Health and Fitness Tips

Health and Fitness Tips - Why your fat loss stopped:


If you hit a plateau, the person with the most flexibility in their approach is the person who's going to be most likely to get through that plateau.

The first thing though is to understand what a plateau really is. This is important, because if you were losing weight, but now you're not, there's only one thing that that could mean; you were in a calorie deficit but you're no longer in a calorie deficit. You may be wondering why that happens.


There are four primary reasons you hit a plateau:

First, your metabolism can slow down. If you've been cutting calories, especially if you cut them severely, your body adapts by decreasing the metabolic rate. That's sometimes known as the "starvation response."


The second reason is that after people lose a lot of weight, they tend to keep eating the same way they were eating when they were heavier. So they're feeding a smaller person the way they were when they were a bigger person, but when you're a smaller person, you don't need as many calories, even at rest (basal metabolic rate is lower)


A third reason is that when you move a smaller body, you're not burning as many calories anymore. If you strap on a weighted vestor a heavy backpack and go hike up a hill, you can tell, obviously, that you're burning more calories when you're lugging around the extra weight.


Fourth, and this one requires a little bit of honesty, is that most people either cheat on their diets or they forget to record part of their food intake. Even if they don't do it intentionally and they don't "cheat" per se, unconsciously, we're all terrible at estimating how much food we eat. Some studies have even showed underreporting calorie intake as muchas 50%. In other words, you say, "I'm only eating 1,200 calories a day, but i'm stuck at a plateau" but you're really eating 1,800 calories a day which doesn't give you much of a deficit.


All of these reasons for plateaus get amplified in the later stages of a diet, because biologically speaking, your body is doing everythingit possibly can to get you to go off your diet and to get weight to stabilize.After a long period of dieting and a large decrease in body mass, your body cranks up the appetite, stimulates cravings and your body tries to trick you into eating more.


The leaner you get and the more aggressively you cut calories, the more your body tends to defend its weight, and any remaining body fat. So it's really common to hit that plateau when you're leaner. Usually it's nowhere near as difficult for the overweight person to start losing weight as it is for the lean person to get ripped.


If you think about it, it's pretty unnatural from a biological perspective to walk around with really low single-digit body fat. It's not beneficial from a survival-of-the-species point of viewto have low body fat. So this metabolic adaptation becomes more pronounced the leaner you get.You're also at a higher risk of losing muscle, because extra muscle is not econmical when there's a calorie shortage. It's kind of like a gas guzzler.


The ultimate answer to why you plateau and why it's hard to break into those single digits is that you were in a calorie deficit, but for all of the reasons mentioned above, you're no longer in deficit.

The way to break the plateau then is to:

(1) Re-stimulate metabolism and re-set fat-burning and starvation hormones

(2) Re-establish the deficit, and

(3) Keep after it!

The question was, "How do I do that? More cardio, more weighttraining, manipulate my diet?" You could do all of the above. Eating less or exercising more can both increase a deficit. But one thing you might want to do first, is give yourself a little break. Take your calories up to maintenance level, maybe for a week.


The idea there is not to try to accelerate fat loss, because what you're actually doing is removing your calorie deficit for a short period of time. What you're trying to do is facilitate the fat losswhen you jump back into it. It gives your body a physiological break from the stress of dieting; it resets some of those starvation hormones and stimulates your metabolism so when you go back to the calorie deficit, your body responds again.


You also get mental break from the diet as well, which makes it easier to stick with the program when you go back to it. You could also use a calorie cycling approach, to help prevent yourself from hitting another plateau, and we already covered calorie and carbcycling in the last call.I also recommend, because so many people underestimate how much they eat, that you don't take any chances.

Stop guessing and really get serious about what you're taking in.You've probably been told many times by a lot of different "experts"that you don't have to count calories. But when you're in a plateau, I'd recommend tracking calories or keeping a food journal. Then what you need to do is reestablish that calorie deficitusing every tool at your disposal.


Use nutrition by pulling back your portion sizes. Or use cardio. And by increased cardio, I mean increasing energy expenditure. You could add days a week. You could increase your duration. But increasing energy expenditure is not necessarily doing longer workouts, just burning more calories. So you could also take the same amount of time that you're spending right now and increase yourintensity.


The whole idea is just burn more calories and stimulate metabolism, which gives you your deficit back again, or you can pull back your calorie intake and give yourself a deficit again from the food side. There's more than one way to do it and I don't think that you should lock yourself in to just diet or just exercise. Remember, there are TWO sides to the energy balance equation, not one.


More at: http://www.fitnessattitudes.com/plateau.html