For successful weight loss, choose a deficit plan that is safe.  Nutritional experts suggest reducing your calories by 20%.  Let’s take Rhonda’s case as an example.  She can maintain her weight by consuming 2,099 calories per day so: 2,099 X 20% = 420 calories     2,099 - 420 = 1,679.  Rhonda can drop her calories by 420 per day, maintain her current activity level and lose weight.

Here’s where it gets tricky and where some people get into trouble.  If you reduce your calories too drastically, which many diets recommend, you will initially lose weight but in actuality you will be slowing down your metabolism or initiating the starvation response.

The Starvation Mode:
It happens on every diet I have ever been on or seen.  You are faithfully eating right, exercising like a Olympic athlete and beginning to look like one with all the weight you’re losing, when all of a sudden the scale breaks.  I’ve accused many a scale of being of the devil.  Quite simply, the body is equipped with a built in saving mechanism commonly referred to as the starvation mechanism.  Since your body will always try to preserve itself under all conditions, if your body thinks you are starving, it will slow down your metabolism so that you won’t starve.  It protects its fat stores and instead uses lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning.  This leads to muscle loss, which in turn lowers your metabolic rate.  So what do you do?

There are many things you can do to compensate: increase your exercise, eat less, take a sledgehammer to your scale or you can make a small adjustment to your diet that will guarantee your weight loss success: you can eat more.

Tom Venutto, in his great book, Feed the Fat, Burn the Muscle recommends what he calls the zigzag method.  With the zigzag method you will mix in a higher calorie day every fourth day to your eating plan.  It’s very simple: you simply eat your maintenance level calories every fourth day.  Tom calls the zigzag method:

“The most effective nutritional technique for fat loss ever developed.  It is effective for breaking plateaus, accelerating slow fat loss, maintaining lean body mass and preventing sluggish metabolisms from slowing down further.”