Last few pounds... to get cut

I look like a worm that swallowed a marble. I have little or no fat on my arm, legs, chest but still have a small tire around my waist. I have OK definition on my body except the midsection. I have lost about 65 pounds over the last year. I workout 6 days a week including a weekly intense 11 km trek over a mountain (Burn 1800 calories).

I have a calorie deficit pretty much every day. I do 20 min daily on a treadmill at 15% grade at about 5 km per hour. I have been stuck in the range of 83 to 85 kgs for a month or so. Some days up, some days down a kg. I want to make the push to loose that last 4 or 5 kg. I do abs every day and I can feel that I have a well defined 6 pack under that flab, it just wont go away.

yesterday I was watching a killer ab video and in one of the comments, someone said "you don't eat dairy do you"? this was directed to the person who was in the video. I eat yogurt every day, both as part of my 5 meals and also in protein shakes instead of milk, I also have the occasional cheese. can this be part of the problem?

 Nah, that's just good ol'fashioned "nutritionism" where the would-be guru singles out this or that macronutrient, food group or commonly consumed food item and blames all your problems on it.

 Usually based on a couple rat studies that involve dosages about 1000 times what a human can even physically consume, genetically modified mice, or made-up 'studies' pulled out of their ass. Or they'd go the Gary Taubes route and use a textbook from 1931, two badly designed studies from 1950, a poorly controlled PhD paper from 1971 and a study the author later retracted and invent magic insulin that violates the laws of physics.

 Either way, it's just nonsense designed to make you think there's some "secret" you don't know and that you need to pay'em money to learn.

 Dairy can potentially cause bloating - in people who are lactose-intolerant or allergic to certain milk proteins. You'd know if either applied to you by the way you'd get violent stomach cramps and prologed gastric irritation every time you had milk.

 Don't do abs every day. All you're accomplishing is localised overtraining and CNS fatigue, not what you have in mind.

 You're at the point where what you need to do is take frequent diet breaks to 'reset' your current metabolic adaptations to having a calorie deficit. Your body is in full-blown panic mode as all that lovely fat it's stored away in case of starvation has almost all been used up and you have a fair bit of various hormonal adaptations that are coming into play to protect what your body considers a precious resource. Eating maintenance or thereabouts for a time (1 day to a month, depending on how long you've been dieting) allows those adaptations to dissipate a bit, leading to faster overall fat loss.

 Might want to think about changing up your workouts as well - though that's less important than to have a diet break for a bit and let your body adjust to a new bodyweight before you go get those last stubborn pounds off.

to the OP: I have this same problem!

Melkor-- what do you mean by localised overtraining and CNS fatigue??

thanks :)

Thanks Melkor,

I made a omelet yesterday and started to reach for some cheese to add and pulled back my hand in horror.lol. I have been loosing weight for about a year and recently moved up to a maintenance diet. I am 6'1 and 53 years old. I forgot to mention that besides the treadmill, I also lift. I have been trying to up my protein and increase my weights. I'm getting stronger and better definition and see the fat slowly peeling away from my upper body and legs but nothing from the waist area. I have been changing my workout as well as the food I eat. Ran a 10 k just to try to shock my body, drank more water, drank less water. I seem to loose weight at the begining of the week and it comes back towards the end of the week and I am less discipline on the weekends and by the time  Monday comes around, I am back to the same place as the last Monday. I do not eat a ton over the weekend, I do my treking on Sunday burning 1600 to 1800 cal so I will eat a nice pasta lunch (300 gr pasta and some meat) and just that extra puts me back to the same weight as I was the last week. I am hoping I am switching fat for muscle, but other things are changing just not the belly. My ab workout is just the 8 min abs workout, so I thought I could do them daily. I have a very slow matablism so  that helps me to keep a little more regular in that area. Thanks for you help, as always you have good advice.

 Cheese can be tricky to get right without weighing it, it does pack a caloriffic punch that can add more calories than you had in mind to something. But outside of sheer calorie content there's no reason to be cautions - as long as you log it accurately there's no earthly reason I can think of to fear cheese.

 Besides lactore intolerance or allergies that is.

 I don't think the pasta is the problem - there's a paper out on the effects of exercise on fat storage (de novo lipogenesis) I found interesting in that respect. The subjects were trained pretty hard and then fed a pound of pasta to see how exercise affected fat storage. Guess how much fat they stored after eating as much pasta as they could physically cram down?

 Nothing.

 Okay, this is after high intensity exercise when you're at least somewhat glycogen-depleted, so theoretically I suppose you can argue that your walks aren't that intense but I'm willing to bet you're quite glycogen-depleted after walking for a few hours.

 The 8-minute ab workout is decent enough; thing is, when you work a muscle every day it never gets a chance to recover. The muscle fibres never get to grow stronger and under constant overtraining with too much volume or too high frequency your body will instead lose muscle in that area. That's the localised overtraining bit - the rest of your body may be fine but the muscle you're working every day is overtrained.

 Overtraining - whether localised or systemic - tends to lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels, and a lot of things in your CNs goes astray when that happens. Cortisol is the "energy hormone" that places you in a state of high readiness, and when you're "always on" due to chronically elevated cortisol - well, eventually your CNS fatigues.

 The effect is very probably not dramatic given that abs are such small muscles, but I tend to think that since dieting is already a stressful for your body there's no need to add anything avoidable to it. Even small factors become important when you're close to the end.

 Alwyn wrote an article called "The last ten pounds" a while back - I don't agree with everything in there, but take a look and see if you want to pick up an idea or two from there.

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond with such a detailed message. I always enjoy reading your post, you have a great knowledge of the human system. take care

michael

thanks Melkor!!! :)