Achieving Sustainable Weight Loss: Strategies for Establishing Timeframes and Diet Breaks

Diving deep into sustained results and long-term changes.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

As we look to embark on the journey towards a healthier lifestyle it can often feel like navigating uncharted territory with the vast depth of information out there. With so many different opinions and approaches, all claiming to know a new revolutionary approach. Amidst all this information boiling it down to the basics, understanding the significance of timeframes, and strategic breaks, and following an effective phased approach to reach your goal in a healthy timeframe. Effective dieting isn't about rapid weight loss, it's a comprehensive journey requiring patience, strategy, and a commitment to a long-term lifestyle change. We will discuss how to approach these basics and make it easy and understandable how to apply them to fit your goals and lifestyle. Understand why it is important to take a phased approach, and how to know when you’re ready to take a break. This is all central to the journey as it is a marathon, not a sprint. The more you try to make it a sprint, the more you’re focused on the destination, the less likely it is going to stick at the end and relapse to old habits will be inevitable. 

Basics of Weight Loss: The most important thing to look at when we are losing weight is making sure that we are going to be taking in fewer calories than we are burning. As we have discussed a few times before, making sure that we set that deficit using the best available information and tweaking it as we go along is going to be the backbone of weight loss. Now it goes deeper than this because we need to be calculated with how we do these things, your body loves to maintain homeostasis, it is what your body is made to do, so the goal is to keep things as regular as possible so the more that you plunge it into a deficit the more your body is going to be fighting against it. This is why we choose modest caloric deficits so we can mitigate the amount that your body is going to be fighting against to sustain it without imposing a huge amount of diet fatigue to where your body downregulates the caloric expenditure a ton thus bringing you to the end of a diet phase early before we achieve what we set out to do in the first phase. This rate of loss that is ideal is going to be 0.5-1% of your total body weight per week, lower than that and we aren’t pushing your body enough which can play a lot of mental games, above that and we run the risk of pushing your body into blunting your caloric expenditure. When we run past this number and downregulate the caloric expenditure too much, this is how we get to that point where we are no longer able to sustain weight loss and typically when people fall off the rails, revert to their normal diet, then rebound right to where they were.

Timeframes: Now that we have that understanding of the basics, let’s talk about the timeframes of dieting. Dieting like everything with the body, accrues fatigue over time and the longer you sustain it, the more fatigue that is there which eventually needs to be cleared out to continue the process of accruing fatigue and pushing yourself. If you told yourself to add 10 minutes every single week to a run, there’d be a point where you’re just too beat up to even think about doing that, so why do we expect our body to be able to handle that fatigue with the diet? Many things within the body follow the same principles, making sure that we understand how to manage this and make it work for us deepens that understanding. This is when we can get into the ideal timeframes of what we want to see. Following what we do with weightlifting and running we can apply those same fatigue-clearing principles with dieting which gives us the same beneficial outputs of clearing fatigue and sustaining progress. With weightlifting, we typically have 4-6 week cycles, called mesocycles, where we will deload at the end to clear fatigue to start another cycle of accruing fatigue again. Taking the same idea into dieting we can follow the same way that we do with weightlifting where we diet for 3-4 weeks and then take a break to clear fatigue for 1-2 weeks. This is a very effective way as it follows the same idea that we do for running where we accrue for 3-4 weeks then pull back for a week to let your body catch up and clear the excess fatigue to make space for more. We can also follow a longer timeframe which is a bit more difficult to sustain but as long as you plan for it, it is completely reasonable. Taking a longer diet period of 6-12 weeks is also completely realistic but as we have already spoken on, this generates a ton of diet fatigue. It typically takes anywhere between half the time or exactly the time spent dieting in maintenance to clear out this fatigue. What that means is if you take 12 weeks of dieting, it can take you anywhere between 6 weeks to 12 weeks to fully clear out that fatigue. Either approach that you take, you need to make sure you have those maintenance periods to allow your body to clear out fatigue so you can continue to push and make that progress.

Phased Approach to Weight Loss: When I say focus on this phased approach to weight loss, this means that remembering, it took you a while to get to the point that you’re at no matter where you are coming from. Expecting large rapid change is unrealistic, changes to your body take time in any regard. As we work through these phases losing 0.5-1% of your body weight per week for 6-12 weeks, following the maintenance to bring your metabolic activity back up, then repeating the process will serve you significantly better in the long term than trying to exceed that and do it all in one diet phase. The people who try to do it all in one diet phase are the ones who rebound the worst and lose their muscles in the process. Remembering that Rome wasn’t built in a day, taking the long-term, consistent, lifestyle approach to this and knowing that your body makes changes based on what you impose upon it. This makes it significantly easier once you know how it is going to respond. If you follow 3-4 phases of 0.5-1% bodyweight per week, over a year with your breaks maintained you can be down a significant amount with the ability and knowledge on how to keep it off and how your body responds. This experimentation and time are going to give you the results that you want in the long term. It will show different avenues that you want to pivot to, everybody wants to have the super lean, shredded body that we see all the influencers have, but the years of work that it takes to get there is more than just weight loss. Weight loss reveals the body underneath, weightlifting builds the body underneath. This phased approach will set you up for understanding what it takes to have intentional goals that you work toward and clear out the fatigue when it is unfeasible to push any further.

Applying The Principles: As we always do, I want to make sure that we tie everything together so you can take the knowledge here and apply it to your day-to-day life to help make those changes toward your goal or at least have a deeper understanding of what we are looking to accomplish. The biggest thing is making sure that we are setting ourselves up for success. Know the place that you are coming from, did you just come from an incredible weight loss stretch now you have hit a roadblock? Are you eating too little and can’t possibly increase your movement any further? Then let’s focus on a few-month break, slowly increasing your calories by 100 a week, and watch your weight, it will fluctuate week to week but that is expected as you allow your body to refill its energy stores and rehydrate. This isn’t canceling out the progress that you have made, this is all expected as your body gets out of a deficit to allow itself to clear fatigue. You’ll notice that quickly it will level off and your energy levels will drastically shoot up. Once you get to that point then you know you’re ready to start the process again. If you’re coming from a point where this is your first time diving into it, it is going to be much easier as you’re likely already eating at your maintenance or above so we can just take the process as it goes. However, we want to be smart with how we set our deficit and make sure we track the time frame. Understanding that around a 500 calorie deficit per day will get us toward a pound per week. This will be the baseline for us to reach for the 0.5-1% of your bodyweight loss per week. If you are 200 pounds this can be 1-2 pounds per week as a rate of loss. To establish this deficit that we can sustain we want to aim to decrease the amount you’re intaking and increase the amount that you’re moving. It is best to have a combination of both of these so we don’t risk plummeting your body into that starvation mode. One of the ways that we can accomplish this is splitting it right down the middle, using that 500 calories a day deficit, we can lower our intake by 250 and up our expenditure by 250. This is easy on paper but as we know, your body likes to maintain homeostasis so make sure that even when you’re upping your activity level you’re not compensating somewhere else by stripping out movement there. This is why step counters are so popular because they give us the baseline of where you were at, and we can easily increase that by 2,000-3,000 and make sure that you’re getting that activity level higher than where it was before. Thus we can make sure that we are truly establishing the deficit. 

Now going past this, once you have been on your diet for 6 weeks and your goal is to sustain it for 12 but, you notice that your rate of loss starts to slow. This will be an important time for you to sit down and be honest with yourself. We need to reestablish that ideal deficit that we are looking for. Assuming it is still the goal to sustain it, be honest with yourself and see if you can increase the movement or go with less food. Either option will help you get back into that deficit and with time, it will continue to level off. Once that is no longer sustainable to choose either option then it is smart to take a break, let the diet fatigue clear out, and get yourself ready for another cycle of weight loss. Remember the break from the diet isn’t just diving right off the deep end but slowly bringing your calories back up, say 100-200 a week until you get back to that maintenance number, then let it reestablish itself. This builds up that base so you can cut from it again without rebound weight gain. 

This is why it is a marathon and about the lifestyle change. If you’re in for a quick fix you can see how quickly it is that you can plunge yourself into a bit of a hole that you need to dig yourself out of to get to your goal. If you aren’t intentional with what you’re doing you are going to be unknowingly setting yourself up for some struggle down the road. The quick fixes can get you to lose weight but don’t teach you the successes for maintaining afterward and how easy it is to rebound to your old habits. With this long-term approach, it forces it to become a part of your lifestyle, it forces you to be intentional with what you want to do. It gives you the time to understand how your body responds and empowers you to make decisions on how your body reacts. There is no quick remedy and any secret that claims to be out, is likely just another way that somebody else found for them to stick to a deficit. It is not an easy journey, it takes lifestyle changes and sacrifice, but at the end of the day, it helps you reclaim the life that you’re looking to get and allows you to be a present member of your life instead of just a bystander watching life pass you by. 

Ready to take charge of your health and make a sustainable journey towards your fitness goals? Implement the principles outlined in this article and start seeing positive changes in your lifestyle. If you have any questions or need personalized guidance, don't hesitate to reach out at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com be sure to share this around with anybody who may find some useful information within this or any of my other posts. The more people that get the information to them, one step at a time we can hopefully work to build a more healthy society!

Until next time,

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS