Help - reached a plateau.......

melcookson

I've been doing weightwatchers since January and have lost 19lbs on the plan.
However, for the past 9 weeks my weight has stayed the same.
I've decided to do MyFitnessPal alongside WW to try and monitor how much fruit I'm eating,it's working out at about an additional 400 calories a day on top of my 26poi ts (1040 cals), plus weeklies, which I use occasionally (you're allowed 49 points a week for treats/meals out, not compulsory to eat them, 1point = approx 40 cals).

Just wondering if anyone else has plateaued with respect to their weight loss and any tips you can pass to me?
I'm 5ft, 124lbs and would like to lose another 15-20lbs.

brianmeidell

I plateaued after losing about 16 lbs (about 2/3 toward my goal), and stayed the same for 2 weeks or so.

I have had this happen in weight loss before, and I found two things that helps me move on:

1) Take a one-day-only binge day where you eat way, way, way more than you need. I read a long time ago that some famous fitness or body builder guy (I think it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually) would do this once in a while during hard dieting, to knock the body out of hunger-mode, where it burns less calories.
The effect it has had is to temporarily gain several pounds of weight, which then leaves the body over a week or so, and then continues down. I just did this, and it worked.
However, it takes a serious amount of self-control to get back on that dieting horse after the binge day. I would not recommend this to everyone.

2) Start eating almonds, spread out during the entire day. There is a study that showed that people who ate a lot of almonds lost more weight than people who did not, even though the almond-eaters were eating 300 calories more per day.
My interpretation of this is: You get 300 calories worth of almonds "for free" per day. That's a lot of almonds.
I used to be more strict and timed about it, spacing out with 2-3 almonds every 45 minutes throughout the day, using an alarm to remind me. The result is that your body keeps it's metabolism up, and you will be a lot more hungry, but it will burn more energy.

Recently, though, I've just been eating them whenever I feel snackish, and it seems to benefit my weightloss.

Honestly, I have no idea whether these things are good for anyone but me - I can see them doing more harm than good for some people, but they've worked for me.

Good luck getting there!

Regards,
Brian

Christi6604

Hey there,

I was on a six-month plateau and someone on these forums posted this article, which helped me. For ME, I had to up my calories by about 150 per day and decrease my cardio a bit...that kickstarted my metabolism again and I've lost another 8 pounds.

http://fitnesswithnatalie.blogspot.com/2011/05/most-dreaded-word-in-weight-loss.html

Good luck. I know it's frustrating. Just keep tweaking until you find what works for you.