01 Feb Why Doing More Is Often The Reason Fat Loss Stalls
Doing more, not less, is often the reason fat loss stalls.
You might think you should respond to a fat loss plateau by trying harder.
Eat less, train more, tighten up the rules.
For a while this might help but what happens when it doesn’t?
Fat loss stalls even though effort keeps increasing. Why?
This is what most people miss: the body doesn’t respond to effort alone, it responds to safety.
Let me show you how this works.
Why Doing More If Often The Reason Fat Loss Stalls
You can be eating in a calorie deficit, working out hard, staying consistent, and fat loss just doesn’t happen.
You might think you need to add a workout, cut out all sugar, get stricter.
In many cases this will backfire. You’ll be doing even more and still nothing changes.
When you hit a fat loss plateau, trying harder is often a trap.
Fat loss isn’t just a math problem. It’s a biological process governed by your nervous system.
An already overloaded nervous system will not respond to more effort.
It needs the opposite of what you think will work: less effort.
This is why my client Lisa was able to lose weight eating more food.
She came to me unable to lose weight even though she was eating very little, training 5-6 days a week and walking 15k steps a day.
Her weight hadn’t moved in months.
She was exhausted, struggling to sleep and felt like she had to always be on the run to see any progress.
Instead of pushing her harder, I told her to cut back: training was reduced to 3 days a week, steps decreased to 10k a day and calories were increased.
By improving her recovery, within a few weeks the scale began to move again, with less effort than she had ever thought possible.
Fat Loss Is A Biological Process Not A Calorie Equation
You’re not a robot.
Even if you don’t consider the psychology around fat loss, you’re not dealing with calories alone.
You’re dealing with the physiology of the human body.
YOU might want to change, but your BODY wants to keep you the same.
That’s its job. To keep you in a state of balance.
Anything that brings you out of balance is seen as a threat by your nervous system and triggers biochemical reactions to counter it.
Your body doesn’t care that you want to look better. It cares about your survival.
You need to work with this in order to lose fat successfully.
The Role Of The Nervous System In Fat Loss
Fat loss is regulated by hormones and your nervous system.
To simplify, there are two opposing branches of your autonomic nervous system which work together:
- Sympathetic = triggers flight or fight response to prepare for stress
- Parasympathetic = activates rest and digest mode to calm the body and slow down functions to promote recovery
Neither is good or bad. You need both to survive. You also need both to lose fat.
What isn’t good for your body is always being in a sympathetic state.
The confusing thing is, your body can be in a stressed state even if you don’t feel stressed.
Stress can be lack of sleep, lack of food, over exercising, getting a big expense you can’t afford etc.
It’s physiological not just emotional.
This stressed state is what can stall fat loss.
Acute stress burns fat, but chronic stress promotes fat storage.
The Role Of Cortisol In Fat Loss
One of the main hormones implicated in fat storage is cortisol.
Cortisol isn’t bad. In fact you need it to live.
What isn’t ideal is chronically elevated cortisol.
What elevates cortisol?
You guessed it: heightened sympathetic nervous system activation = chronic stress.
Here’s where it gets a bit complicated but I’ll keep it simple…
Chronically elevated cortisol can impair fat mobilisation, impact insulin sensitivity and disrupt appetite signals.
This is one reason why fat loss stalls even if you’re in a deficit.
Metabolic adaptation is another and that’s partly driven by cortisol.
For many people, elevated cortisol won’t stop fat loss all together, it masks it.
Cortisol increases water retention in the body which can show up as bloating and the scale jumping up. Stress induced inflammation does the same thing.
Another client of mine came to me complaining about having being in a calorie deficit for months but her body wasn’t changing. She technically wasn’t overweight, but she felt puffy and had this stubborn belly fat even though she trained hard.
Instead of adjusting her calories, we changed her workouts around.
She went from doing HIIT style classes 4 days a week to doing 3 structured weight training sessions with a focus on lower reps and compound movements. She focused on improving her sleep and making sure she was actually resting on her rest days.
After about a month, her stress levels came down and so did the water retention. She looked completely different.
Over the next few months, fat loss continued even though we didn’t lower her calories more- in fact we ended up increasing them.
Why Doing More Is Often The Reason Fat Loss Stalls
Some stress is necessary to change the body, even to lose fat.
The key is balancing the stress load on the body with adequate recovery so you achieve a positive adaptation.
Too much stress load, or not enough recovery results in a negative adaptation. This could look like injury, illness or simply a fat loss plateau.
Here are some types of stress that contribute to your stress load:
- Being in a calorie deficit
- Cardio, weight training, HIIT (any type of intense exercise)
- Overthinking your food/ decision fatigue
- Life stress
- Constantly being on the go
Common overload patterns can look like:
- Excessive training volume
- Agressive calorie deficits
- Poor sleep
- Constant food control
The body doesn’t know the different between physical stress, emotional stress or dietary stress.
Stress is stress, your body doesn’t care where it comes from.
Signs You’re Doing Too Much
Even if you’re super disciplined, you might be doing too much.
This is how you can tell:
- Feeling wired but tired or feeling flat for days on end
- Poor sleep even though you’re exhausted
- Increased bloating or water retention
- Training feels heavy and harder than usual. Progress stalls.
- Cravings increase despite discipline
- Fat loss happens on holidays (stress is reduced here- you might be walking more but training less intensely, eating more freely, feeling less life pressure)
Why Some People Lose Fat When They Do Less
When you come across stories of people who suddenly lose weight when they eat more, they haven’t found some magical plan that goes against the principles of fat loss.
A calorie deficit is still required to lose weight. Weight training is still necessary to build muscle and target fat loss (not just weight).
What’s missing from these stories is the stress and recovery part.
When you reduce stress, cortisol normalises, insulin sensitivity improves, digestion improves, and fat loss can resume without further restriction.
I work with a lot of women who are worried about gaining weight when they start my program because it involves doing much less than what they’re used to.
The workouts are often shorter, involve less cardio and feel easier. Plus they’re often given higher calorie targets than they think they need for fat loss.
What they find is that doing less doesn’t slow progress, it allows it.
Trusting eating more is the right move can be really hard, that’s why we build things up gradually.
Over the course of a month or two, these clients end up trusting the process because their body is finally changing. Their measurements go down, photos show visible fat loss and most importantly, they feel better than ever.
What Doing Less Actually Means For Fat Loss
Doing less to lose fat doesn’t mean you do nothing or just take it easy
It means you respect your body and balance stress load so that fat loss not only becomes possible but sustainable.
Less is not stopping or changing the plan altogether.
You need to target stress better which could look like:
- Fewer but higher quality workouts
- Less sets in your workouts
- More consistent walks (these are not a stress on the body)
- Eating slightly more that you think is necessary
- Having a treat each day
- Prioritising a consistent sleep schedule
- Taking time to relax each day
- Recovery as part of the plan, not a reward
Fat Loss Happens When The Body Feels Safe
Fat loss becomes easier when you let it happen rather than try to force it.
Gripping timelines and trying to make it happen only slows it down and creates more stress.
Your body doesn’t respond to force, it responds to safety.
Safety comes from predictability, not punishment.
You need to consistently balance stress with recovery.
The people who get the best results are not going hard one week then struggling to keep up the next.
They are sticking to a sustainable plan, consistently, week by week.
The most consistent fat loss progress I see comes when clients stop chasing exhaustion and start focusing on regulation.
Their goal is to feel their best by eating enough, training with intent, and allowing recovery.
Fat loss happens as a result and it doesn’t require fighting the body.
Progress might not be dramatic week to week, but it is sustainable.
Plus, if you’re feeling better and can enjoy your life at the same time, what is the rush?
Finally…
If fat loss has stalled, the answer isn’t always another cut, another workout, or more willpower.
Across my coaching experience, fat loss stalls far more often from chronic stress than from a lack of effort.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is remove pressure, not because you’re giving up, but because your body needs a different signal.
Fat loss doesn’t happen when the body feels forced.
It happens when the body feels safe enough to let go.
That’s why sustainable fat loss isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what your system can actually recover from.
When you stop trying to override your biology and start working with it, progress happens, often with far less effort than you expect.
If you need help getting your body out of a fat loss plateau you can reach out for coaching here.