Q: Tom, I know you often say that to get to the point to be able to see your abs, you need to get to single-digit body fat. What if I hit a plateau at about 12% body fat? What do I need to do to break the plateau and get my fat% down to single digits? Should I do more cardio, more weight-training, manipulate my diet somehow?A: There's more than one way to break a plateau. You could use any of the strategies you mentioned; you could reduce your calories, bump up your weight training volume, or increase your cardio.
You shouldn't limit yourself to just one way or even a few ways. One of the problems I see with quite a few programs is that they're too rigid about what you are and aren't allowed to do. It should be the other way around - the person with the greatest number of strategies and the most flexibility is the person most likely to get through a plateau.
You should also keep in mind that the ideal plateau-breaking method may depend on how long you've been dieting and what kind of condition your body is in now. A dieted-down person trying to get even leaner and crack single digit body fat (to have ripped abs) is very different from someone who just started dieting and is still carrying a lot of body fat.
But before you choose any plateau-breaking strategy, the very first thing you need to do is get very clear in your head what a plateau really is. This is important, because plateaus are highly misunderstood and if you don't know the cause of a problem, it's nearly impossible to fix it. The cause of plateaus is actually very simple and all boils down to one thing:
If you were losing weight, but now you're not, there's only one thing that that could mean; you were in a calorie deficit before, but you're no longer in a calorie deficit.
There are four primary reasons you lose your calorie deficit and hit a plateau:
The 1st reason is that most people don't stick closely enough to their nutrition plan and they forget to record (or stop recording) their food intake. This one requires a lot of honesty with yourself. Even if you don't do it intentionally and you don't "cheat" per se, (a lot of eating behavior is unconscious), we're not very good at estimating how much food we eat when we simply try to guess. Some studies have exposed under-reporting calorie intake as much as 50%. You say, "I'm only eating 1,200 calories a day, but I'm stuck at a plateau!" But you're really eating 1,800 calories a day which doesn't give you much of a deficit.
The 2nd reason is that you need fewer calories after you lose weight. Calorie needs are directly tied into your body weight. One problem is that after people lose a lot of weight, they tend to keep eating the same way they did when they were heavier. But when you're a smaller person, you don't need as many calories, even at rest (your basal metabolic rate is lower).
The 3rd reason is that when you move that smaller body, you're not burning as many calories. If you strap on a weighted vest or heavy backpack and go out and hike up a hill, you can tell, obviously, that if you're lugging around extra weight, it's a lot more work, and you're burning more calories.
The 4th reason you hit a plateau is because your metabolism decreases while dieting and losing weight. While this does not completely stop fat loss, it does slow it down. If you've been cutting calories, especially if you cut them severely, your body adapts by decreasing your metabolic rate. That's sometimes known as the "starvation response" or "Adaptive thermogenesis."
It's really common to hit that plateau when you are leaner. Usually it's nowhere near as difficult for the overweight person to start losing weight as it is for the lean person to get leaner. The last 10 pounds is usually a lot harder than the first 10. When you're leaner, you're also at a higher risk of losing muscle, because extra muscle is not economical when there's a calorie shortage. Having extra muscle is like having an engine that's bigger than you need - it's a gas guzzler.
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