So you’ve embarked on a weight-loss journey and have made pretty encouraging progress. You may even have shed over 2 kg in the first week alone, and continued losing almost 1 kg each week thereafter.
Then, after months of disciplined dieting and regular exercise, it stops. You feel like you’ve reached a plateau, and you stop losing weight. What’s happening?
There can be several factors leading to a slowing down or stopping of weight loss. Some reasons include low-intensity exercise routines, overestimating your calories burnt when working out, or cheating on your diet too often.
Regardless of what the main cause could be, the following tips can prove useful to help you get out of this plateau and back to losing weight again!
1) Alter your training
Your body is able to adapt remarkably, undergoing both anatomical and physiological modifications to handle new stresses and challenges.
As such, you may have experienced rapid weight loss in the initial few weeks of your cardio or strength workouts. However, this gradually comes to a halt as your body adjusts itself to the current level of stress.
To prevent this from happening, you will have to constantly give your body fresh challenges during your exercise sessions to keep your muscles and cellular machinery under adequate stress, which can then lead to further weight loss.
Taking up a structured workout program that targets different muscle groups and alternates between cardio and strength training in each session, while progressively increasing in difficulty, could do the trick.
2) Alter your diet
Continuing to stick to a certain diet after weight-loss has plateaued might be another misstep, despite doing everything else right.
For example, if you’ve been on a ketogenic diet for several months and no longer find yourself losing weight, it might be an indication for you to switch to a different diet, or add something into the mix in terms of your eating habits, such as intermittent fasting.
3) Boost your metabolism
It is normal for your metabolism to slow down as you age, and this could be getting in the way of your weight loss attempts.
But it’s worthy to note that reduced metabolism may also occur when your body undergoes a status of sudden caloric deficit due to your diet, as it might slow down the burning of calories so as to conserve energy and stop you from going into starvation.
To counter this metabolic slowdown, remember to keep an active lifestyle while also consuming foods that will boost your metabolism.
It is a common experience for many to find maintaining weight-loss more challenging than the initial process of burning fat. We hope these tips can help keep your momentum going and reach your fitness goals!
