First things first, let me ease your mind: everyone hits a plateau with weight loss.
What a weight loss plateau looks like
This is typically what it looks like: You start a new diet. You see encouraging results around the waistline. And then your progress grinds down to a halt. But you didn’t change anything, so what happened?!
The short answer is that the human body is complex and highly adaptive. As you lose weight, one of the things your body does is reduce its Resting Energy Expenditure. It slows down your metabolism, which means you burn fewer calories at rest and during physical activity.
What you need to do about it
If you’ve hit a plateau with your weight loss, and you still have a goal to reach, here’s what you need to try to break on through to the other side.
- Start Intermittent Fasting (IF). IF is probably the best thing you can do to achieve your weight loss goal. Check out our IF quick start guide.
- Already doing IF? Now get on a keto diet. Keto helps get your body into ketosis. Ketosis is a state in which your body burns fat for energy. At Golden we believe in practicing a joyful keto. No need to count carbs and calculate fat:protein ratios. Read all about our Golden keto method here.
- Already on IF and Keto? The easiest thing to try is to reduce your carbs further, and maybe even reduce your fat intake. A quick way of doing this is to eat less cheese, yogurt, nuts, nut butters, or nut flours in your meal, and replace it with 1-2 cups of salad.
- A counterintuitive strategy is to go off Intermittent Fasting for 1-2 weeks. Seriously. So instead of doing two meals between 12 and 6pm, eat 3 meals between 8am and 6pm. Try to eat about the same amount of food as you did when you were on IF. Stay on keto. The idea here is to retrigger the weight loss cycle that begins when you start IF, after the two week break.
- Start doing High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Or do a regimen of heavy weights and low reps. If you’re already doing these methods of exercise, you can change two things:
- Timing: if you were doing morning workouts, switch to evening, and vice-versa. If you did workouts right before breaking your fast, change that to working out after you break your fast.
- Do completely new exercises for 2-3 weeks. The body becomes efficient at doing the same exercises. Challenge it with new movements.
- Reduce your stress. Stress makes it really hard to lose weight. Find little things you can do to release stress. For example:
- Take a brisk walk
- Meditate: sit still, breathe slowly, and just let your thoughts come and go
- Listen to classical music
- Read or watch something that makes you laugh
- Drink a cup of tea
- Get plenty of sleep. You’ll know you are getting enough sleep when you feel energetic in the morning, or when there are no dark circles around your eyes.
- Improve your gut health. To do this you need to get lots of fiber from vegetables. Eat more veggies, especially cruciferous veggies. Increase the variety of veggies you eat. Eat fermented veggies like kimchi, sauerkraut, and pickled veggies. The diversity of fibers is important too.
There you have it. A list of things to try that will definitely get you back into weight loss mode. You got this!
Next, read this quick start guide for Intermittent Fasting.
Then, learn more about HIIT.