3 most common dieting mistakes to avoid for effective body recomposition! 🙅🏻‍♂️

Common dieting mistakes will not only limit the amount of fat you lose but also compromise your ability to retain or even build muscle throughout the body recomposition process.❌

You do not wish to end up looking skinnier or “skinny fat”, but instead shred off the excess fat while retaining or building up as much muscle as possible that will give you the lean & strong physique. 😍

1st Mistake: Losing Weight Aggressively  📉

While aggressive diets may yield faster weight loss, the percentage of weight loss deriving from muscle instead of fat tends to increase accordingly. 

A good rule of thumb is to lose around 0.5-1% of your bodyweight per week. This will allow you to retain or even build muscle as you lose fat more optimally. 👍🏻

2nd Mistake: Dramatic Changes Derails Progress 👎🏻 

The most common occurrence when an individual start dieting is to drastically reduce their food intake or even eliminate carbs completely! They usually will also increase their cardio activities at the same time, thinking that all these sudden changes will speed up the process! 

This can be true in the short term to a certain extent, but it is actually stopping you from continuously losing fat while getting leaner in the long term.

2 specific reasons why it is detrimental in the long term: ✌🏻

1.    Difficult to sustain for an extended period of time & very likely the individual will experience the negative effect of aggressive dieting quickly. 

2.    This approach also prevent you from having any leverage when you hit a fat loss plateau. 

The hard truth to dieting in a calorie deficit is that overtime your body will compensate and it does so by decreasing its metabolism to burn fewer calories. With this, it will naturally decrease the various movements you make (aka your NEAT) throughout the day. 🚶🏻‍♂️

This will eventually leaves you stuck in a fat loss plateau since your metabolism has decreased to a point where you are no longer in a calorie deficit to lose fat.

To break through this fat loss plateau, you will either have to decrease your calorie intake slightly or increase your physical activity. But since you have been “starving” yourself and doing excessive cardio, it is very unlikely for you to consistently continue pushing through this fat loss plateau. 

This is the exact reason why many people are stuck in their fat loss journey & losing a lot of precious lean muscle from doing too much cardio. Hence, the rate at how you lose more fat than muscle is critical! 🙇🏻‍♂️

Eat at a very slight deficit of approximately 5% to a maximum of 20%. For most individuals, this equates to around 100-500 calories below maintenance calories. If you are at a higher body fat percentage, you should aim for the higher end. And vice versa for those at a lower body fat percentage. 

Try to keep to a minimal of 1-2 cardio sessions per week at the start of your journey as well! 

If your weight and fat loss begin to stagnate after a few weeks, you can simply drop your calories further and/or increase your physical activity slightly, as needed. This will then allow you to break through these plateaus. 🏃🏻‍♂️

3rd Mistakes: Not taking diet breaks when needed

This is specifically for diet breaks with your calorie deficit.

The longer you are in a calorie deficit diet, the more your body begins to physiologically adapt. This adaptation not only slows down your fat loss but also makes you more prone to losing precious muscle mass.

Diet breaks can be effective if implemented properly. You can do so by increasing your calories back up to maintenance for a week or two during your diet. 

This will reverse a lot of the physiological adaptations that your body has made in response to your diet. It will then make your weeks of dieting after this break a lot more effective for both fat loss and muscle retention at the same time. 

The only major drawback of diet break is that it will extend the length of your diet as a result. 

Personally, I will recommend implementing a diet break only when necessary, once every 4-8 weeks. This will avoid increasing the length of dieting while still reaping the benefits that diet breaks have to offer! 🙌🏻

The final takeaway from this blogpost article will be to avoid rushing the process & rather slow it down by using a more controlled and systematic approach to dieting. ✍🏻

If you find this blog post article helpful, feel free to connect with me on all my social media platforms to stay up to date with my content. 📲

For those looking to gain muscle & lose fat while simultaneously getting leaner & stronger in the process, do schedule your complimentary personal training consultation to explore the possibilities of working together & providing you valuable takeaways that you will find it beneficial to get started! 📧