The Straw That Broke the Calorie Deficit’s back

Carla has mastered the art of maintenance; the ebbs and flows of various seasons and feasting, counter balanced with deficit days now and then.

What about maintenance or “eat up” days?

Maintenance days or “eat up” days in the Venus Factor fat loss program are eating up to the level your body needs to maintain.  This is not a level where you lose fat, nor do you gain fat. 

It’s not a “cheat”, binge, or free for all. It is how you should eat. It is necessary. This is what you are meant to do. It is what your body was designed for. It should be enjoyed.

Sometimes we get used to a calorie deficit and we don’t want to eat up to maintenance. No one can tell you what to do, but these eat up days are designed into the fat loss protocol for a reason. Diet history has shown that if people go too long restricting calories they will eventually crash. 

But there is more to the story…

A calorie deficit is corrective action

The calorie deficit necessary for fat loss is drastic action. 

It is corrective action needed for fixing a health problem.  It’s not how you are meant to live your life.  It’s not ongoing, it’s meant to have an end point.  The goal isn’t to get down to zero percent body fat.

Sometimes you get so used to the deficit that you start feeling like it is how you live your life and it’s hard to learn how to stop doing it.

But just like a patient receiving treatment for a health problem there will come a time when you need to learn how to live your life without the “treatment”.

Enjoy the food!

Even if the calorie deficit is hard, it’s not like you don’t get to eat. You should enjoy the food you do eat. Savor every bite and appreciate the nourishment and energy it brings you. Know that you can always have more next time.

Enjoy your maintenance days too.  After a while you’ll notice it’s not all that much more food, so just enjoy it. Let your body have the recovery it needs from eating up to the level it needs. 

Maintenance days are recovery days

Maintenance days are recovery days from the calorie deficit.  They are just as important as the recovery days you take to rest from the workouts when you are sore and fatigued.

As John also states in the fat loss manual, specific macro increases are to “teach your body to become efficient at utilizing protein for muscle repair and recovery, and to teach your body to become more efficient at burning carbohydrates.”

“Eat up” to maintenance days are training for the rest of your life

John said he’s never seen a single person who did not flounder in maintenance after they hit their fat loss goal. They are so used to eating at calorie deficit that they don’t know how to “stop the treatment” or live life as they should.

If you learn to master these maintenance days now, you will be ahead of the game when your time comes, when you reach your goal.

It’s hard to imagine that it will happen, but if you keep going and you don’t give up, IT WILL HAPPEN. 

When it does, it feels surreal and hard to believe. Be prepared by mastering the art of eating at maintenance.

Learn to go with the ebbs and flow of various seasons and feast times in your life counter balanced with a few deficit days now and then.  You will need to know how to balance both a little for life.

The straw that broke the calorie deficit’s back

Depending on stress in your life, any stress, it can happen at any time; the crash and burn, or the binge.

Sometimes we just get on a roll.  We are happy with our success.  We are excited and we just want to keep going.  We get kind of greedy about fat loss progress. If we are counting calories we become calorie misers.

The problem is that you feel fine, and you keep on going, and you feel fine then some little thing happens, it piles itself onto all the stress in your life (including the prolonged calorie deficit) and BAM, you crash and burn.  You don’t know why it happened.  You don’t know why you went out of control. It’s the straw that broke the calorie deficit’s back.

This can set you behind.  It’s fine.  You can take a deep breath and regroup.  You know it’s not the end of the world of course, and you get back up and keep going.

But you might avoid this in the future if you take the time to learn how to eat up to maintenance a little more often.

Maintenance days are always a WIN

Remember that the “eat up” to maintenance days are always a win.  You can take one or more of these days whenever you want or feel you need them. You can take them for a week, several weeks, or a month if you want.  It’s always a win. 

John and Brad teach us this and if you want even more information to back this up there are others who teach this too.  I’ve learned a lot from Leigh Peele. Information, especially the right information, is power.

This is why I like our immersion program; it gives us the knowledge and the power to live our lives the way we want to again after recovering from obesity.

Eating up to maintenance is how you were meant to live, and it’s certainly not going backwards.  Going backwards is only a very long string of over eating or binge eating that requires corrective action to fix.  Maintenance does not require corrective action.  It truly is a win.

With Thanksgiving and Christmas behind us, and New Years still ahead, we are still at the tail end of a feasting season.  Some of us take a little break from the feasts right about now to take a little corrective action and that is a normal part of this season.

My friend Carla has learned the art of maintenance and she is active in our online community and always around to give a word of encouragement or advice.  She’s taken the time to learn the art.

Will you take the time to learn to be as successful as our beautiful Venus Carla?

-Ro