Weight-Loss Plateaus
Your weight-loss program has been going great guns when, wham, your scale stands still. You’re exercising and dieting with the same gusto, but the pounds no longer are melting away. Experts say such weight plateaus are common, but they can’t say for sure why they occur, who is most prone to them or what to do about them. Here are two suggestions about how to handle them.
Laurie Meyer, Milwaukee registered dietitian; president of Optimizers weight-loss program.
“Keep exercising and paying attention to your diet. Consider varying the diet, maybe changing a snack or increasing the protein or carbohydrate content for a boost.
“If you slack off dieting or exercising, you may feel psychologically in a failure mode . . . and you may not ever want to get back on track. So many people we see (trying to lose weight) are black-and-white, all-or-nothing personalities. We would rather tell them to expect plateaus, which we define as a lack of weight loss for two or three weeks, and then to become determined to ride them out.”
Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology, Yale University; weight-loss expert.
“Traditional wisdom suggests eating less and exercising more (during a plateau). People are especially inclined to increase exercise, the rationale being that it will increase your metabolic rate.
“But plateaus also have been defined as the body’s defense against weight loss. When your weight loss becomes sufficiently severe, the plateau may occur as your body ‘defends’ itself against more weight loss. Should that be the case . . . it’s possible that an exercise increase will have a paradoxically negative effect on weight loss (as the body conserves even more energy).
“Another idea is to give the body a vacation. Instead of eating 1,000 calories a day, eat 1,200 or 1,500. Instead of exercising five times a week, drop back to two workouts. Do that for a couple of weeks and then resume your previous weight-loss plan. You might just push yourself beyond the plateau. But all of this is very speculative.”
