How To Kick A Weight Loss Plateau

Sometimes, you can do all the right things and still hit a point where you feel like you’re standing still on your efforts to lose weight. At Prime Fitness in Totowa, New Jersey, we track your progress, so we know when a weight loss plateau occurs and can make changes to your program. Weight loss plateauing occurs for many reasons. One reason that’s actually a good one is that you’re replacing fat with muscle tissue. Muscle tissue weighs more than fat tissue does per cubic inch, and you’ll know that’s what’s happening if you take measurements and are losing inches but staying the same weight.

If you’re gaining muscle, you’re still making progress, but what if the plateau isn’t from that?

Check out the routine you’re doing. Have you changed it at all since you started or even increased the repetitions? The human body is amazing. The more you make a movement, the more efficient it gets at doing that movement. That means burning fewer calories. If you haven’t changed your routine since day one, it’s time to make that change. Do something new. Varying your workout not only works different muscle groups on different planes, but it also burns more calories as your muscles learn the movements.

What type of workout are you doing?

Are you doing full body workouts that include all types of training? While aerobic exercises like running do burn tons of calories, those calories come from both muscle and fat tissue. Strength training also burns calories, but it primarily burns fat tissues and builds muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn 24/7, since muscle tissue requires more calories to maintain than fat tissue does. You effectively boost your metabolism.

If you’ve lost weight, losing more weight is even more difficult.

If you carried two twenty pound dumbbells everywhere with you, it would be constant exercise and cause you to burn more calories. If you’re carrying an extra 40 pounds, it’s exactly what it’s like. As you lose weight, the amount of extra weight you’re carrying is less, so your body doesn’t have to work as hard and you’ll burn fewer calories. It’s harder to lose weight, but still doable, especially since you’ve built more muscle mass. You have to beef up your workout or cut more calories to lose the same amount of weight as quickly. That’s why trainers constantly change your workout program and help you with nutrition.

• Your plateauing may come from too strict of a diet. Eating healthy isn’t dieting and a super low calorie diet isn’t healthy. It can make your body go into starvation mode, where it slows metabolism.
• Is the problem hydration? Your weight gain or lack of weight loss may come from water weight and one way to eliminate it is to drink more water. The body retains fluid when there’s too much sodium.
• Is the gym your only activity? If you’re working out for a half hour to an hour, but the rest of your life is sedentary, you can bust that plateau by being more active when you’re not in the gym. Take the stairs or park further from the store at the grocery. Have fun. Go for a walk or spend a night dancing.
• Another simple solution for plateauing is adequate sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, the body makes more ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and less leptin, the one that makes you feel full. Adequate sleep can help prevent overeating and give you the energy you need to stay active.

For more information, contact us today at Prime Fitness