Answer To Your Fitness Questions" />Weight Loss Woes And Pitfalls Happen To All Of Us As We Try To Lose Or Maintain A Good Healthy Weight
June 26, 2007
Weight loss woes and pitfalls happen to all of us as we try to lose or maintain a good healthy weight. But every once in a while we hit a plateau and it’s kind of like running into a wall or in other words, you stop seeing results. This is not uncommon, in fact, unless you continually update your program to reflect the changes your body has already experienced, you can almost guarantee that a plateau will occur at some point as you move towards your goals.
The first thing you should do when hitting a plateau is look for a possible cause. Are you eating more calories than you think? The research shows that most of us really do underreport the number of calories we eat. The problem is that we really don’t know how to make an accurate assessment of just how much we are eating, for example, we don’t weight or measure the food , instead just eyeball or we don’t enter the small bites here and there that can add up to an additional 600 calories per day. But here is the interesting point, even if you’re eating less calories than before you lost the weight, you could be eating just enough to maintain your current weight at your current activity level. When we lose weight our metabolism slows down because there is less weight to fuel now, both at rest and during exercise. That is a plateau.
This leaves us with two options, to decrease again your caloric intake or increase your exercise. The problem with decreasing your calories is the danger of losing nutrition from a diet low in calories. It is much better to lose slowly and moderately by modestly decreasing your calories and it is also better to gradually increase your exercise sessions in intensity and duration very moderately. Otherwise, you stand the chance of injury and burnout, which spells failure.
Another way to get off the plateau is to add strength training. This is because muscle increases and that helps to offset the metabolism-lowering effects of diets. The more muscle you have the higher your metabolism is.
One last way is to vary your workouts. The human body adapts really fast to the same program or stimulus. By shaking things up you shock the body and it will begin to react again.
So get off the plateau safely and effectively!!!
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