Adjusting Diet and Exercise
If you’ve ever watched a weight-loss show, you’ve seen how quickly people can lose weight at the beginning, dropping 10 – 20 or even more pounds a week. However, by the end of the show, they’re celebrating over losses of only 2 – 3 pounds per week. Although everybody’s weight loss journey is different, most share the trait of the latter pounds being harder to lose than the first ones.
There are a few reasons for why your body stops losing weight as rapidly as it did in the beginning, which we’re going to get into in this article. We’re also going to show you a few simple ways that you can adjust your diet and exercise program so you can push through your weight-loss plateau and lose those last stubborn pounds.
Here are several reasons why weight loss slows over time:
Metabolism Adjusts
Your body’s instinct is to maintain your current weight through metabolism. So, when you start to lose weight rapidly, your body fears that you could die if you keep losing that much weight, and so your metabolism naturally slows down in an attempt to match your energy output with your new caloric intake, leading to weight loss slowing down considerably.
Fat to Muscle Ratio Shifts
Building muscle is an important part of losing and maintaining your weight, but it’s also important to keep in mind that muscle weights more than muscle. As your body’s ratio of fat to muscle begins to shift, you will naturally have a harder time moving the scale because even though you may be burning more fat, you’re also gaining muscle.
You Need Less Calories
As your body becomes smaller, you need less calories to keep everything working which means your basic metabolic rate that’s just enough to keep you alive is now less than before. Because of that, it also means that it will be harder to lose those last few pounds because you have to continue to make changes to your diet and exercise program to make up for your changing body.
Here are the ways you can combat these problems:
Increase Your Metabolism
There are a number of ways that you can increase your metabolism to help combat your naturally slowing metabolism caused by weight loss. Consider adding supplements or drinking green tea to help give your metabolism a boost. You can also make sure you’re spreading your meals out throughout the day which helps keep your metabolism running.
Keep Up the Cardio
By increasing the intensity level of your cardio, you can burn more calories and fat rather than simply building muscles. Studies have shown that sprinting can greatly improve your caloric burn rate during an exercise session and can also trigger your body to burn fat. Even a few short sprinting sessions added throughout the week will help you keep burning fat.
Keep Limiting Caloric Intake
It’s easy to use an online calculator to find out your basic metabolic rate based on your current weight, so be sure to recalculate every week to make sure that you’re still eating the right number of calories based on your weight. Then, if you need to make additional changes to your diet based on this, you can easily do so to keep losing weight.