I’ve had a lot of experience with weight loss over the years. I dieted down to six percent body fat to compete in the Iron Maiden bodybuilding contest back in 1992. And I’ve helped many of my clients reach their ideal weight.
One thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a point you can reach where you seem to have an incredible amount of momentum – whether you’re gaining or losing.
For example, when I was a couple of weeks out from my bodybuilding contest, I realized that I had “peaked” too soon. So I tried to reverse course and found that no matter what I ate, I just kept losing.
I’ve observed a similar phenomenon with some of my clients. One client in particular lost over fifty pounds. And when he finally reached his ideal weight, it seemed that he could not slow down the fat loss process. At first, he thought he might have cancer or some type of wasting disease. But in a short amount of time, he was once again able to gain weight.
I had never read anything about this nor heard it discussed until Dr. Michael Eades’ mentioned it in his blog, recently. Here’s an excerpt from his blog. He’s writing about why it’s harder to lose weight the second time around:
“If you want to be successful the next time around on a low-carb diet, you’ve got to follow a low-carb diet. And it takes commitment. You’ve got to realize it’s going to be a little more difficult than it was the first time, and you’ve got to go on an honest-to-God low-carb diet filled with quality low-carb real foods. And you’ve got to stick to it. You want to hang in there until you get to what was called in the old medical literature the dynamic weight stage. The dynamic weight stage is when weight is changing rapidly in either an upward or downward direction. Anyone who has gained or lost a lot of weight has experienced this. You can gain rapidly once you get into this phase, but ultimately you stabilize and hit the static weight phase. It works the same going the other way. Once you get your weight loss momentum built up, you seem to lose effortlessly while in this dynamic phase. This is where you want to be. But you have to commit for a few solid weeks to get there. You can’t just diddle with it, go on a few days and off, fill up on calorie-dense, low-or-no-carb junk, say you’re doing a low-carb diet, and wonder why you aren’t losing. You’ve got to get up into the low-carb saddle and ride.“
If weight loss is your goal, you want to get to the point where you reach the dynamic weight stage – and the weight loss seems effortless. It’s so much easier than starting and stopping over and over again.