Stubborn body fat is frustrating as hell. If you’ve ever dieted down to below 10% body fat, then you know what I’m talking about. There are millions of dollars made every year selling promises in the form of a pill that are supposed to help you get rid of stubborn body fat.
The thing that really sucks about stubborn body fat stores is there are always certain areas where you’re looking ripped immediately, like the upper back, shoulders, and arms. Then there’s areas like the love handles and lower abdominals where we can’t possibly seem to free up that stubborn fat no matter what we do.
So we continue dieting by dropping more calories, and exercising more. Maybe add in a session of HIIT cardio on an off day, or extend our warm up to 20 minutes of steady state cardio. Anything to burn more calories and get rid of that last bastion of fatty tissue.
This might actually be making things worse though.
Adaptive thermogenesis is a very real thing that takes place when you’re dieting. To put it simply, when you diet by eating fewer calories and exercising more, your body responds by burning fewer calories.
Not only does it burn fewer calories, but naturally you start craving more food and production of vital hormones from the thyroid down regulate. The thyroid and the hormones it produces are keys to the fat loss equation. It’s damn near impossible to drop fat if you’re not producing enough of these.
To your body, you’re doing everything wrong. You shouldn’t be trying to work through those precious fat stores, so it’s going to try and prevent you from dropping anymore.
This isn’t a bad thing, actually. It’s a natural response by the body thanks to millions of years of evolution. But how do we trick our bodies to drop stubborn body fat?
The biggest key is diet. In this instance, we have to start cycling the diet.
The leaner you are, the harder it is going to be to drop fat. Most average people out there think they’ve got stubborn body fat, when in reality they just haven’t dieted long enough.
Once you hit about 10% things start to get tricky. You have to pay more attention to what you’re doing in order to drop more fat. This is where cycling the diet can have a huge benefit.
What does cycling the diet mean?
Most experienced gym bros are familiar with carb and calorie cycling. That’s all I’m talking about here. On certain days you’re eating higher levels of carbs and calories, and on others you’re eating lower amounts.
Generally the higher intake days are on days that you’ve got more activity in and out of the gym planned. The lower calorie and carb days will generally be rest days, or active recovery days.
Here’s why you should start cycling your diet.
Taking in varying amounts of calories every single day doesn’t allow metabolism to become static and adaptive thermogenesis to really set in. When you diet steadily for long periods of time, the body adapts and in order to get past plateaus you’ve got to either eat less or exercise more. Not with this approach.
By cycling your carbs and calories you can keep production of vital hormones from the thyroid up, which in turn will help keep your metabolism high. This is vital to dropping fat, since you won’t down regulate hormone production or metabolism.
Training sessions will also be much higher quality because you’ll be fueling the body for performance. The quality of training sessions is almost always something that goes in a diet. With a cyclical approach, that worry is now long gone.
So when should you start using this approach?
I mentioned it earlier, but I’ll say it again: If you’re 20% body fat, this approach probably isn’t necessary. For the vast majority of people out there, they don’t have stubborn body fat. They just haven’t dieted long enough.
Once you start getting leaner, this is where a cyclical approach to diet becomes really useful. A good rule of thumb is about 10% body fat, or when you can really start to see your abs, but you still have little pockets of fat you’d like to get rid of.