Gym-goers after body composition improvements usually focus on 2 phases: the bulk or cut. Most people will generally have a more successful muscle-building phase when their start point is leaner. But hardly anyone asks “Am I in the best position to drop body fat?” Since successful fat loss is about manipulating supply and demand, let’s see why your starting point matters more than you think.
Supply, Demand & The Body’s Defence Mechanism
To reduce body fat, we need to place the body in a situation where demand increases supply. Demand in this case is the total energy your body uses on a daily and weekly basis. That energy expenditure is a combination of BMR (basal metabolic rate), NEAT (steps), cardio, resistance training, and TF (thermic effect of food). Supply is the energy you provide your body: calories.
As the supply and demand is manipulated over weeks and months, our bodies adapt in 2 ways:
By reducing our energy expenditure at rest
By reducing our energy expenditure during activity
There’s also a 3rd behavioural adaptation, which reduces NEAT (a consequence of lower energy availability). These form the body’s defence mechanism against calorie deficits.
To outsmart this “feature”, we continue to manipulate the supply and demand, by either lowering calories and/or increasing expenditure. Eventually, we will reach a point where supply is low and demand is quite high, and further adjustments may come with too big of a “cost” relative to the “returns”. When this happens, we need to rethink our strategy.
Restorative Phases?
Sometimes I’ll work with a client who has been attempting to reduce their body fat for several months but they’ve reached a plateau. The visuals aren’t improving and their scale weight fluctuates around the same mark each week. Effectively, they’re in a maintenance phase. Usually, the supply and demand in this situation will look something like this:
Resistance training 4-6 times per week
Very high steps per day (+15,000)
Cardio 3-5 hours per week
Low calories (~10 calories per lb. of body weight)
Recall what we said about the need for demand to exceed supply to see fat loss. To continue losing fat in the above situation, we’d need to either increase their physical activity or reduce their calorie intake. Neither is easy to do, as they are already close to maxing out what they can consistently stick to each week.
This is where a Restorative Phase can come in (the name can be whatever you want to call it). A period where we return the body closer to baseline, by increasing the supply and lowering the demand.
Here’s an analogy to illustrate. Imagine a drug dealer is selling cocaine, but his supply is running out while demand is as high as it can be. He’s forced to cut his product with baking powder and sugar, which leads to unhappy customers and lower profits. The dealer decides to pull out of the marketplace and spend a few weeks getting his supply back up. During that period, demand goes down because there’s nothing for addicts to buy. The drug dealer comes back with a big supply and demand subsequently increases, allowing him to earn more.
For fat loss purposes, it means steadily increasing the calorie intake, while reducing activity levels. By doing so, we place the body in a better position to manipulate the supply and demand, to make future fat loss easier and less costly. Realistically, this may add 4-6 weeks to your total time spent dieting to drop body fat. A reasonable trade-off when compared to spending months at your mental and physical limits, without seeing anything in return.
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