At Metabolic, we believe that you find your ideal diet through a combination of factors, including how well you are able to maintain your body composition or achieve your body composition goals, as well as how easily you are able to keep your SHMEC in check.

Our current habits, experiences and mindset about food and eating are influenced and shaped by many factors, including our goals or values. A particular style of eating may be selected because it aligns with our religious beliefs or health goals, or for ethical and environmental reasons.

Even if fat loss is your ultimate goal, it’s important to honour your personal preferences around nutrition and eating habits. From that place, here are two key pieces to consider as you build your personal and unique fat-loss nutrition plan.

1. The caloric side: Energy balance is essential

If your current food and eating habits are making it difficult to lose or sustain your weight, find a way to create a reasonable caloric deficit that is sustainable for your metabolism. A reasonable caloric deficit will be large enough to move the needle, but not so large that it triggers the “starvation” alarm bells which can lead to yo-yo dieting cycles. When this starts to happen, your SHMEC will go out of check. This is why we need to consider calories as well as the metabolic response to that intake.

In some cases, time-restricted eating can be helpful as it reduces eating windows, which can naturally reduce caloric intake – as long as there are no metabolic compensation reactions like overeating during eating windows. For some folks, intermittent fasting and/or time-restricted eating is helpful because it reduces the number of food-related decisions to almost zero during these times, which frees up some much-needed mental space for other things.

Pick an approach that works best for you! We don’t suggest any approach that promotes restriction or deprivation. Moderation is key. Be flexible whilst creating boundaries or guidelines to guide structured eating about 80 percent of the time.

2. The hormonal response: let SHMEC be your hormonal compass

Does your approach negatively or positively impact your biofeedback? In other words, your SHMEC: sleep, hunger, mood, energy or cravings? SHMEC reflects how your body is hormonally responding to your program. Consider checking in on a regular basis, either meal to meal, day to day, or week to week.

These check-ins provide an opportunity to evaluate what is working well so that you can continue building on that (or continue doing more of that). If your SHMEC is not in check, then that’s a sign that you need to adjust something – even if you are seeing positive changes to weight and measurements. SHMEC must be in check or the metabolism will push back against further or sustainable fat loss efforts. 

Match food intake to your needs and goals, but stay flexible too! Adjust your approach as needed according to your biofeedback.

Aim to bring these hormonal clues into a state of balance to support the metabolism as you lose fat. If your approach is not balanced, the metabolism tends to push back in an effort to prevent further loss. This is when SHMEC will go out of check. As you might know, it’s incredibly difficult to sustain an approach when you feel tired all the time or you’re hungry and craving all day.

When both of these pieces are tracking together and in the direction of your goals, you know you’re on a sustainable (and arguably, sane) path toward fat loss. 

What works best for you? We’d love to know. Please share in the comments! 

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash