How to Break Through a Weight Loss Plateau

Hitting a weight loss plateau is discouraging when you’ve been working so hard to reach your goal. Before you throw in the towel, try these strategies to break through.

I’m a generally positive person. I won’t sugarcoat something negative, but I always try to find the silver lining.

That being said, sometimes the truth is hard. And here’s the truth…

Change ain’t easy.

Change always comes with some amount of discomfort. It’s not always “break a leg” discomfort, but it’s enough to make us hesitate.

Which of course is why so many of us simply don’t change.

Why Change is So Hard

I’m not talking about short-term change. I’m talking about long-term, even lifelong, behavior change. Lifestyle changes. Dependencies. Habits.

We think that change is straight-forward. We believe that long-term change is all or nothing, like changing your white shirt to a black shirt. The reality is, change is not a single event. Behavior change happens over time, with a lot of room for error along the way.

Negative emotions are often a catalyst for change. While it feels, at least at the start, that guilt, shame or fear should be enough of a motivator, the opposite is true. We should be trying to jump start change from a platform of positivity…what good will this change bring to my life? How much better will my life be when I’ve made this change?

We bite off more than we can chew. I can’t tell you how often clients come to me expecting a massive diet re-haul and a professional athlete style exercise program right from the get go. Sometimes the hardest part of my job as a coach is asking them to slow down, start small, and create a strong foundation on which we can build upon forever.

The toolbox is empty. If you attempt to put together the IKEA shelf without the right tools, you get nowhere. True, the tools for weight loss are not as straight forward as an L-shaped doo-hickey to tighten the bolts (straight forward, right?), they exist. And to beat a weight loss plateau, you should have a toolbox full of strategies that your comfortable using.

What is a Weight Loss Plateau

When you first start out on a weight loss program, you might find that the pounds come off easily. That’s normal…your body is ready to lose the extra weight. But over time that weight loss slows down and you could even hit a weight loss plateau.

It’s frustrating to see your weight plateau, especially when you are still exercising and still following that diet plan.

What happened?

Weight loss is about more than caloric ins and outs. When you lose weight not only is your waist line affected, your body goes through physiological and hormonal changes too.

Weight loss plateaus happen for a number of reasons.

• As you lose weight, your metabolism requires less energy to maintain daily functions. Larger bodies need more energy to simply exist, while smaller bodies need less.
  
• Restrictive diets are a go to for weight loss and while they work at the start, your body adapts AND it becomes harder to stick to.
  
• The more you workout the stronger you get. Your cardio-respiratory system and your heart become more efficient at lifting the same weights through the same sets and running the same miles at the same pace. As your body becomes more efficient, your body doesn’t need to work as hard to get the same exercise done. This is one place where efficiency is not necessarily beneficial.
  
• There is a theory, called the “set point theory” that suggest that there is a weight range in which your body is most comfortable. You already know your body is a powerful machine and will resist. Scientists do believe that this “set point” is flexible, but it takes time.

Strategies to Break Through a Weight Loss Plateau

Fill your toolbox with the following strategies if you are struggling to break through a weight loss plateau. *I highly suggest implementing one strategy at a time. If you increase your workload while decreasing caloric intake you may find yourself lacking the energy to follow through.

Progressive Overload

No matter how fit you get, you need to continue to challenge yourself to see results.

Your body will not change unless it is forced to. You do that with progressive overload: an incremental increase in demand over time. More simply put: you have to continue to challenge your body to work harder if you want to break through this plateau.

Think about it this way: the first run of the season is brutal. You’re sweating hard, breathing hard, moving slowly and feeling miserable. But you know that if you keep it up, after a couple of weeks your runs will get easier.

Why? Because your body has adapted. It doesn’t have to work as hard to go the same distance at the same pace. Which means…

Your not burning the same energy (read: calories) on week 3 as you were week 1. Gotta up your game.

Put it into action

There are a couple of ways to implement progressive overload.

• Increase the resistance. If you’ve been lifting the same weights for a few weeks now…trying adding a few pounds to the dumbbell or bar. You might not be able to complete the same number of reps, but as your body adapts and gets stronger, you will work your way back up the rep range (p.s. that’s when it’s time to increase resistance again).
  
• Or,increase the volume. This can come in the form of increasing your rep range from 8-12 to 12-15, or it can come in the form of adding another set entirely.
  
• Decrease rest times. Shorten the amount of time you rest (or scroll through Insta), in between sets. This forces your body to work without fully recovering, boosting metabolic efficiency and overall work.
  
• Throw in some advanced training techniques like drop sets, rest/pauses and negatives.

Adjust Caloric Intake Without Decreasing Protein

As you lose weight, your metabolic needs decrease**. You may need to adjust your overall caloric intake to maintain a caloric deficit.

That being said, don’t skimp on protein. A high-protein diet is proven to maintain muscle mass, especially at a caloric deficit. You don’t want to lose muscle mass when on a weight loss diet, your goal is to lose fat. Muscle burns more calories at rest – that’s a good thing…keep it.

A high protein diet stimulates certain hormones that will help control your appetite and increase between-meal satiety (important, especially if you are in a caloric deficit). Plus, protein has the highest TEF (thermic effect of food), of any macronutrient, meaning it takes more calories to metabolize protein than it does carbs or fat.

Put it into action

• Eat at least a portion of protein at every meal. Babes, that’s about the size of the palm of your hand. Guys, that’s about two palms.
  
• Spread intake through out the day. Studies show that your body most effectively processes 20-30 grams of protein at a time. Plus, eating 1-2 servings of protein 3-4 times a day brings protein consumption up towards 25% of total calories, a great macro goal.
  
• Learn the signs of not getting enough protein, and grab some great recipes in this article!

*Keep in mind that if you do decrease calories, it is not healthy to drop below 1,200 calories per day. Remember that your body needs calories simply to function (digest, breath, walk, think straight), and no weight loss plateau is worth that sacrifice.

Stop Drinking Your Calories

Neither our brains nor our food journals seem to account for liquid calories in the same way they account for food calories. Nonetheless, liquid calories can easily push us over the caloric limit for weight loss.

If you want to break through a weight loss plateau, stop drinking your calories. Switch to water, seltzer water or unsweetened tea and coffee.

And sadly, alcohol might be sabotaging your weight loss efforts. It’s not really the calorie count in a single beer or glass of wine that gets ya. It’s more the fact that for most of us, alcohol inhibits our self control. We tend to make less healthy decisions when imbibing.

What’s more? Your body prioritizes alcohol metabolism. That means that when you drink alcohol, your body suppresses fat burn to focus completely on breaking down and getting rid of the alcohol.

Increase NEAT

NEAT: non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

This is the energy used for everything you do that is not sleeping, eating or conscious exercise. These are the calories you burn walking up the stairs, raking leaves, playing with your dog. This is why articles that tell you how to burn more calories through out the day tell you to park further away and never take the elevator.

Think about it: how much time do you spend consciously exercising each week? 4 hours? 7? Now how much time do you spend not exercising?

A lot.

You can break through a weight loss plateau by burning calories when you don’t usually burn calories.

Put it into action

• Get up from your desk every hour to take a 5-10 minute walk. 8 hours is a long time to be sitting at your desk.
  
• Do body weight exercises during commercial breaks.
  
• Get stand up desk.
  
• Clean for 15 minutes a day.
  
• Add movement to your morning or evening routine. Go for a walk, stretch or do a set of push ups and crunches. Pick something that you can easily commit to without disrupting your usual routine.

Stop Relying Solely on the Scale

If you rely solely on the scale to give you your progress report, your leaving out some crucial details.

We associate a certain number on the scale with the perfect body that is going to look, and feel, exactly how we want it to.

First of all, I’m not going to get started on the “perfect” thing but know this: perfect does not exists.

Now that that’s out of the way…

If your goal is to look and feel exactly how we want to…then the goal isn’t really the number, right?

The scale alone isn’t great at measuring progress, especially if you are starting to spend time lifting weights.

If you are strength training, you are building muscle, especially at the start. Muscles weigh pounds. So while you are most likely also losing fat, the scale might not budge (or it might even go up)!

So despite the number on the scale, your body composition has improved, your health has improved, you look better in your clothes (and out of them), and you feel better too! Your body could change drastically without much movement on the scale!

What to focus on instead:

• Progress photos. Progress photos give you a visual representation of the changes your body is going through.
  
• Measurements. If your measurements, either with a tape measure or a body fat reader, are going in the right direction, I encourage you to go ahead and throw that scale right out the window.
  
• How you feel. Start paying attention to markers like sleep, energy level, focus, libido and mood.

Focus on behaviors, not outcomes. We can, and should, always want to be healthier, fitter, happier. But if you focus too much on that outcome you lose sight of how much progress you’ve made today.