Every dieter has experienced it. You know the story; despite doing everything right: working out and eating well consistently, the stubborn scale refuses to move. You start to feel as if all this effort you are making is worthless and contemplate throwing your hands up in defeat and ordering that extra-large pizza you’ve been fantasizing about. Not so fast!
There are tactics you can employ should this happen to you. But before you start using them, be sure you really are in a plateau.
Take your measurements. Before you order that pizza, get out your measuring tape. You should have already taken your measurements when you initially began your fat loss journey. If you don’t think you’re seeing progress now, the first thing you should do is measure yourself. Why? Because the scale doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes, especially when you’re incorporating weight lifting into your workouts, you may still be getting smaller despite a stall on the scale. In a nutshell, this can happen because you are gaining muscle at a close pace to that at which you are burning fat. Muscles if famously more dense than fat (i.e., one pound of muscle takes up approximately 18% less space than a pound of fat), so you can still be growing smaller and losing fat, even if the scale doesn’t reflect it. If you measure and find that you are still getting smaller, don’t sweat the scale number. Your ultimate goal is to lose fat, right? It isn’t to weigh less. So congratulations! You are losing inches and therefore becoming less fat. Keep up the good work.
Okay, so you have measured and the tape isn’t showing any losses either. What do you do now?
1) Check your water consumption.
Are you drinking enough water? Drinking plain water (not calorie-free beverages) has been shown to increase weight loss by up to 44% (in a 2008 study reported by the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.) You may not experience the same considerable boost, but there are reasons why water can spur weight loss. A study in 2004 found a metabolic increase of about 30% for its participants, theoretically from the thermal effort needed by your body to raise the cold water to body temperature. Also a possibility is that just the consumption of water helps satiate your appetite, which often mistakes thirst for hunger. And if you are retaining water from an overly salty diet or PMS, drinking extra water helps to instruct your cells to release the extra water, reducing your bloat and the water weight it causes.
How much should you drink? You should drink enough that your urine is clear or nearly colorless. For most women, that requires about a 2 liter/day water intake.
2) Eliminate breads, sugars and starches from your plate.
Nix the sugars and starches. Yes, I said it. If you’re stuck and not losing, I suggest you skip the bread at dinner. Have a salad instead of a sandwich, or order the sandwich and eat it open-faced with a fork so you can avoid the bread. Pass on the potato; opt for an extra helping of vegetables or fruit instead.
“But starches are low calorie! Fat free! Nutritional! They fill me up!” There can be truth in that, but those objections are not the reasons I suggest eliminating them. When ingested, starches convert to simple sugars, which provoke a fast insulin response. One job of insulin is fat storage, so eating foods which provoke a high insulin response also turn on the fat-storage trigger in our metabolism. Eating sugars and starchy foods tells our body to park any calories not immediately used in fat storage. I don’t know about you, but if I’m trying to break through a plateau, the last thing I want to do is start up the fat storage engine.
By cutting the starches and sugars, you minimize the hormonal response your body has to your food, which can translate into a big difference in fat loss.
3) Try calorie cycling.
Calorie cycling is a bodybuilder’s secret, but it is built into every program which includes a “cheat” day. You may have done it without knowing it. The theory behind this is that an occasional spike in calories helps avoid your body's adaptation to your low calorie diet. The human body is very efficient, and if you feed it a lower calorie diet, it will adapt over time, reducing your losses. Calorie cycling attempts to stymie its natural efficiency.
How to do it. It is a fairly simple approach, with some no-nonsense caveats. For 2-3 days a week, eat your normal, lower-calorie diet. On the 4th day, eat more calories – around 500 calories more. Do not eat crap. Eat good food, just eat more of it or richer healthy foods. Do not get comfortably having a weekly oreo and ice-cream binge. That is not the idea. Rather, you want to increase the total calorie count for the day. On day 5, go back to your usual diet for a day or two and then repeat the higher calorie day on day 7. Basically, every 2-3 days, add in a higher calorie day, then return to the usual menu. I have also seen calorie cycling methods which go every third week instead of the third day.
4) Change up your activity.
As mentioned above, the human body is very efficient. It figures out how to accomplish what it needs using the least amount of energy possible. If you have been following the same routine (endurance running and weight lifting, for example), change it. Follow a different lifting program – try an upper/lower split instead of full body. Bike instead of run. Do sprints instead of a long run. Try out the ergometer (aka, rowing machine) at the gym instead of the elliptic. Mix it up.
Add in HIIT and/or sprints. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and sprints both rely on a different energy system than longer, more endurance-type sports. They also are huge fat-burners. See my previous post for more info.
5) Additional suggestions:
1) Get more sleep. Poor quality or quantity of sleep can affect your hormones, which in turn affects your fat metabolism. If you are not already getting a solid’s night’s rest, make it a priority.
2) Track and evaluate honestly what you are eating. Are you really eating as well as you think you are? Sometimes we slowly get off track and it doesn’t set off any alarms. Look to see if you are eating 6-8 servings of fruit or vegetables. Are you eating a lot of fast food? Even “healthy” options at fast food restaurants usually have high sodium and sugar contents. Are you snacking on something you’ve forgotten about?
3) Tweak your macronutrients. If you’re currently doing a 50/30/20, try a 40/35/25. Something different. Play around with it. You might find that you function better and lose more fat with a different macro composition.
4) Eat less salt. In conjunction with drinking more water, you may find that dropping your salt intake can improve the scale’s behavior. I do not suggest that water-weight is your ultimate goal, but water retention can hide legitimate fat losses.
Most importantly, don’t give up! Just because you’ve hit a roadblock doesn’t mean you need to turn around. Keep up the good work and don’t be discouraged. Try some of these suggestions. Find other suggestions (there are more out there, I’m sure.) But keep at it; you’ll be glad you did!
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