Beating The Weight-Loss Plateau

Unfortunately, it happens to everyone.  You’ve been doing a great job with your weight-loss, but suddenly you feel like you’ve hit a wall. The pounds you were dropping earlier now stubbornly refuse to budge. What’s happened?  You’ve reached a dieter’s plateau.

Weight-loss plateaus are very common. In fact, if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll reach this frustrating stage one or more times on your journey to reaching your ultimate “goal weight”.

It’s a natural consequence of the weight loss process that as you lose weight, you end up burning fewer calories. Does that mean you have to eat even less? Only if  you don’t keep doing the key things you learned in both exercise training and weight loss nutrition at Genesis.  For folks who are not Genesis clients, their resting metabolisms slows down because there is less of them to fuel AND they are likely not doing what they need to so they actually improve and sustain a higher fat-burning metabolism.

Don’t Panic And Go To Extremes

When Genesis clients hit a weight-loss plateau, sometimes they start doing things outside the proven Genesis Weight Loss “Formula”.  These often include cutting their daily calories, increasing the intensity of their cardio exercise outside the prescribed heart rate training zones, increasing the number of days they do cardio exercise, etc.

The fact of the matter is that when you hit a weight loss plateau and the weight scale seems not to be moving (or moving in the right direction), assuming that you are still adhering to ALL of the key weight loss principles in the “formula” that has worked for you at Genesis so far, it usually means one or both of the following things:

#1: You are at a transition point when your body is trading fat loss for improved muscle function as a result of being stronger…

AND/OR

#2: You are teetering on the edge of your metabolism going into “starvation mode”.

If you are presently trading fat loss for muscle restoration and improved function, the weight scale won’t tell you this.  The weight scale can’t see what’s going on inside of you.  You just have to trust that if you’re still adhering to the “formula” we’ve taught you, things are going in the right direction.  When will you know for sure what’s going on?  When you have your next Monthly Momentum Keepers Assessment.  Remember, that’s when we measure your “fat loss” versus your weight loss.  Until then,carefully monitor how your clothes are fitting – looser means you’re moving in the right direction regardless what the scale temporarily says.

On the other hand, it you are teetering on the edge of your metabolism going into “starvation mode”, it means you’re not doing something right.  Your brain is sensitive to keeping you alive.  So if you change something too quickly or radically in your eating patterns, meal design, water intake, daily calorie volume, or exercise training habits, you could be sending a signal to your brain that your “survival” is threatened and subsequently it will respond by shifting your metabolism into a conservation mode where it will hoard and store fat much like squirrels gather nuts for survival during the winter.

Increases in stress can also shift your body into “survival mode”.  Sudden changes in lifestyle (divorce, a change in residence, concentration on a health issue you’re trying to overcome, etc.) has been shown to cause increases in cortisol in the body, which is a fat-storing, metabolism-slowing hormone released when you are subjected to certain types of stress.

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