When You Should Keep Your Calorie Levels at Maintenence

Realizing Your Diet is Not Working

Most popular weight loss programs do not deliver results as promised, which is why people become frustrated constantly changing their dieting habits.

A diet can aim for fat loss, however, an individual’s discipline to adhering to the guidelines is what will make or break them.

Some people have been training and dieting 6 months or more without seeing any fat loss results despite being within a caloric deficit. Training this way creates a sunk cost fallacy, where you continue to commit to your diet because of the time that’s already been invested.

Rather than running in circles with a useless fat loss diet, increasing your caloric intake to maintenance levels can help restore your metabolism to ignite your ability to burn fat faster. The best way to figure out calorie maintenance levels is to adjust the macros of your meals to match your daily activity levels.

When we introduce higher amounts of macros into a maintenance diet, the improvements in strength and muscle size can be noticed relatively soon.
When You Should Keep Your Calorie Levels Under Maintenence

For an individual to create a caloric deficit, the number of calories to be consumed has to be less than the number of calories expended.

A simple caloric deficit creates a demand for the breakdown of tissue for the release of energy, but it doesn’t necessarily target fat cells to release this energy.

When we focus on macro levels in addition to overall caloric intake, we can target whether the energy breakdown comes from muscle tissue or fat.

The main objective of fat loss plan should be to preserve as much muscle mass as possible while reducing body fat levels. Diets high in protein macros help preserve this muscle tissue while curbing appetite for mindless snacking and gorging throughout the day (see How Much Protein Do You Need Each Day).

To switch to a diet for caloric maintenance levels, you simply need to switch from higher macros of protein to higher macros of carbohydrates. When we introduce additional carbohydrates to a low-calorie diet, the daily caloric level is increased and more energy becomes available for your muscles to use.

Higher macros of carbohydrates increase the amount of stored glycogen in the body, which is the muscle’s main source of energy when the body is in a fasted state.

Of course, when adding an increased amount of carbs into your diet you have to adjust the amounts of protein and fats. Lowering your protein levels from 1.2 to .8x body weight would be needed to prevent your overall caloric intake from being too high.

Adding increased amounts of carbohydrates into your diet will also make dramatic changes to your lifts since carbohydrates have a big impact on muscular strength. Muscles also increase in volume due to higher amounts of glycogen stored within the cells.
The Wrap Up

Carbohydrates are the key to building a caloric maintenance diet to help preserve muscle and to invoke new life into an ineffective, long-term fat loss program. Switching to a diet targeted for maintenance can be the solution for individuals that have plateaued from excessive dieting and are no longer seeing results. Caloric maintenance levels vary greatly for each individual with body composition changing over time, however, constant experimentation can calculate an accurate maintenance level.

What else do you want to know?

Why You Can’t Spot Reduce Fat

How Much Protein Do You Need Each Day?

Why Changing Your Dieting Style is Irrelevant for Fat Loss