472: What Is The Best Way To Break A Weight Loss Plateau? Troubleshooting & Plateaus with Ted Ryce Part 1

Podcast Transcription: What Is The Best Way To Break A Weight Loss Plateau? Troubleshooting & Plateaus Part 1

Ted Ryce: First thing I want to just hit you with is, when you’re getting results, and things start to slow down, especially in areas that you want it most, you may realize that you hit a plateau. And so many people think there’s something wrong, maybe this is as far as they can go with fat loss, maybe it’s their age, slow metabolism, hormones, pre-menopause, post-menopause, low tea, the list goes on, gut bacteria dysbiosis.

Look, the list is endless. And it’s normal to be frustrated and have these types of doubts when progress stops coming. But a lot of it is not physiology, a lot of it is psychological, as well; we’re going to talk about the differences here.

And when you’re stuck, it’s really important to redouble your commitment to stay focused on your goal and to be positive. That’s the number one strategy. You can’t let a plateau take you off your game. And if you let this happen, you’re being an average person. And I know you’re not average, you are legendary. So don’t act like an average person who freaks out just because you stopped getting results.

Now, it’s okay to not be happy about it. You shouldn’t say: “Oh, fantastic, it’s a plateau,” but at the same time, it shouldn’t break your confidence. And if it does, you’ve got a mindset issue and something that you need to overcome. And many people quit when they stall because they don’t understand the reasons why plateaus happen and they don’t understand the strategies that they can use to break through and reach the next level.

And the good news is we’re going to go over that stuff right now. The bad news is that plateaus are common. In fact, you should expect them. I’ve been in a fat-loss phase myself, I hit a plateau, I hit several plateaus. And I’ll share what happened with me— by the way, I follow my own advice there. I don’t freak out: “Oh, no, like not losing fat. I’m going to just give up.” That is not what I did. I said, “Oh, yeah, okay, definitely need to change what I’m doing.”

So anyway, if you understand how plateaus are a normal part of the way your body adapts, it won’t bother you so much, okay? So again, expect plateaus, don’t say: “Well, it might happen to me.” No, it definitely will happen to you, I promise it will happen. Listen to me again, I promise it will happen, 100 percent it will happen to you at some point.

But when you understand what we’re going to go over today, you’ll simply make the right adjustment and get back to work and be back on target. So, no, bitching or whining or crying or giving up and throwing your arms up to the sky and asking God, “why?’ when the plateau happens, just say: “Oh, okay, all right, so I’m not making results, okay.”

So, let’s look at why progress stalls in the first place. There is the snack-cident problem. So you’re following the program strictly and guess what, you’re losing fat, you feel better, your clothes fit better, then something happens and suddenly, you’re off the fat-loss wagon, maybe there is birthday cake at the office, your partner left you, your boss reprimanded you, you went out to lunch with your co-workers, you got sick.

I got sick recently— actually, twice, once with dengue a fever and then I got a bad diarrhea for like four days, and it took me off my game. So, someone in your family might get sick or maybe you had an emergency at work—before you know, you’ve had a snack-cident, right? Which can start as a cheat but can quickly mushroom until into a full-on binge. And a little bit of the fat comes back.

Not a problem! If it crept up on you without you really paying attention, that’s normal, okay? And the thing that I want you to avoid is the shame. Shame, by the way is when you blame the core of who you are like, “I am a failure.” Instead of saying, “Oh, I didn’t do the right thing.”

So, shame is when you’re the problem, deep down inside, you’re just a flawed person, which, all of us are, so I don’t know what the big deal is. But shame is when you really get into it, like, “Gosh, I fell off again, I am such a loser,” instead of saying, “Oh, I really kind of went off the end there, went a little crazy there, I need to get back on track.”

So, you’re dissociating your behavior from who you actually are. And feeling like a failure and ditching your diet and falling back into your old patterns is what happens to so many people. But that’s how you fail you. In other words, you give up. And in case you’re wondering, one treat or a cheat meal won’t be the unraveling of all your hard work.

In fact, it really doesn’t even make a difference. If you just get back on track right away, it really doesn’t make a difference. I mean, in my fat loss, I don’t even think about this stuff. I’m at the point where I just, you know, I kind of go with the flow.

I went off my diet for a whole week, because after coming back from dengue fever, I was having chronic constipation—I know more than probably what you wanted to hear. But I got sick of it, so I went off my diet until my gut health started improving, and then I went back on track and started losing fat again. It just wasn’t any big deal; you just don’t stress about it.

So, with the snack-cident, we’re not talking about a once-in-a-while indulgence, or even a day-after-Thanksgiving, or a hangover, we’re talking about behavior that causes you to throw up your hands in the air and say, forget the diet, portion control, workouts, going to bed early, falling back into the unhealthy habits that you’re trying to get away from in the first place.

So, why does this keep happening? A big part of this is people numb themselves with food. And if you were wondering, “Well, Ted, wow, how can you stay on track with everything? And how are you able to not get so triggered by lack of progress?” It’s because my life is pretty damn good, and it’s not because it ended up that way.

If you know anything about my life, I’ve had many tragedies than, at least most people in the Western world will ever have in their life. But I’ve worked very hard to step up and sort through the issues that were causing me to use drugs or to smoke marijuana every day, or to go out binge drinking on the weekend, or when I got in my 30s, to overeat ice cream and other foods.

So, if you’re numbing yourself and you have underlying issues, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later, when we talk about deep health in the program, understand that if you’ve got an issue with your relationship with your partner, if you’ve got an issue at work, if you’re in the wrong work, if your boss is one of those horrible bosses that they make comedy movies out of, and you just know that you’re on a path or career path that just isn’t right for you, or some other thing like that, or even maybe a trauma that happened to you or a divorce or anything like that, and maybe you’re not dating or maybe you’re, you know, whatever the situation is, if you’re not taking care of that area of your life, you may turn to food or alcohol, or a number of things to try to solve it.

And the problem is, when you eat, it makes you feel better. But when the afterglow of the Hagen-Daz ice cream bar wears off, you still have that problem with your relationships or with your job, or with whatever it is. So you must step up and start to take small steps at the very least towards solving that area of your life.

And if you’re not willing to do that, you will fail. I’ll just tell you that right now.

So, I just wanted to present this, if you have areas of your life that are causing you to turn to food or alcohol or binge-watching TV or whatever it is, or even exercise, by the way—some people get too crazy with exercise because they’re trying to escape the issue in their life, but none of it solves a problem, you must step up and solve that problem, okay?

When you’re imbalanced, you’re going to be good. You’ll eat to feel good, and if you want a treat, you’ll eat it. I eat my flourless chocolate cake, I’ll eat the Thai coconut ice cream. I enjoy it. And then I go back on track, and I fit it into my macros.

I never stress about this stuff. It’s because I’m not going to say I’m stepping up in every single area of my life, but I’m stepping up enough to where I feel good about who I am, or what I’m doing. And it wasn’t always that way. Again, if you know my story, you know I’ve had to overcome a lot.

And so we’ll have a specific lesson for the overeating that we’ll talk about, the numbing and/or destructive behaviors that make us fat. But for right now, think about it. And on part 2, we’re going to go over solutions for the plateaus, you can finally achieve the body you want.

So let’s go into some of the reasons here. So, the “enjoying your life too much” problem. So let me tell you a story. I had a client named Heather that was super happy when she joined the program, she was excited about the workouts and nutrition plan, wanted to get started right away.

So when it was time for her to report her progress at the end of the week, I didn’t hear from her. Then I messaged her via app and couldn’t get response for days, until she got back to me and said she couldn’t do week 1 because she went fine dining a few times and she was about to go on a work trip for several days.

And what I said was, “That’s not your problem, that’s not a problem. In fact, this is what you do in life, things happen, and you need to be able to navigate them, and I can help you with that, that’s what I do in the coaching program.”

But she said she was working really hard to have a certain lifestyle and just wasn’t ready to give that up for getting lean. I told her she didn’t need to have an “all or nothing” mentality. You could do something every day. We could find balance in the nutrition program so she could eat the foods that she still wanted or have those indulgent dinners. But she continued not to follow the program. She just went running a couple times, she was on a 1200 calorie food plan, but she wasn’t tracking her food.

So what I’m telling you is that you’ve got to understand that life is going to happen. And there’s a way to make it all work for you, no matter where you’re at, okay? Because you don’t want to be like this person. Because what happened was, she quit the program. She paid for it, and she quit.

And she said she needed to wait until things slowed down. That is not how it works, and she’s never going to get results. And she probably feels terrible about giving up, instead of stepping up and working with me –and working together with me, rather, so that we could find a solution. Okay, what are you willing to do? What can you do right now? What’s the step that we can take right now?

Okay, well, let’s do this. Let’s track protein intake, let’s do 15-minute workouts, I mean, I will work with you. No matter what your lifestyle is, I will work with you, there is a way to get better results. Now, I’m not going to say that you’re going to get amazing results working out 15 minutes three times a week and tracking sometimes but not tracking, you know, you’ve got to put in some effort here.

But you can make surprising results on less effort than we think; it just takes a little upfront effort. In other words, instead of taking responsibility for her actions and learn how to stay in shape while she was busy because her lifestyle wasn’t going to change any time soon, she decided to blame the timing.

My life is always busy. I’m always busy. I work long hours every single day. I’m not out having a good time; I just post the times that I do have a good time on Instagram and Facebook. So don’t be that person. Take responsibility for what is not working and move on. Life will always be hectic, so it’s up to us to make it work. And once you accept that approach, things get easier.

So let’s talk about the “I lost my motivation” problem. So the key to weight loss motivation is similar to [the amount] of fuel in a car— you don’t need the motivation to be full the drive, you just need to prevent it from running on empty.

I tell people not to waste precious time and energy on staying highly motivated, because it has a natural rhythm; sometimes I’m motivated, sometimes I’m not motivated. And so when you need an instant dose and weight loss motivation, ask these questions: if I stopped my program, how would I feel in six months or a year for now? If I stopped my program, what will my health be like? If I stopped my program, how will my work, my relationships and family be affected? Sometimes you just need a reminder of why you join this program, why it’s time for you to handle this area once and for all.

And one last thing before we move on is that it happens to the best of us, we all go through times where we’re motivated and times when we’re not. And what happens is we lose a bit of motivation. And what I want to tell you is maybe it’s your program, maybe it’s that you’ve lost track of what you’re trying to accomplish in these 90 days. Maybe it’s that you lost some weight and now you’re feeling comfortable again, right?

So let’s talk about when we get sick. So, let’s say you’ve been losing weight like a boss working out every day like a machine and then you wake up one day and something just isn’t right. This happened to me. Fast forward a couple of hours and you have a full-blown cold-from-hell, the flu, you’re nauseated, or you’re visiting the restroom. It’s the hottest new hangout spot in town. You’re officially sick and you’re not the only one.

I’ve had a ton of questions lately about what to do when you’re in the process of losing weight and you find yourself sick and feeling like absolute shit. Well, what are we going to do? Is it possible to stay on track with weight loss while you’re sick? Well, yes, it is. Rule number one is just don’t panic.

When you’re super motivated to lose weight and you’re putting all the effort in and then you get sick. I mean, a lot of times, we’re to blame, we pushed it a little hard, and that’s why we got sick. In my case recently, both times I got sick, one time I got bit by mosquito, had nothing to do with anything else, I got bit by a mosquito, but it was carrying dengue a fever, which is a virus and it kicked my ass, okay, bad! I could barely get out of bed. It was so terrible. It’s really sucked.

So, this is going to happen or you may get cold if it’s flu season right now. So, let’s go over some things. 

Stop exercising until you feel better. Do not try to exercise when you’re sick. Recovering from a cold, in other words, your immune system doing what it’s supposed to do, cost your body energy, recovering from exercise cost your body energy, you do both at the same time, you’re going to smash your immune system, so stop exercising.

Number two is focus on protein and vegetables and staying hydrated and eat whole foods. And check out week 3, my best food choice list. That’s going to help you stay on track with the best food choices.

Number three is stop stressing out because it’s not going to help, in fact, do some meditation. I do meditation when I get sick and it helps with the symptoms, except with dengue fever, it didn’t really help with dengue fever. But I got a really bad flu in Miami the last time I got the flu and I used meditation—I even wrote about it—as a way to boost your immune system.

And it’s not maybe that it’s just relaxing. If you’re stressing out, you’re tense your muscles, your body’s tense, you’re stressed, it just helps lower the stress. And if that’s a problem, then it can help you. So let’s talk about tracking your food problem. So it’s easy to get results at the beginning, you probably noticed that, but it can be an issue later on.

And I want to tell you this, the more fat you want to lose, the more meticulous you’re going to have to be. For example, I was able to get down to 15 percent body fat fairly easily— and really eating sloppily. And I wasn’t paying that much attention at all. But to get below 15 percent, I was really struggling, I had to track my food, I had to do everything you’re doing right now.

And so when most people think about compliance, they only think whether they follow their allowed-foods list, so food quality, and they pat themselves on the back for eating clean. But as you know, for fat loss, the real question is: “How is your compliance to your calorie deficit ?” And second of all your protein, if you— but number one is that calorie deficit.

Too much healthy (a.k.a. “clean) food is the cause of many fat loss plateaus. So again, ask yourself whether it’s possible you underestimated your calorie intake or overestimated your activity level.

Almost everyone reports eating fewer calories than they really do. It’s one of the most well-known facts and weight-loss research. And there is one that I want to share with you. This research team hypothesized that many overweight people did not lose weight because their calorie intake was substantially higher than what they reported. The subjects were chosen specifically because they claimed history of ‘diet resistance.’

In other words, they had made at least eight attempts at weight loss in the past, they believe they’re eating less than 1200 calories a day, and many of them thought they had a metabolism or thyroid problem. The results were a big surprise to the subjects but confirm the hypothesis of the researchers.

Under laboratory-controlled conditions, they found this study participants underestimated their food intake by a whopping 47 percent and overestimated how much activity they were doing by 51 percent. The authors concluded that failure to lose weight despite a self-reported low-calorie intake can be explained by substantial misreporting of food intake, and low physical activity.

And even health professionals are not immune to this either. There is a study on dietitians that showed that they under reported their intake by an average of 16 percent. So even people who’ve studied this and gone through to— you may not know but dietician training is no joke, they take a lot of the same classes that pre-med students take. So it’s no joke, it’s really difficult: organic chemistry, biochemistry, and then they go through all these other classes, specific to nutrition, and even then, they’re not great with it. So keep that in mind.

You’ve got to pay super duper extra attention if you are not making progress. And the major lesson here is to be sure you rule out the most common and obvious reasons for plateaus before making any assumptions, you may be simply eating more than you thought you were. And the plateau-breaking lesson that naturally follows is that if you’ve been guesstimating food portions, it’s time to get serious about your calorie and macronutrient numbers.

So here’s how to do it right; get a digital scale and use it, and weigh things out, and really do this for the majority of your meals. And now of course, I’m not asking you to go to a restaurant and bring the scale with you, but you’ve got to every time that you can be on top of things. And one of the biggest problems with My Fitness Pal is that when you’re feeling tired and you don’t take the time to insert the correct amount of each item, you just kind of pick the first option that you see.

But at the end of the day, you might have a 300 to 400 calorie error. That’s the thing, you’ve got to take the time to do things right on My Fitness Pal. Another thing is measurement cups and spoons. Measure things out as best as you can. Sometimes we don’t have a choice in how we measure food items. Like I said, you might be in a restaurant, you may be on a work vacation, and you don’t want to be the weirdo at the working lunch that starts measuring things out and weighing them.

So what I want to tell you is, when you’re at a restaurant, you can ask the server, how many ounces, how many cups? Also, I pay for extra pieces of protein, so I know I’ll hit my protein intake. Another trick is that if I can’t get a bigger piece of protein, I’ll go home and hit my protein target with a whey protein shake or egg whites, or before going to the restaurant, I’ll have a protein shake, so I’m not worried about the amount of protein I’ll eat and I’ll eat less because I already had the protein shake.

So make sure you measure, you count, you track your food intake. If you find yourself guessing a lot and you’re not making results, it’s time to tighten things up. I also want to say this: sometimes I’m a bit sloppy with My Fitness Pal myself. But here’s the difference, I get results, I know how to tweak things, so I get results. And if I’m not getting results, I adjust things, I don’t freak out, I’m not like at a loss of what to do, I just start adjusting things.

So again, stop the guessing work and stop trying to remember what you have for breakfast, do it as soon as you can and really take the time. I would also say this: a lot of people when they’re measuring at home, they don’t think about, “Okay, that’s half a cup of rice on my plate,” they think about, “Oh, I measured out that half a cup of rice.”

They don’t think about, “Okay, let me kind of memorize what it looks like on a plate, so that next time I’m in a restaurant, I can accurately determine how much I ate more accurately determine how much I— even though I’m not going to measure it. Okay, so really start to get familiar at home. Take a mental picture of how much half a cup of noodle is, half a cup of rice, whatever servings that you find yourself doing to fit your macros, take a mental picture and take that mental picture with you to restaurants.

I was having a talk about this with a client, you’ve got to take these mental pictures, you’ve got to get clear on what a tablespoon is, half a tablespoon, cup or rice, half a cup of rice, you know, you’ve got to do this. It doesn’t have to be so accurate. But you’ve got to get to the point where you know enough that when you’re in a position where you can’t measure things that you don’t freak out or give up.

I had one client who was telling me he just gives up: “Oh, I don’t have no idea how to put this in. I’ve got no idea how much is in this.” Take the time and figure it out. I know it’s annoying, and I know you don’t want to do it. And you know what, I don’t want to do it either.

I’ve talked about this before, there’s a big payoff from exercise, you go to the gym, you didn’t want to do it, but after you’re done exercising, you feel good. You’re like, “Oh, wow, that was amazing. I feel so much better now that I exercise.” Do you really feel better by pushing yourself to put things in My Fitness Pal, maybe a tiny bit, but it is not like the payoff that you feel from going to the gym.

However, this is the biggest payoff that you’ll ever get for nutrition, it just happens later. So you’ve got to delay gratification a little bit, and realize that compliance was your problem if you’re not on top of how much you’re actually eating. 

So again, map out your training and nutrition strategy for next seven days if you hit a plateau, really get things right, create a plan, then go back to work with renewed motivation and enthusiasm.

If you’re tracking carefully, and you know your compliance was spot-on, then it’s time to consider some of the other possible causes of your plateau— the biological ones. 

So I’m going to go over that now. But I just want you to understand this stuff because this is the stuff that stops people; it’s why people don’t believe in calories. But you all know differently now because you’ve gotten results from being in this program.

So let’s talk about this. Your body doesn’t like to change. Every system in our body is tightly regulated to maintain something called homeostasis. So, blood sugar, body temperature, and acid-base balance are a few examples. And when the balance of your body is disturbed, your body sees that as a threat to your survival. So, feedback mechanisms automatically kick in to bringing you back to “normal.”

And your weight is no different; you adapt hormonally and metabolically to dieting weight loss. And the more you restrict calories, the more weight you lose, the more your metabolism slows down. If all else is equal and you’ve remained compliant on your original plan, a plateau means that your body has adapted.

So let’s say you did everything right— with all this stuff that I just went over, you said, “Ted, I’m doing that I know how much half a cup of rice looks like on a plate, I know everything that you just said, and I’m still stuck in a plateau,” then this could be the reason, your body has adapted.

So by avoiding really strict starvation diets, in other words, you reduce the amount of adaptation and the frequency of plateaus. That’s why you don’t want to drop your calories too low. However, metabolic adaptation is unavoidable, it’s what happens. And it’s highly misunderstood as well.

So, your metabolism slows down for two reasons. The first one is that smaller people burn fewer calories than larger people. So the more weight you lose, and the lighter you get, the more your deficit shrinks, even at the same intake. So does that make sense to you?

So a 200-pound person and 150-pound person, they’re going to need a different amount of food. That’s why one size fits all diets don’t really work. But dialling in the amount of calories based in…and I’m going to tell you, by the end of this program, you’re going to learn how to do all this stuff yourself, to some degree.

But understand that just, because a lot of what we have heard or been told or thought is that big people have slower metabolisms than smaller people. But it’s actually the reverse that’s true. It takes work to be overweight— fat burns two calories per pound, it costs energy to stay fat, you simply cannot do it if you’re not eating enough to stay fat. And when you lose fat, then you’re going to need less and less food. One of the reasons why I focus so much on not dropping your weight so much and building muscle is because the bigger your body, the more food you can get away with eating.

In fact, I had a coaching call with a client today and I said, “My calorie deficit is 2000.” That’s what I’m supposed to average. And hers is 1400. But I’m 180 pounds, and I have kind of low body fat, so I’ve got a high amount of muscle on me. And so she’s a little jealous, but we all have different body sizes. That’s just how it is.

And so that’s probably why it’s easier for a lot of men. Women say, “Oh, it’s just easier, you have more testosterone,” or whatever. No, it’s easier because they’re probably bigger than you. And it’s easier to eat less if you’re 200 pounds. If you’re 150 pounds, it’s harder to eat last, right? I mean, you need to eat less food. Even at the same muscle mass and same body fat percentage, you’re going to need less food. And if you go over that, you’re going to start to gain weight.

Here’s an example: Paul’s a 40-year-old active male, 5 feet 8 inches tall on 235. If you run his numbers through the calorie formulas, the ones that I’m going to share with you later in the program, you’ll see his maintenance level is about 3200 calories per day. So, with a 20 percent deficit, which is fairly conservative, he would want to eat 2600 calories per day to lose weight.

Suppose Paul successively loses 50 pounds and becomes a lean 185-pounder, but then he wants to knock off that last 10 pounds so he can get “ripped.” Now that he weighs 185 pounds again, if you run his calorie calculations again, you’ll see that the math equation is changed! He’s a smaller guy now so he needs less calories— or fewer calories, is the proper way to say it.

So, at 185 pounds, his maintenance level, in other words, what he needs to eat to maintain his body mass is 2800 compared to the 3200; we’re not talking about the fat loss calories, we’re talking about that part at the front, at the top, rather, 3200 to 2800. He’s burning 400 calories a day less than when he started just sitting on his butt doing nothing.

He’s burning 400 calories per day less. If he keeps eating the same way he did when he was a bigger guy, he will hardly lose weight anyway because he just doesn’t need that many calories to sustain his weight. So suppose Paul also forgets to account for measly 200 calories per day— now his deficit, it’s gone, and his plateau has been fully explained.

Now, let me talk about the second part, which is adaptive thermogenesis. This means that when you restrict your calories and lose weight, your metabolism slows down even more than you’d predict from the weight loss alone. So first, we talked about bigger bodies require more calories than smaller bodies. Now we’re going to talk about something different.

This is a bit more complex, and it happens through weight-regulating mechanisms involving numerous hormones and body systems becoming more efficient. It’s similar to how the thermostat in your home turns on when the temperature drops. You have the temperature set in a nice comfortable level and when the temperature regulation system detects a drop below that point, it automatically turns on the heat to bring the temperature back up. Or turns on you know, since we’re going into winter right now, just go with that example.

But if your weight-regulating system detects a change in body weight below, its usual setpoint the metabolic thermostat turns the calorie-burning hormones down and the hunger hormones up. Your body becomes more efficient and burns fewer calories while simultaneously tricking you into eating more. This is complex stuff that stop you from starving to death, okay. It stopped you from starving to death.

This is not something to hate, or to be angry at. It is how you are here today. It is how human civilization came to be because if it didn’t do this, then the majority of us—our ancestors, not us— but our ancestors starved to death. But here we are in the modern world where you can click on Uber Eats, sitting on your butt, not even having to do anything and get food delivered right to your door. You can order food from Amazon Fresh— you don’t have to do anything to get food.

Whereas in the past, we had to hunt for food, we had to be farmers. Understand, this is what the stuff that saved our lives. So with fewer calories out and more calories coming in, your calorie deficit shrinks your fat-loss slows down and eventually you reach a plateau. Although the weight-regulating mechanism that causes metabolism to slow down and hunger to go up is kind of complex.

You should see by now that it’s a pretty simple sort of thing. If you were losing weight, but your weight loss has stopped, you had a calorie deficit. But now you’ve lost it, you’re not in a calorie deficit if you’re not losing weight. So, let’s talk about some psychological and behavioral reasons.

In the majority of cases, thyroid issues, which thyroid, everybody talks about hormones and metabolic rate. Thyroid hormone is the only hormone that directly regulates your metabolic rate. But most people don’t have a slow thyroid. Also, slow metabolism is not a thing; it’s the lack of compliance.

Stated differently, you didn’t follow your plan close enough and you may not have realized it. And so your goal is to see some kind of positive result every week. If you’re getting no results after seven days, before considering a change, the first thing to do is to check your compliance to your current plan.

Now, we talked about that a bit, but I want to revisit it and ask you to ask yourself, honestly, have you been doing everything you need to do, or are you missing something? Have you done your best or could you have given it a little bit more? Have you been consistent in your nutrition tracking and hitting your macro goals every day, or at least getting close, and eating well one day, you know? Are you doing a great job all week and blowing it on the weekends? The cause your of your plateau may be uncovered with the answers to these simple questions.

When you’re rate yourself for complaints, remember to rate yourself in all four areas: mental training, do you have a current set of updated goals in writing? If you don’t, make sure, revisit The Heaven & Hell exercise. Do it again. Print it out. If you want me to send it to you, I can email it to you, just ask me. Have it around you so that you can remember why you’re doing this, what you’re moving away from and more importantly, what you’re moving towards.

Cardio training - Have you been following your customized cardio program consistently? Now, I won’t start you out with cardio, but eventually we start adding in some cardio either moderate intensity training or high intensity training, depending on your injuries in situation and all that.

Resistance training - How many resistance workouts did you do? And are you applying progressive overload week by week?

And then nutrition - Have you hit your macro targets every day to the best of your ability? Now, I’ll tell you: I’ve been off this week with my macro targets. I’ve been under eating protein, I’ve changed locations, that’s normal, it’s natural, things happen.

So, what I did was I found a solution, I needed to go food shopping. I haven’t done that yet. I’ll be honest with you. But I got some protein, I got a big five-pound tub of protein powder to help me make up the lack of protein that I’m eating.