How Can I Lose Weight Once I Reach The Plateau?

With well-planned diet and exercise, most people are able to lose weight, but after weeks or months of exercise, many dieters reach the dreaded "plateau." Early on, weight comes off consistently, but once your body has burned a certain percentage of fat, the rest of the weight comes off much more slowly. If your weight loss has flat-lined, you need to reevaluate and adjust your daily diet and exercise routine to get past the plateau.

Step 1

Eat complex carbohydrates. Subcutaneous fat is easier to burn than visceral fat. When a person plateaus, it usually is because most of the subcutaneous fat is gone but pesky visceral fat remains. Complex carbohydrates are found in vegetables, grains and fruits, and promote visceral fat loss. Early on in your workout, you likely focused on lean protein for energy, but a protein-rich diet isn't as effective when trying to reduce visceral fat.

Step 2

Monitor calories carefully, maintaining a normal level. When reaching the plateau, some people cut back on calories, but this isn't a healthy or safe tactic: The key to weight loss is burning off calories, not starving yourself from a lack of calories. The average person should maintain a daily caloric intake of about 2,000. Track your caloric intake so that you know exactly how many calories you need to burn each day. In order to lose weight, you simply need to burn more calories than you take in.

Step 3

Exercise with fat-burning cardiovascular workouts. Strength-training tones muscle but it doesn't take off pounds as quickly. If you've plateaued, your problem could be that you're focusing on the wrong exercises for continued weight loss. For an average 160-lb. person, an hour of running burns about 986 calories, rollerblading burns 913 calories and jumping rope burns 730 calories. With just two or three hours of these intense cardiovascular exercises, you can burn off an entire day's worth of calories. Weight lifting burns only 219 calories per hour.