How to break a fat loss plateau

louie377
louie377 Posts: 30 Member
edited September 21 in Health and Weight Loss
The first step in breaking plateaus is to stay positive and focused on your goal. Focus on where you want to go, not on where you are. A slow week is not a setback, it is feedback. If you have a week with no results, be like Thomas Edison and say, “This is great!

I’ve learned another way that doesn’t work.” When you look in the mirror and see no change, and you still keep the faith, knowing that in time you WILL get there if you stay the course, that’s the difference between those who ultimately succeed and those who fail.

The losers - the unsuccessful ones - they throw their arms up in the air in frustration after a few weeks with slow results and they QUIT, all the while grumbling about how they tried “everything” and it didn't work Usually when you hit a plateau, it means you need to work harder:

You need to crank up the intensity and frequency of your training. You also need to “tighten up” your diet. People often underestimate the amount of effort it requires to develop a lean body. They’ve been so brainwashed by the media and advertisements for weight loss scams that their perception of the amount of work required is flawed.

It takes hard work to get lean and if the degree of effort you’re putting in isn’t working, then quietly (without complaining) accept the fact that you have to work harder.

For example, if you’re doing 20 minutes of cardio per session, you can increase the duration to 30 minutes. If you’re doing 30 minutes, you can increase it to 40 minutes. If your heart rate is 130 you can push it up to 140. If you’re eating only 3 meals per day, you can increase metabolism by bumping it up to 5 or 6 smaller ones.

If you’re cheating 2 or 3 times a week you can drop back to only one cheat meal a week. Basically, reaching peak condition means that you train harder and diet ................ Stricter!

Replies

  • lordofultima
    lordofultima Posts: 293
    My sentiments exactly. There is always "tightening up" that can be done to your routines and nutrition. When your progress starts to slow or halt completely, you have to remove something that is inessential, and push even harder. Maybe flush out your old routine completely for a new one, keep your body guessing. Stop with 3 meals, split those in half and eat 6 instead.

    It's important to work it like this, because if you drop everything like a bad habit on day one, you're much less likely to succeed. Cold Turkey is a recipe for disaster.
  • weaklink109
    weaklink109 Posts: 2,831 Member
    You also need to evaluate your calories in, in relation to how much your body needs--taking in to account how much you are burning from exercise. If your body doesn't have enough fuel, it will hold on to everything it can, and the result will be a plateau.

    It sounds counter-intuitive, but there IS something to the idea that sometimes you have to eat MORE to lose. People prove this regularly by having a day where they don't get their normal amount of exercise, perhaps they are at a special occasion and eat more than normal, and then post a loss a day or two later. If that happens, it can be a sign that you are not meeting your body's nutritional needs.

    This is where the BMR, and figuring how many calories you are burning from your daily activities, plus exercise calories all come in to play in order to calculate where your calorie consumption needs to be.
  • balance9
    balance9 Posts: 160
    Great post, especially with regard to attitude. Also, sometimes it's important not to *add* cardio, but to decrease it a bit and replace with strength training. For women especially, this is often the missing piece of the puzzle.
  • lordofultima
    lordofultima Posts: 293
    Yeah that's usually why people plateau, they start to see less and less weight loss, so they starve themselves of calories even more, and then their metabolism pretty much halts as a result. Having energy to supply to your body is very important, especially when coupled with strength training, since your body has to fuel all the new muscle you're obtaining, and have the nutrients to rebuild that muscle while resting.
  • louie377
    louie377 Posts: 30 Member
    Good luck. You might want to invest in Build the fat feed the muscle . It's an e-book by Tom Venuto you can buy online. A wealth of info. And no BS Straight talk
  • louie377
    louie377 Posts: 30 Member
    True Great feedback:)
  • ArchyJill
    ArchyJill Posts: 548 Member
    For me it wasn't so much a matter of how much I ate, but what I was eating. In desperation I hired a trainer, who did the following: 1) gave me a great resistance training routine, 2) lowered my fat and upped my protein intake, and 3) convinced me I needed to drink less if I wanted to focus on lean muscles.

    Haven't lost a pound (argh) but I am way more defined and did lose a pants size in about a month!
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