Stalled Fat Loss

My BF% is around 8 right now. Its pretty lean, but I want to take my leanness to the next level. I’m 6’1" and 195 lbs., I lift total body 3 times per week and run either 400m or intervals at least 2x per week. I’m eating around 2000 kcal daily, sometimes as low as 1700. It feels like I’m undereating, but my body doesn’t handle high calorie days or carb-ups well. Any suggestions? If you need more info, I can post more. Thank you all.

I have been in this situation before myself.
What worked for me? Carbohydrate refeeds. Basically, I would deplete carbs during the week and then load up 1 day on the weekend. Obviously there is much more to it than this but this is the basic premise. Initially, I feared that the carbs would accumulate additional bf but it certainly wasn’t the case. Got me down to 6% from 8% over a one month period. Have you tried this before?
Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

What’s your typically meal plan that makes up the 2000 kcal? Also, what’s the frequency of your meals?

Breakout the Carbs/protein and fat.

My meals vary a lot, but they’re basically the same with the macro breakdown. A typical meal is usually:

App. 6 oz lean meat
Vegetables
If AM: about 40g carbs from sources like apples, oatmeal especially
If PM: fat source such as almonds or 14g fat from Udo’s oil

Usually, I gett about 280g protein, 100g carbs, 60g fat per day. My food choices are pretty decent. But, I can’t keep fat loss going without losing more lean mass than I’d like. Thank you all.

MainEvent, I’ve been playing around with a dietary approach designed to break plateaus; carb and calorie cycling. Think about this as a basic concept and try it out for a few weeks.

  • Work out every other day.

  • Eat 1.5g of protein and .4g of fat x LBM each and every day.

  • On days you work out take in 215g of carbohydrates divided between three meals; one P+C meal before working out, Surge sipped during & after, and one P+C meal after (starchy carbs like oatmeal). It’s not part of the 215g above, but take in 3 servings of fruit, too.

  • On days you don’t work out eat what is essentially a P+F day, taking in 5g of veggie carbs (Net Carbs) with each meal. You could actually have broccoli or a spinach salad at every meal.

You’d be taking in roughly the same amount of calories, but you would be alternately running the tanks dry (glycogen stores) and refilling them. On days you weren’t eating (many) carbs, your body is a lot more willing to burn stored fat. And on days you do, the body wants to refill muscle glycogen.

The only other thing I’d recommend is that you incorporate HIIT on days you don’t lift weights 2 or 3 times a week.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

UPDATE

Nearly 2 weeks later I stepped onto the scale and it told me 197 lbs. This threw me for a bit of a loop because I had started my own variation of T-Dawg 2 going with moderate carbs on workout days and lots of fibrous carbs on “off” days. Granted this may be from water, but I have been working my legs harder of late because they are lagging, so maybe it’s a combination of water and the beginnings of more lower body mass?

MainEvent, I hope you have a scale at home you’re using, not one at the gym. Weighing yourself needs to be done under the same conditions; i.e., on the same day of the week, as soon as you get out of bed, right after you hit the restroom; without clothes, of course.

In addition, scale weight doesn’t tell the whole story. You have no idea if the 2 pounds is water and glycogen (glycogen is stored in the muscles in a 1:3 ratio of glycogen:water) or if it’s fat or if it’s muscle. In addition to weighing yourself you should be taking a BF%. I’ve had good results with the AccuMeasure 2000 (<$15 on the 'Net). It’s a one-point, one-pinch test that you can do yourself.

Are you refeeding on T-Dawg 2.0? Are you keeping a food log and measuring, weighing and counting the food you eat? The reason I ask is that the only difference between weight maintenance and weight loss for me on my diet is how loosely or how tightly I hit my numbers.

About those calipers, are you pinching where they tell you to pinch? I followed their instructions exactly, it even has a few pictures of people doing it but I get a really small reading, and I’ve done it like dozens of times, even trying slightly different areas near where they tell you to pinch. It’s always under 10 millimeters usually about 6 which says somethin like around 5 percent bf and I’m around 12 if im lucky. If I clip it to my side/lower back readings are significantly higher. Am I just a mutant or something?

P.S. Anyone know which article they were doing all that bodyfat testing crap? I couldn’t find it. Maybe that will clear things up for me.

Leth

Leth, The article you want is called Body Composition for Beginners. Do a search and you shall find it. It is a two part article. I hope this helps…

Joe_

TT:

Great stuff!

I’m sure you’ve probably answered this before, but I simply cannot find the information? (Sorry!)

AS A STARTING POINT:

1) In terms of CALORIES
When devising a “starting point” for someone, is there a multiple that you use for calories a) for workout days and b) for non-workout days? (I know that in the past, you’ve recommended MANIPULATING cals MAINLY with carbs, but it seems as though you need some kind of “starting point” in terms of total calories).

  1. After you have set your fat and protein cals (as you indicated above), what is your starting multiple for CARBS? (workout days vs. non-workout days?)

Thanks, TT!..and I apologize if you’ve answered this a million times before!

Mufasa

Mufasa, there really isn’t an easy (i.e., cookie-cutter) answer to your question. As evasive as it sounds, “it depends.”

Arbitrarily, I’ve settled on 1.2g CHO x LBM as a generic starting-point maintenance number. That’s only a starting point since I tend to be an advocate of going higher carbs on days a person works out and lower carbs on days they don’t.

Even though I have a generic starting point (i.e., idea of what carb-maintenance is), I look at how many days a week a person works out and what their activity levels are (or are not) and what their goals are (bulk, cut or bulk+cut) and whether they’ve stalled/plateaued in their weight loss prior to asking me for help. I even take age into consideration. Not because a person’s metabolism changes that much as they grow older, but because of the nervous energy of youth, the constant state of motion and being on the go and wanting to do something – anything!

So even though 1.2g of CHO x LBM might pop into my head initially, I’m likely to alter the numbers I recommend.

Whatever number is chosen for carbs, energy levels and movement towards (or away from) the stated goal are monitored. Small changes sometimes need to be made at about Week 2 or 3. It doesn’t matter WHAT number is chosen for carbs originally, it can be adjusted/tweaked. Nothing is set in stone.

Additional considerations, though, are the types of carbs (green veggie or starchy) and the timing of carbs. As is often the case in life, nothing in a vacuum.

What about the setting of total daily calories?

Thanks again, Tampa!

Mufasa