Tips On Overcoming Your Weight Loss Plateau

In each and everyone's weight loss journey, they'll hit a plateau and won't see any results. It's really unavoidable. You can be working out all the time, watching your diet and religiously sticking to each and every one of your weight loss goals. So what's the deal, right? Such plateaus are predictable and explainable.

Why? Because Basal metabolic rate (BMR)—the energy required to keep the heart pumping, lungs expanding, kidneys filtering and all other vital bodily functions going when the body is at rest—accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the calories you burn and depends, for the most part, on body mass. When weight-loss occurs, body mass goes down. Therefore, so does BMR.

So for example: Let's say you weight 162 pounds and consume 1,900 calories a day. In order to lose a pound a week, you've got to cut between 500 and 600 calories per day. So you restrict yourself to 1,400 calories, and the weight comes off easily. But suddenly, after your sixth week on this diet plan, you've noticed that the scale isn't moving downward anymore. This is because with the weight loss, your BMR has also declined, and where your body used to burn 1,368 calories per day, now it's using only 1,080. At this weight, there's less of you to move around, so you burn fewer calories working out and waste fewer calories as heat. All in all, your daily calorie expenditure is now pretty close to what you're taking in. You've hit a new—and probably very annoying—equilibrium.

Here are some tips to beat the plateau to continue your weight loss:

Don't Give Up! You may feel stuck, but you're probably still losing weight—just not enough to register on the scale.

Work Out Harder(Or At Least Strive For A Few More Reps When Doing Each Station At Bootcamp)! Increasing physical activity is particularly useful for moving beyond a plateau, because exercise both uses calories and builds muscle. Place a goal in mind when at each station and force yourself to stick with it.

Eat More Protein! There is some evidence that shows that shifting fat and carbohydrate calories to protein calories may help preserve BMR during weight loss. But don't overdo it—twenty-percent of daily calories from protein is as high as you should go.