Weight-Loss Plateau

Despite sticking to your diet and exercise plan, your weight just isn't coming off anymore. Don't give up. Hitting a weight-loss plateau is frustrating, but it's normal. The worst thing you can do is revert to old habits and start regaining weight. Tweaking your weight-loss strategy will help you conquer your plateau and start shedding pounds again.

Identification

It's normal to shed pounds quickly at the outset of your weight-loss program. When you cut calories, your body releases glycogen, the storage form of carbohydrates found in your liver and muscles. When glycogen is burned, water also is released, which results in substantial water weight loss that accelerates your positive trend on the scale.

Despite this initial success, you are likely to hit a plateau because you lose both fat and lean tissue when you cut calories. The lean muscle mass slows your metabolism. Since the rate at which you burn calories declines, you need to either increase your activity or cut calories again.

Time Frame

If you are hitting a weight-loss plateau at the six-month mark, join the club. This is the point at which a plateau is the most common. It does not seem to matter what type of program you are on, from diet to exercise to behavior modification to pharmacotherapy to programs following weight-loss surgery, according to "Clinical Obesity in Adults and Children," by Peter G. Kopelman.

Solution

Ramping up your exercise program is a top plateau-breaker. That's because it burns calories and also helps you build lean muscle mass. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism becomes. Raising your basal metabolic rate, or BMR, is important because it accounts for 60 to 70 percent of calories you will burn each day. BMR is largely dependent on your body mass. Reassessing your diet and cutting calories is another option -- as long as you don't go below 1,200 calories daily.

Considerations

You don't necessarily have to spend more time exercising to ramp up your calorie burn and build more muscle mass. Interval training, in which you alternate bouts of higher-intensity work with lower-intensity recovery periods, is one good strategy. Add this to your regimen twice a week. It works for all types of cardiovascular exercise, from walking or jogging to the stairclimber or elliptical trainer to biking to swimming.

For example, if you regularly take 20 minutes to walk a mile, add segments in which you walk at a 15-minute mile pace for a couple of minutes at a time. Other strategies include incorporating strength training into your routine if you don't already do so and adding activity to your day outside of planned workouts. For example, do more vigorous cleaning or walk more and rely less on your car.

Weight-Loss Plateau

Identification

Time Frame

Solution

Considerations

References

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