He got him lean in 8 weeks on a single ingredient diet: donuts. Off course this is not a diet you want to replicate or even use long term because you inevitably will run into problems sooner or later due to nutrient deficiencies and sky high amounts of inflammation. After the 8 weeks were over, his client immediately got pulled back on his usual nutritional regimen and was taking additional supplements to get his blood markers back to healthy levels. But it does prove that being in a caloric deficit and staying in a caloric deficit consistently is the main driver of weight loss. Notice that I use the word weight loss, not fat loss. His client did lose some fat, but because of the donut diet, he also lost muscle tissue and lots of water. You have to take these factors into account.
Anyway, if you start off your new cycle by dropping your calories too low and bumping up your activity to fast, you create a deficit that’s too big. This increases physical stress and upregulates cortisol output. Cortisol is not a bad thing. We need it to wake up and perform during the day but only in acute elevations. If cortisol becomes chronically elevated, your metabolic rate eventually goes down and causes metabolic adaptations (depending on how lean you are and how big of a deficit you’re in this can be anywhere from 3 to 12 weeks). Cortisol also increases the activity of aldosterone and vasopressin, two hormones that increase water retention especially in the ab, hips and waist region.
A little water retention down the road is completely normal, but as you are progressing and keeping track of your weekly bodyweight average, you should be able to see a bigger difference in scale weight over the course of 2-3 weeks max. When this doesn’t happen, you can try multiple things: use refeeds one day per week, go back to maintenance for a week and reevaluate your progress from there, decrease you cardio sessions a bit or decrease your food intake even further. When you decide to decrease your caloric intake, monitor changes in body composition and body weight closely. If there’s still nothing happening and you tracked everything to the T, than you definitely need to go back to maintenance for a couple weeks and start again with a smaller deficit after.
Also, how good is you sleep quality? Bad or suboptimal sleep, especially bad deep sleep, is not good for body composition because sleep affects every system in your body. When you consistently experience bad sleep, your cortisol levels go up and your immune system is weakened. This makes you hold more water as explained above and it’s a bad recipe for muscle maintenance and muscle growth. So, prioritize sleep hygiene and become a boss at sleep. You body will thank you for it. If you want more info on this subject, visit one of my threads were I talk about optimizing sleep.
Lastly, it’s important to manage stress levels. Not only the psychological form, the physical form as well. All that training on top of a caloric deficit, stress from work, relationships, finances etc. becomes very taxing on the body. Since you succesfully dieted down to 10% multiple times, I’m guessing you have protocols for this or you just don’t experience a lot of stress in your life.
