The Dreaded Weight Loss Plateau

One of the biggest roadblocks on a journey is when your weight stalls. It can cause all sorts of psychological issues that often lead to people throwing in towel even if they have lost weight. However, it should be expected well in advance that plateaus are completely normal and can happen multiple times throughout your journey.

There are several reasons for this with the main ones being how your metabolism adapts to changes in calorie intake and expenditure. In addition, by default, smaller bodies burn fewer calories so essentially losing any amount of weight will decrease the number of calories your body burns. Finally, general movement (fidgeting, standing up, housework, etc.) also slow down. Why does all this happen? Well your body is very clever in noticing when it has been receiving fewer calories than normal and therefore kicks into survival mode by compensating limiting the number of calories it expends.

This means that if you continue with the same eating and training pattern, things will remain the same weight-wise as you are no longer creating the caloric deficit to achieve the weight loss you did originally.

Different people will hit weight-loss plateaus at different times, This depends on how much weight they have to lose, how much exercise they are participating in, and how low they have dropped their calories below maintenance and for how long.

Ultimately the answer is to change the stimulus again either by tweaking calories further or looking for ways to expend more energy or a mixture of both. If you have room for more energy expenditure activities like walking to more a few times a week, cleaning more, or adding a gym session or two then go with these strategies first. You would be surprised how much all this stuff adds up and can often be enough to elicit further weight loss. If you come to a place where you cannot add any more physical activity to your current lifestyle then reduce calories slightly (250 – 300) to progress once more.

Hopefully, now you can see that plateaus are completely normal and the reason why. Expect them but also plan so that you can overcome them when the time comes.

 

You May Also Like

About the Author: Fat Losing Tips

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *