How to Break a Weight Loss Plateau

Have you ever found yourself on a dreaded “plateau” when losing weight? You were moving along nicely at first, dropping pounds fairly easily – when BAM! The scale isn’t budging no matter what you do. This can go on for many weeks, and it is often one of the biggest reasons why people quit their diets.

Take a look at the tips below to learn how to break a weight loss plateau:

- How far have you come?

First, consider how much weight you have lost, and how much more you want to lose. Is it realistic to want to lose more, or are you quite close to your initial goal weight? Sometimes you may have a specific number in your head (like how much you weighed in college) but since then you have grown and matured and that weight may no longer be realistic for you.

- How much more do you want to lose?

If you do indeed want to lose more weight, you need to readjust your calories and exercise habits so that you are creating a “deficit” between calories eaten and calories burned. Figure out how many calories you need to eat. This is usually calculated by multiplying your current weight by 10, and then subtracting 500 or so. If you weigh 200 pounds, you would need to eat about 2,000 calories daily to maintain that weight. To lose weight, you can reduce your daily calories by 500 or so, which should result in a 1 pound weight loss per week. If you burn approximately 500 calories a day by exercising, you can bump it up to 2 pounds per week lost. (This varies widely from person to person – consider it a rough guide, not an absolute.)

- Be logical about it.

The worst thing to do is get emotional about a plateau, because your emotions won’t allow you to make logical, informed decisions. Keep your cool and think about it logically – your body is fairly predictable in the way it reacts to outside influences. Consider what you have been eating and drinking, how much you have been exercising, and then make decisions that will help you jumpstart weight loss again.

- Be patient.

It may take a few weeks to see the numbers on the scale moving down again – be patient while you wait. Simply focus on taking the steps you know you need to take to get where you want to be. You know it works, it has always worked in the past and it WILL work again – just keep reminding yourself of that and you’ll feel more confident about it.

- Avoid things that can lead to a plateau.

Finally, be sure you aren’t doing things that can create weight loss plateaus – like eating too much sodium or sugar, not drinking enough water, not getting enough exercise, not resting enough, being too stressed, and so on. Check out the ingredients of everything you’ve been eating and be sure there aren’t hidden problems there, like added sugar and sodium that is putting you over your calorie limit. Also be sure that you aren’t keeping your calories too LOW by eating less than your body needs, or that you haven’t lost a substantial amount of weight very quickly – that can make your body call a time-out to adjust.

To break a weight loss plateau, you simply need to figure out what’s causing it in the first place and take steps to correct it. You may need to do a bit of detective work to find the answers, but they are always there.

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