5 Reasons You May Stop Losing Weight

Weight loss can be overly frustrating, especially due to the fact that it never remains consistent. While you might find patience to deal with minor ups and downs due to reasons like water content in the body, a prolonged plateau is something that really can put you off and set you farther back. If you have experienced rapid, satisfying weight loss when you first began trying but have met rather slower weight loss in the following weeks, you are not alone. It is rather normal for weight loss plateaus to set in. In fact, you might find yourself losing 2 pounds a week at first but see the needle on the scale fixed for several weeks later, despite the same amount of workout. Following are five reasons this might have happened.

Under Eating

The simplest fact you can learn when trying to lose weight is: It takes calories to burn calories. While you indeed might be intent on making sure that you consume the least possible calories, it is essential that you make sure that these are enough to help your body function normally. Unless you are providing your body enough energy to work with, your metabolic rate will lower itself, thus leading to weight loss being slower. Skipping meals, therefore, is certainly not a great idea! A thumb rule to make sure you consume enough but not excessive calories is to keep them just slightly below the amount you need to maintain your current weight.

Overeating

Yes, quite the opposite can also hamper you. This is particularly a problem for people with raving appetites, since they tend to convince themselves that meal portions are less important than what they are actually eating. This, however, is not the case. A low calorie food will be rather futile if you consume very large portions, since your calories intake will not lessen! This problem may be worsened if you are working on the dieting principle of taking more than 3 meals a day.

Over Training

It indeed must be a triumphant feeling to see the display on the treadmill showing a very high number of burnt calories. This, and the resulting weight loss, is likely to be enough of an incentive to make you workout enough to burn a very large amount of calories in a very less time. Unbelievable as it may be, however, overtraining can eventually result in diminishing returns. If your body is way too overworked during a certain time of the day, it will automatically try to make up by burning lesser calorie during the rest of the day when you are rather inactive. The total burnt calories' count, therefore, might not differ by a significant amount, thus leading you to a frustrating weight loss plateau.

Exercise Efficiency

When you first begin to work out, your body is naturally not used to it. It, therefore, undergoes an 'adaption period', where is makes several internal changes to adapt to increased workload. It so happens that this adaption period itself burns a large amount of calories due to ongoing internal changes. Once, however, you become rather efficient, lesser calories are burnt during the same amount of workout, as is lesser effort. The key to avoiding this is to not let your body be comfortable with working out and to keep changing intensity, duration and frequency of your workout.

Loss of Lean Body Mass

Muscle, as they say, is the metabolic furnace of the body. If your workout is resulting in muscle loss, it will lead to a lower metabolic rate and thus lower weight loss. You must, therefore, ensure that you are maintaining a safe calorie deficit and taking the essential nutrients. You must also accompany your cardio workout with weight

Sheza Naeem answers questions about how to lose weight in her articles. Her weight loss tips and information helped people; adopt a healthier way to live their lives and eat healthy diet.