Breaking the Weight Loss Plateau

Have every tried to lose weight and it started out great but then stopped? You lose 10 pounds or even 15 or 20 and you feel like you’ve finally found the way to get rid of all that useless flab… and then it seems like you’ve hit a wall! You just can’t shed a single ounce. This is a condition called a weight loss plateau and it happens to millions of people. It’s not your fault. It just happens.

It doesn’t matter how much you train or how carefully you watch your diet. It has suddenly become impossible to go on losing weight.

However, before you lose heart and get all depressed, read this article about how to break your weight loss plateau and start losing pounds again. The truth is that there are a number of things that you can do to restart your weight loss process again. In this article I will share some of the best tips I know…

Tip #1 – Do strength training and intervals

While you may have been working out for a while now, you may need to do things differently. The focus should be on strength training and interval cardio workouts. The reason is that these kind of workouts have an after-burn effect. Not only do you burn off calories and fat during your workout, you continue to burn calories well after the workout has ended.

In addition, strength training in particular can increase the amount of lean muscle mass that you have. Muscle tissue has one ‘magical’ property: it burns more calories than other tissue. It doesn’t matter whether your sitting, reading, or even sleeping. More muscle equals more burned calories, and breaking a weight loss plateau is all about burning more calories.

Tip #2 – Increase protein and fiber

You may find that a small change in the food you eat will make a big difference. In particular, adding more protein to your diet may give your metabolism a boost. Protein is good for your metabolism for two reasons:

1. It is a thermogenic food, meaning that it is hard for the body to digest so it requires a lot of calories. When you eat a lot of protein, the body needs to use more calories to process it, leaving less calories to get stored.
2. Protein is the building block of muscles and we’ve already discussed how more muscle tissue means a higher metabolism and a faster calorie burn rate. Naturally, just eating protein won’t get you any muscles, you need to train for that as well, but it’s crucial if you want to get any results.

Tip #3 – Add more fat burning Foods

While the actual effect of so called “fat burning foods” is often exaggerated, to break a weight loss plateau often requires doing many small things and waiting for the big result to arrive. For that reason, you should include in your diet, in moderate quantities some of the following foods:

1. Green tea – I often drink this with honey as sweetener.
2. Cinnamon – This spice helps to stabilize the fat storing hormone Insulin.
3. Chili peppers – Due to their richness is capsaicin, a substance that boosts calorie burning.
4. Dark chocolate – Due to it’s richness in caffeine and theobromine.
5. Cool water – While water is, in an of itself, free of any fat burning substances, drinking cool water forces the body to expand calories to heat it up to the normal body temperature. Water also has many other benefits. Check out this article on how much water to drink per day for more information.

For more fat burning foods, check out the 7 Day Belly Blast Diet by Josh Bezoni.

Tip #4 – More meals, smaller portions

One excellent way to break through a plateau is to make changes to your eating habits. One way to do so is to eat more meals and snacks throughout the day but to make each of them smaller. Big meals tend to weigh the body down, divert much of the body’s energy to the act of digestion, can make you sleepy, and may be adverse to maintaining a high metabolism throughout the day.

Eating lots of small meals and snacks will help you ward off cravings, can keep your energy levels up, and may produce a faster calorie burn. Try it and you’ll see.

Tip #5 – Workout harder

While you may be feeling like you’re giving it all at the gym, are you really?

Take a hard and critical look at the workouts you do and try to make them harder (within reason, of course). You don’t have to train like crazy 7 days a week but you do need to make every workout count. Craig Ballantyne, a trainer I respect a lot, once wrote that he tries to set some sort of personal record every time he goes to the gym: lift a bigger weight, do more reps, run faster, etc. While this may not be possible on every single workout, it’s a good mindset to have and one that can deliver results for anyone who wants to break through a weight loss plateau.

Tip #6 – Change things up

Often, our body gets used to what we eat and how we train. If you’re finding it hard to continue burning fat then a change may be in order. One way to do so is to alter the amount of calories that you eat and change the composition of your nutrients. For instance, add more protein to your diet and lose some carbs. This change doesn’t need to be forever. You should make it a habit. One program that uses this kind of calorie cycling is the Xtreme Fat Loss Diet by Joel Marion.

Another thing is to do different exercises at the gym or during your cardio workouts. Do some cycling instead of running, use free weights instead of training machines. A change may work wonders.

Final tip

Above all, don’t despair. Breaking a weight loss plateau can happen if you do the right things and never stop trying, I’m sure you’ll succeed. And, if you feel that your current diet plan has run its course, it may be time to find another one, with a different method to push your fat loss results further.