Layer 4: Knowing when to add food.

As you get closer and closer to having your weekly meals resembling the plates given, and you have set better habits around drinking and snacking, you will inevitably begin to drop weight. It’s now important to keep an eye on how much weight you are dropping and keeping it in a healthy range: You shouldn’t drop more than a kg a week. Whilst it can be highly motivating to see more than this at the start, dropping more than a kg a week on a consistent basis is often a sign that your calories are too low. So why is this a bad thing?

Dropping too much weight too quickly risks triggering the body’s stress response to what it recognises as a scarcity of food. Essentially, it does not recognise that *Joe* wants to drop a bit of weight in order to feel good on the board again, it simply recognises that food is scarce. As a result, it will figure out ways to move less and expend less energy to make sure its key systems can still function. This essentially makes it more difficult to drop weight. 

Another thing to remember is that radical changes to nutrition behaviour and habits result in substantial weight loss from week to week. Whilst initially this looks good on the surface, there’s a good chance of a rebound to rebel against the process when things feel ‘too much’ or ‘too hard’.  Remember, we want to make these changes long-term not just for a short period of time and the best way to ensure this is to not shock the system to an extreme.

What to do:

If you have consistently dropped more than a kilo a week here are some simple ways to begin adding food to make things more manageable:

• Add a portion size of carbohydrates to one of your current carb-free meals
• Add an extra snack in between your meals
• If you have cut out quite a lot of booze try adding some back in to ease the process
• Look to treat yourself more often with the foods you love.

Remember to try only one of these at a time to see the effect it has on your weight week to week. From there you can monitor the result and continue to make adjustments if needed until you hit your sweet spot.

Now what?

With these 4 layers, you have more than enough direction to create meaningful and lasting change with your nutrition and weight. Make sure you’re not overwhelming yourself with fad diets and extreme measures; whilst the methods and layers explored in this blog post might seem simple, they are backed by leading nutrition experts in the industry. Follow them and layer one thing at a time to not only drop weight but keep it off. Any questions feel free to send me an email.

We cover nutrition for weight loss and performance in the Skateboard Strength Fundamentals program, with easy-to-follow videos as well as a Facebook support group to ask questions and keep you accountable, so be sure to check it out.https://skateboardstrength.com/fundamentals/