For our final consideration in this module, we would like to leave you on a short note about transitional dieting. Transitional dieting is, as the name would suggest, the period which you transition from a calorie deficit to maintenance after losing your desired amount of weight, and then the period which you maintain that weight.
Fat loss is not difficult. Just about everyone who is overweight will lose appreciable amounts of that weight at one point or another during their life – the problem is with fat loss maintenance. It is because of this fact that the course you are undertaking and others like it are so critical. By learning about nutrition per se, and not just weight loss, you can place yourself in a position whereby you can alter your intake to suit any goal, rather than just learning how to manage to eat less for a given amount of time.
Transitional dieting can be hard, because it requires you to consciously eat more and trust that you aren’t going to end up back where you started. By learning about nutrition before/during the dieting process this is easier because you are not just leaner/lighter, you are more knowledgeable about nutrition and the application of nutritional practice and you have developed good habits.
A good way to approach this is to gradually increase the amount of food you eat week to week. Start slowly and gradually increase portion sizes while broadening the range of more calorie dense food choices which you opt for as you gain in confidence and understand your own body more and more. Combining regular diet breaks with this final approach is a very powerful tool in your arsenal. We’ll talk a lot more about transitional dieting in the final module of the course, but for now just remember that food choices, exercise choices, NEAT levels and flexibility are key in diet adherence, and should all be considered when building a diet.
For long-term fat loss, you need to have control over the entire pyramid, but we’ve only just begun by talking about the energy value of foods and what that means for us in terms of weight management. In the next module, we will be looking at the large nutrients contained within the foods we eat that ‘contain’ that energy, the macronutrients.