The Dreaded Diet Plateau!

It's the most depressing prospect for any dieter - the plateau. Despite weeks of careful calorie counting and gut-busting exercise your weight loss suddenly grinds to a halt, or even worse, starts to creep up again.

Why does it happen?

A plateau occurs because your body is noticing a lower calorie input and so slows down its metabolism to conserve energy. Diet plateaux are quite common among repetitive dieters, whose bodies have become experts at slowing down to conserve calories.

It's very hard to stay motivated, but remember that most dieters go through this phase, and come out of it. The bottom line is that if you are expending more calories than you take in then sooner or later you will continue to lose weight - that's an irrefutable fact! And though dieting can get a bit tougher with time, there's no truth in the old myth that yo-yo dieting damages your metabolism permanently.

Muscular metabolism

However, if you've frequently crash dieted and severely restricted your calorie intake without doing any exercise, it's likely you'll have less muscle now compared with the very first time you dieted. As muscle has a higher metabolic rate than fat, you need to increase your muscle mass through exercise.

The best way to increase the amount of muscle in your body is to do resistance or strength training such as weight lifting, crunches or workouts with dumbbells.

Weight increases

If your weight plateau has turned into a weight increase try to find an explanation for it. The obvious thing is to check your portion sizes carefully and, if you are new to Nutracheck, double check you are entering all your information accurately to obtain the correct calorie count. Water retention can also cause weight gain - for women, it's common to put on a few pounds before a period.

Work through it

To get through it any plateau the best approach is to up your physical activity and stick with a calorie-controlled diet. Don't try starving yourself, but don't give up either! Sometimes you can plateau for a few weeks or even put on a pound or two, so be patient, pat yourself on the back for all the weight you have lost so far, and before you know it you'll be on the downward trend again!