How to Adjust Calories To Break Through Fat Loss Plateaus

Approaching Fat Loss Plateaus:

Weight loss isn’t linear, with a lot of peaks and valleys obscuring the path. How do you know if you should be dropping your Calories, increasing energy output, or wait for the scale to reflect your hard work?

Reducing dieting for fat loss to be a lot more basic than it is, tracking consistently with high precision for an extended period of time (with a bit of patience along the way) will lead the way. But as mentioned in the Fundamentals of Body Composition & Nutrition article, both body fat and muscle are metabolically active tissue, so decreasing the amount of it will decrease your BMR and even energy output from the same activity (since you’re moving with less overall bodyweight). At some point, you’ll inevitably need to adjust your energy intake and/out energy output.

1: Understanding Standard Weight Fluctuation

Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of approaching a fat loss diet, standard weight fluctuation is the root of all confusion. While you don’t want to use fluctuation as a catch-all for genuine plateaus or weight regain, weight can fluctuate 2-6lbs (or more for those with greater body mass) on any given day.

Especially while dieting, this can stay elevated for several weeks at a time. Couple that with very intense resistance training as in Booty by Bret, which can cause inflammation — the fluctuation starts to make a lot more sense. Here are a few factors which influence weight fluctuations:

Daily Fluctuations: 

• Water Retention: Hormonal responses to calorie deficits (e.g., cortisol and aldosterone) tend to increase, leading to greater water retention.
• Glycogen Retention: Glycogen depletes over time while dieting, which can account for over a pound of weight change. Additionally, for every 1 gram of glycogen stored, 3-4 grams of water bond to it, potentially adding up to 5 lbs total.
• Gastric Emptying: Eating fewer Calories often means lower overall food volume, which slows down digestion and can cause more food to remain in the digestive tract.
• Training-induced Inflammation and Muscle Repair: Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) and standard muscle repair can cause inflammation in muscle tissue, leading to several pounds of additional water being retained.
  
• Muscle Mass Increase: If you’re new to strength training or returning from a break, you can gain muscle quickly, around 0.25 to 1.0lbs per month, which can offset fat loss on the scale.

This isn’t to say calorie deficit diets cause weight gain in the long-term, it’s simply a reminder of how complex the human body really is. That said, the mechanism of fat loss remains simple: a calorie deficit leads to fat loss — despite being easier said than done. However, larger deficits can lead to greater hormonal responses that affect water retention.

Similarly, food intake influences hydration levels. Roughly 20-30% of daily fluid intake comes from food. Eating fewer Calories means consuming less water from food, which can impact hydration unless water intake is intentionally increased.

Anecdotally, many people experience a frustrating paradox — being extremely strict with dieting but seeing no scale movement, getting frustrated and eating away from your plan, then suddenly dropping several pounds after eating at maintenance (or even in a mild surplus). This isn’t from eating few little Calories, it’s a result of hormone levels stabilizing after a short-term calorie increase.

Why Does This Matter?:

The distinction between fat loss and weight loss may seem like a superfluous semantic point, but understanding this can reduce the frustration knowing that just because the scale isn’t reflecting our hard work, it doesn’t mean we’re not losing fat. As an extension of that point, it’s important to recognize that a scale isn’t measuring your body fat, it’s measuring your body weight, which is a useful but flawed proxy to track our body fat. Recall that 3,500 Calories is roughly 1lb pound of body fat. If you see your body weight increase by 2lbs in a day, ask yourself: did I consume a 7,000-calorie surplus yesterday? If your answer is no, then rest assured, you didn’t gain 2lbs of fat. Alternatively, and not to be a downer, if you see the scale decrease by 2lbs in a day, it’s unlikely you were in a 7,000-calorie deficit the day prior, however, that can be reflective of your hard work starting to pay off.

 
So, what should we do with this?

• Favor weekly moving averages rather than day-to-day weight.
• Ignore outlier data — anything beyond ±2lbs in a day.
• Track progress through subjective measure as well:
  • How clothing is fitting
  • Progress photos
  • Bodyweight strength trends
  • Circumference at different body parts

2: Do You Actually Need to Reduce Calories?:

As mentioned, it’s inevitable you will hit a fat loss plateau throughout your journey. How should you proceed? 

Be Patient: Has Fat Loss Actually Stalled?:
While day-to-day fluctuations can have our weight jumping all over the place ± 6lbs, recognizing that a lot of these processes are sustained over time, and in the case of hormonal responses, can stay elevated for weeks at a time. As frustrating as it may be, resist the urge to make any immediate changes until your weight isn’t trending down for 14 days. If you’re noticing all other metrics are improving, it might be best to not adjust your nutrition approach at all.

Adjust For Genuine Plateaus:
If it’s been a full two-weeks and you don’t have either a downward trend in weight and/or a few days with no low weigh-ins, it’s very possible (but not certain) that you’ve reached a plateau. There are two main ways to approach plateaus, which I would address sequentially.

Improve Tracking Accuracy Before Cutting Calories:
As you’ve likely experienced, tracking is tedious, annoying, and inconvenient. Often times, we start to move away from strict tracking to eye-balling our measurements. While I believe this is a crucial step towards creating a sustainable lifestyle (it’s not realistic for the vast majority of people to fully weight and log every Calorie you consume, indefinitely), it opens room for error. Several studies find people underreport their energy intake by some 40-70%! To put that into perspective, if you’re aiming to eat a 2000 Calorie diet, the low end of underreporting would be eating 2800 Calories — enough of a difference to turn a moderate calorie deficit into a mild calorie surplus. This isn’t to say people are intentionally lying about their energy intake, it’s to suggest how difficult (and in some cases, entirely unrealistic) tracking and reporting is.
Even more interestingly, several studies which look at this notice that people aiming to eat very few Calories tend to underreport their intake more than those with moderate Calorie targets. If you’ve experienced the confusion about how you can consume such a little amount of energy and not lose weight, the answer could be you’re setting the goal unrealistically low, which is causing an entirely unsustainable method of approach, resulting in large energy intake variance.

Where Does The Discrepancy in Reporting Originate?:
Every Calorie you consume counts. So called “hidden Calories” creep their into our diets without us realizing it. This isn’t to say you should drive yourself to the point of insanity tracking pieces of gum, but being cognizant of mindless bites, sips, and snacks can add up very easily. More importantly, cooking prep and methods can add a significant number of Calories, with oils having a significant number of Calories for a very small serving size. In the case of eating at restaurants (which is its own beast), seemingly low-Calorie, healthy dishes can be covered with oil, turning what could be a 600 Calorie dish into a 1,500 Calorie dish. Lastly, condiments, sauces, and toppings tend to pack a ton of Calories which often go unnoticed. The notorious case of salad, something with next to zero Calories, can quickly turn into a 1,000+ Calorie meal with the addition of meat toppings, nut toppings, dressings, etc. This is by no means to say to avoid any of these food groups, it’s just to be more aware when tracking. Summarizing a few primary areas where you may be adding Calories into your diet:

• Condiments
• Oils
• Cooking Sprays
• Toppings
• Spreads
• Coffee Creamers
• Smoothies
• Alcohol
• Restaurants
• "Healthy" foods

On the point of “healthy” foods, recall that nutrient-density technically doesn’t influence fat loss to any significant degree. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t aim to eat to optimize your health while dieting for fat loss, it’s to highlight that foods which are nutrient-dense can often have a lot of Calories relative to their food volume, satiety index, etc. (e.g.; avocado, nuts & seeds). With all of that in mind, this speaks to the importance of looking at nutrition labels and the serving size, which leads us to the next point:

Understand Nutrition Labels:
When tracking, we often have the tendency to look at the total Calories and individual macronutrient quantities, then assume that’s what we’re adding. Tracking will require some tools, whether that be manual food scales, digital food scales, and/or measuring spoons & cups. While a manual scale will be the most accurate, they take up a lot of counter-space for no significant benefit. A digital food scale will suffice – anything from a standard retailer will do the trick. As you’re monitoring your intake, even if you’re not directly logging it, getting into the habit of weighing your food will ensure you’re not consuming multiple servings when you thought it was one — in the case of oils and nuts & seeds, you may be very surprised and underwhelmed at how small a serving size is! Pointing to a very unique case, looking at PAM cooking spray, the nutrition label says there’s 0 Calories per serving. While this is technically true, we’re almost led to believe PAM contains 0 Calories at all, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Per 100g of spray, there’s 792 Calories, coming from 88g of fat. While this seems counterintuitive (and even downright deceptive), this comes from the serving size being sufficiently small where they’re able to round down to 0g.

And now the frustrating part of nutrition labels which is outside of our control — food labels aren’t entirely accurate. In the United States, the FDA allows for a margin of error up to ¬± 20% relative to the “true” value (as if there wasn’t enough variance going on with everything!). While we can’t control this, I believe this is a good case for eating a narrower range of foods when your weight isn’t moved. Additionally, less processed foods tend to be a bit more predictable, although variance in fat in meat products remains quite high.

To summarize improving tracking accuracy:

• Weigh and log all food you're consuming
• Weigh food prior to being cooked
• Be mindful of bites, sips, tastes, etc.
• Be mindful of Calories in alcohol
• Factor in cooking oils, coffee creamers, etc.
• Minimize going out to eat
• Eat a narrower range of foods during fat loss plateaus

3: How to Use Progress Monitoring to Guide Calorie Adjusments Recovery:

When to Reduce Energy Intake:

So, your weight hasn’t moved much, then you tightened up tracking and your weight still isn’t moving after another 1-2 weeks — it’s time to consider adjusting your energy input and/or output, or consider a slight diet break if you’re feeling hunger is becoming unbearable (more on this in a future article!).

How to Reduce Energy Intake:

Recall that while skeletal muscle and body fat are metabolically active tissue (they burn Calories while you’re eat rest), it’s largely insignificant, but that looks at those tissues in isolation. Your standard EAT and NEAT will be performed with a lower bodyweight the more you lose, decreasing the number of total Calories to perform the same tasks. This will make a significant portion of why we’re needing to adjust our Calories throughout fat loss phases – recall, our metabolic rate is very dynamic. A good rule of thumb is our TDEE decreases by around 100-200 Calories for every 10lbs of bodyweight we lose. Still, I would use energy adjustments as a reactive measure when you’ve hit a fat loss plateau, not as a proactive recommendation to decrease 10-20 Calories for every pound you lose.

Where Should the Energy Reduction Be Cut From?

• If following Calories & Protein:
  • Protein remains the same
  • Reduce any combination of fats & carbs, allowing for day-to-day variance within the ratios (still considering the Calorie values of each), to achieve your new Calorie target
• If following Macros:
  • Carbs: Reduce daily target by 15-30g
    
  • Fats: Reduce daily targets by 4-10g
    
  • Proteins: Remains constant
• If following Intuitive Eating:
  • Track Calories for 2 weeks to recalibrate your gauge for portions

Seems fairly simple, so why such a large build-up? Often times, especially within fitness, we feel like we need to be doing something to get a desired result. It seems logical that if you’re not experiencing fat loss, reducing daily Calorie intake is the next step. However, understanding all things at play will help to make the best possible decisions. In the case of prematurely cutting energy intake, while you’ll technically see an increased rate of fat loss (assuming you’re accurately hitting your new target), you’ll increase the possibility of creating yo-yo dieting cycles of days of massive Calorie deficits followed by days of significant Calorie surpluses, even if it’s unintentional.

4: Actionable Steps:

1. Give it two weeks to see if your weight starts trending downward and/or if you have new low weigh-ins.
2. Consider training performance, how clothes are fitting, progress photos, body circumference measurements, hunger, and energy levels before considering cutting Calories.
3. Assess tracking accuracy, eliminate errors before cutting Calories.
4. If truly stalled, reduce daily Calorie goal by 100-200 Calories.
5. Monitor for another 10-14 days before further changes