8 Tips for Breaking Through Weight Loss Plateau
Everyone who loses weight hits that annoying plateau period. When you hit a weight loss plateau, it seems like all the tricks you’ve done to lose weight have failed, and no matter how much you control your diet and sweat out exercise, your weight numbers remain steady as a mountain with no downward adjustment. You think you’re doing well, eating light, controlling your caloric intake, and not slacking off at the gym, but even so, you’ve hit a weight loss bottleneck, how do we break through it?
Our body is a living organism, not a significant physical container for storing calories. This is one of the misconceptions we have when it comes to weight loss, so we take for granted that if we burn more calories than our body absorbs, we will lose weight dramatically.
This is not the case. After a certain degree of diet control and a certain amount of time, your willpower will weaken and you will lose resistance to food, while your body will gradually adapt to the rhythm of diet and exercise, and if you still carry out your weight loss measures in the same way as before, your body will function more efficiently. Maybe your weight will even rebound, which is more like a willpower wreck for dieters who are already desperately trying to lose weight. Many people get defeated at this stage, give up on their persistent weight loss efforts and go back to the old lifestyle that made them fat.
Therefore, when we hit a weight loss plateau, we must recognize the reality and take scientific means to enable ourselves to break through this barrier and move on to the next weight loss plateau. After reaching a weight loss plateau, we can take the following steps:
Further Control Calorie Intake
We must do a calorie intake deficit when losing weight, do not let the calorie intake of the diet is higher than the calorie consumption of the body, otherwise, your exercise workouts even if you do sweat, also can not lose weight.
When your weight loss enters a more in-depth stage, there is often weak willpower, the face of food is difficult to resist, and usually also unconsciously steal some snacks, these extra calories become a stumbling block on your way to weight loss, and many eaten calories inadvertently be ingested. So dieters often complain not how to eat and how to still keep gaining weight when they feel gluttonous, you eat things that are often within reach of packaged food or high-calorie food on the table, these foods contain high calories, and you can not eat a few bites will easily offset the amount of exercise you have a few hours.
Therefore, you should still keep your dietary caloric intake under strict control and still aim to further reduce your daily dietary control during your plateau period, starting with a 100-calorie reduction per day and gradually increasing to a 500-calorie reduction per day. This measure should be implemented gradually to give your body and mind an adaptation process, otherwise, you will be easily defeated by the temptation of food.
Change The Way You Exercise
When your weight loss process stalls, you should start to revisit your fitness exercise program because, by this time, the body has adapted to your current physical activity, the body will exercise in a more energy-efficient way, this is our body’s instinct, the body always tends to consume fewer calories and store fat in the body as a life-saving energy reserve, these are natural when we have weight loss obstacles.
We need to make adjustments to the training plan we did before, change the training style, training movements, and training equipment so that the body has a new feeling for your training so that your purpose is achieved, do not do the same training rhythm of the exercise, such as turning your long jog into high-intensity sprint intervals, you will quickly see the weight change brought about by this change.
You can add high-intensity interval training to your training program, increasing the intensity and duration of such high-intensity interval training, constantly prompting yourself to show signs of weight loss.
You can also constantly adjust the rhythm of high-intensity interval training workouts, such as training movements for 40 seconds, then resting for 20 seconds, and after a period changing to 30 seconds training 30 seconds rest, or 30 seconds training 15 seconds rest, this constant change in intensity and training rhythm will not allow the body to adapt, the body will always run in a very energy-consuming way, to achieve the purpose of fat loss this way we achieve The purpose of fat loss.
Training methods you can make some changes, for example, you can change running on the treadmill to outdoor running, you can also change running to riding indoor stationary bikes or wind resistance bikes, you can also change to rowing machines, different training methods will call on different muscle groups in the body to help you burn more calories, without giving the body a chance to adapt. The same is true for strength training.
Don’t Be Afraid To Eat Fat
We have always thought that eating too much fat makes you fat, but now research has found that the fat we eat does not cause the body’s insulin response and does not trigger the body’s fat-hoarding mechanism. At the same time, fat can increase your feeling of fullness, making you less likely to feel hungry, which will help you not overeat at your next meal and can make it easier to control the overall caloric intake of your diet. Studies have found that fat can help you reduce your caloric intake by up to 30%.
However, it is important to note that we should consume healthy fats such as coconut oil, nuts, and avocados, these healthy fats will make you leaner and stronger, be sure to avoid artificial fats, these fats will not only not help you lose weight, but will also give you health risks.
Eat More Protein
We tend to control the calorie intake when we lose weight, if we do not control properly and there is too big a gap in calorie intake, our body tends to go to the breakdown of protein to provide energy for the body, and this time the protein comes from your muscles, if you do not have enough protein intake in your diet, we can easily lose muscle when we lose weight, and the reduction of muscle will reduce our basal metabolism, which is not good for weight loss.
The more protein you eat in your diet will also make you feel full and less likely to feel hungry between meals, so you won’t think about snacking and you won’t eat a lot of food at your next meal, which is great for you to control your dietary intake and avoid excessive calorie intake.
Protein is also a very difficult food to digest, so your body will consume more calories when digesting protein than when digesting carbohydrates, and the caloric effect of this food is also a very important component of our body’s daily basal metabolism, so you should consume at least 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day, and be aware of the sources of protein intake, you should eat more nuts, eggs, lean meats, these are all good sources of protein.
Controlling Carbohydrate Intake
We all know that carbohydrates are a major cause of being overweight, and when you are in a weight loss bottleneck, controlling your carbohydrate intake is an important measure to achieve a breakthrough.
Controlling our carbohydrate intake does not mean not eating at all, carbohydrates are also an essential source of energy for our body, and insufficient carbohydrate intake can also make your exercise workout lose motivation. Therefore, what we need to do is to effectively control and reduce the amount of carbohydrate intake to a reasonable level. At the same time, choose the time of carbohydrate intake on the day of exercise, so that the carbohydrates you consume after high-intensity exercise, go to help your muscle recovery and growth, rather than as energy reserves piled up in the body.
Drink More Water
The vast majority of our body is made up of water, water plays a very important role in the daily operation of the body, and we will sweat and lose a lot of water in weight loss exercise, if you can not do more water, it is easy to cause dehydration in the body, so that the body’s metabolic efficiency will be reduced, and your weight loss efficiency will be slowed down.
When we do high-intensity exercise, we have to do before exercise to start hydration, during exercise also drink water, after exercise to continue to hydrate, to do the entire exercise process hydration, you do not appear before and after exercise weight change, sweating loss of water to drink water to make up for it, sweating during exercise to lose weight is not the purpose of our weight loss, what we want is an exercise to help us burn fat.
Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting can help you effectively control the caloric intake in your diet. At the same time, intermittent fasting can also improve fat oxidation and promote the burning of more fat. This will all speed up the efficiency and process of our weight loss.
Intermittent fasting also allows you to develop healthier eating habits by not eating until you feel full, eating seven or eight minutes full at each meal, allowing your body to slowly get used to being mildly hungry, rather than getting used to the feeling of fullness in your stomach before you eat.
Intermittent fasting can also improve your body’s sensitivity to insulin, allowing your body to channel more of the calories you consume to your muscles instead of turning them into fat and hoarding them.
Getting Enough Sleep
You may be completely unaware of how important sleep is to weight loss. Our body’s weight loss process is not when you sweat and exercise and work out, much less when you eat, but when you sleep at night.
If you hit a weight loss plateau, you must look at your sleep, whether you have the habit of staying up late, whether you get enough sleep every day, and if so, change your rhythm of life to ensure that you get enough sleep every day, otherwise, your weight loss efforts will all be in vain.
A study by the University of Chicago found that lack of sleep slows down the oxidation of body fat and increases muscle loss by 60%, which can become a stumbling block on your weight loss journey. If you want to break through the weight loss plateau, you should make sure you get eight hours of sleep a day.