How To Discover Your Macro Maintenance Threshold

TRANSCRIPT

Hey everyone, Nikkiey here with WarriorBabe. And this video topic today was a popular demand on my Instagram. I got so much good feedback, so I’m excited to bring it to you here. In this video, you are going to learn how you could eat a thousand plus more calories with more carbs and fats and maintain your current weight and body composition. So I’m gonna break it down so that you know exactly what a maintenance threshold is, and how you can begin to replicate this type of strategy into your own fitness journey as well. So if you stay until the end of this video, you are going to know all of my secrets, all that I have learned, and how I have implemented this strategy to hundreds of women who have been able to reach their desired goal of being toned, building muscle and changing their body composition. So get ready and enjoy. But before we do dive in, please smash the like button. It will help other women engage with this video, so they too can learn this information for themselves. So, first off, let me just say how online macro calculators can be so freaking misleading. For those of you who want to be in a maintenance phase, and you go to find what your macro numbers should be using an online calculator, those starting numbers will not be the numbers that carry you through a legitimate maintenance phase, that produces the ultimate result you could accomplish within that phase. Meaning with some time at those starting macro numbers, you could initially lose weight, which is not your ultimate goal with being in the maintenance phase and vice versa. You could potentially gain weight because it may be too many calories for your body. Those calculators don’t determine your lifestyle demands, they only determine a broad thing for you. Then it’s up to you to figure out how to adjust those numbers to align with what your actual goal is of maintaining weight, give or take a few pounds and keeping a decent level of leanness to your body and building some more muscle. That’s what you wanna accomplish in a maintenance phase. And that process of trying to align those numbers can be so freaking overwhelming since it’s not your area of expertise. Let me just speak to this very important reminder here first. This type of strategy may or may not work for you depending on your own personal consistency throughout. This requires a great level of consistency and adherence to figure out the whole data and everything that works specifically for you. It also depends where you’re at in your current finish journey, and the level of experience that you have with tracking macronutrients. Also, all macro numbers are completely unique and totally different for every single individual. So what’s someone’s 2200 calorie maintenance level is may be different to what yours specifically is. What is a maintenance threshold? Well, first of all, the goal of it is to maintain your weight, give or take a few pounds of daily fluctuations and maintain a decent level of leanness to your body while eating way more calories, way more macros than where you were at in a fat loss or cutting face. So in short, there is a lower level to this where your body basically starts out at your maintenance macros. And here at the lower level, you can maintain your weight, you can maintain your level of leanness or you could possibly even lose weight. As you do continue to lose or maintain your weight, give or take those fluctuations that happen daily, and your level of leanness, this is where you slowly increase your macro numbers weekly or biweekly, depending on how your body adapts to the increases. And doing this repeatedly while maintaining great results can push you well above your maintenance macros that you initially started with. So you see those online calculators aren’t going to carry you through the entire maintenance phase, ’cause your macro numbers are going to change. And this is the beauty of eating way more food while maintaining or even improving your body composition results, and how I am able to eat now 500 plus more calories incorporating more carbs and fats above my starting maintenance macros. So to dive into a little more context with what I’m currently doing. Three weeks ago, we kicked off our 80 day strong challenge in our WarriorBabe VIP program. If you wanna learn more about our programs, link in the description below. My goal throughout this challenge is to stay in maintenance, while determining where my new maintenance threshold is. So let me just say, as you go through fat loss and maintenance phases numerous times, as I have for the last seven years, your maintenance threshold can change. It should change because you are building more muscle and more muscle needs more food, so every maintenance phase is gonna require different numbers for you. So five days into the challenge, I dropped five pounds. Now majority of that was water weight from the holidays, but I was also getting hungry, hungry to the point where I wanted to chew my hand off. So I gave myself a refeed day, which is a day of tracking a higher intake of macros. That next day I dropped more weight, and I felt leaner than ever before. And I’m like, okay, this is not my goal right now, so I took that feedback as my body needed more food. So I increased my calories by 250 coming from a makeup of more carbs and more fats, and my body here started to level out, and I have since been maintaining weight, give or take a few pounds, and I’ve been maintaining an overall great level of leanness in my body. Two weeks at this calorie macro adjustment with maintaining results, I increase my calories again by 250 calories, coming again, from a makeup of carbs and fats. Here the goal is to continue to increase my intake every week or two weeks, depending on how my body adapts to the increases, and that’s how I preach it too for everyone else, and while maintaining overall leanness to my body and a steady weight. But also understand here weight, it may increase more than normal fluctuations, and that’s okay because my body, your body, doing this is also building muscle. So just a reminder, don’t entirely rely on that scale. Just use it as a tool. So all in all, now I’m eating 500 more calories than at the start of my maintenance while maintaining my body composition, leanness and weight. So I’m working my way up in the threshold, I’m gonna keep going. Now, here is another more in depth example of my current WarriorBabe VIP client who is 58 years young. And I pulled her stats so that I could give more context to this strategy for you, so follow along. Back at the end of September, we started to reverse her upwards out of a fat loss slash cutting phase to maintenance. She ended her cutting phase at 1,850 calories, and the reverse for a month went amazing. Each week we increased, or biweekly we increased her calories in her macros, for again, a month and she continued to drop weight. She lost five more pounds while eating 300 more calories. Now, finally at 141 pounds, we got her to finally level out and maintain eating around 2,150 calories. And this was in mid-October. So 2,150 calories was the low end of her maintenance threshold. We have since pushed her maintenance threshold to a higher end, and she’s still got so much more wiggle room to go because she’s still maintaining very well. She’s eating now 2,800 calories, 2800 calories. That’s 650 more calories than when we leveled her a way out at the lower end of her maintenance threshold, 950 more calories than when she was in a fat lost cutting phase. This whole strategy is extremely cool to understand and also totally eye opening to how much more food your body has the potential to be able to eat while maintaining where you ideally would like to have your body maintained at. To recap, the goal of the maintenance threshold is to maintain weight, give or take a few pounds, and most importantly, keep a decent level of leanness to your body while eating way more calories slash macros. And there’s a lower level to where your body basically starts out at maintenance macros. And you know, here you can maintain your weight, you can maintain your level of leanness or you could possibly lose weight. If you do lose weight, then you gotta work your numbers upwards. As you do continue to lose or maintain weight, give or take the fluctuation, and you maintain that solid level of leanness that you wanna keep, you slowly increase macro numbers weekly or biweekly, depending on how your body adapts to them. And doing this repeatedly while maintaining great results can push you well above your maintenance macros that you initially started with. This is the beauty of eating way more while maintaining or even improving your body composition results. I hope you all enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed giving you the information and helping you learn more about this phenomenal strategy. If you guys do have any questions, please leave them below this video in the comment section. I am always happy to help and answer them. And if you guys wanna be sure that you get sustainable macro nutrition and workout information for your individual needs, head over to WarriorBabe.com, where you can find even more amazing resources like this to help you build the lean, tone body you want, and most importantly, keep your results forever. Also, please make sure to subscribe to this channel. More videos like this one today are to come. Stay tuned and I’ll see you soon.