How To Break Your Diet Plateau

You may have to work a bit harder to break the stall in weight loss but it will be well worth it in the long run. When you first start dieting, you typically are drastically decreasing the amount of food you eat while increasing the amount of exercise you do. The pounds come off pretty fast in the beginning but after a while the weight loss seems to slow and maybe even stop all together.

This diet plateau is normal, as your body is trying to keep as much fat as it can (this goes back to beginnings of man when food was few and far between so stocking up and keeping those stores of fat on was important for survival).

Your body gets used to the amount of calories and exercise you are doing and the metabolism adjusts itself downward to slow the burning of fat. Plus you weigh less now so it takes less food to keep your body running than it did when you started the diet.

So what can you do to break the diet plateau?

Unfortunately there are no magic pills or foods you can eat. You simply need to eat a bit less, exercise more or both! You could try cutting out a snack per day or lessening the amount you have gotten used to putting on your plate. Substitute that bacon for a low fat soy alternative or that bagel for an orange. Stop using sugar and cream in your coffee or tea. These may seem like little things but they all add up and when you consider a pound of fat is 3500 calories, then eliminating 250 calories a day adds up to 1 pound every 2 weeks.

If you feel like you simply can’t eat any less than you currently are, you’ll need to add on to your exercise routine to break the diet plateau by either increasing the duration or the intensity. Walk another mile each day, or add another 20 minutes of weight lifting exercises. Jog a bit instead of walking. Again, small things that can add up. Depending on your weight and the speed at which you walk you can burn about 150 calories on a 30 minute walk, about 120 by adding 30 minutes of weight lifting, and 275 for a half hour of jogging or swimming.

Breaking the diet plateau is not easy but it can be done. Keep in mind that the less you weigh, the less calories you burn at each activity so it stands to reason that as your weight goes down, the losses you see each week will get less and less.

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