Help!! I Need To Break through A Dreaded Weight Loss Plateau

You're going along tracking calories, working out every day, then Bam!  The scale refuses to budge, you realize you've hit a dreaded weight loss plateau.  Now what?

Even though it's normal to hit a snag in your journey, a setback can make you want to go out and eat pizza, or cookies, and even cake.  But you need to be strong and try one of the following.  You will be back to weight loss in no time!

Here are five important things to know about hydration and exercise:

1. Zigzag your daily calorie intake.

Sometimes you've just got to shake things up a bit.  Here's one way to do it:  If your average daily intake is 1,400 calories, try dropping to 1,200 one day, going up to 1,800 the next day, and then dropping back to 1,400. The idea is to keep your metabolism guessing. There's no magic number that works for everyone, so you'll have to experiment until you find the right calorie levels for you.

Zigzagging will force your body to choose how many calories it needs to recover from your exercise program.  Most people who hit a plateau are under eating. If you are indeed under eating, adding calories for a few days, then lowering them again, will help you force your body into a hormonal response that will not only help you break out of a plateau, but..as you learn to recognize the signals..will teach you how much food you should be eating.

2. Switch up your exercise routine.

If you do the same workout each day, eventually it can start to become less challenging, and (unfortunately) less effective. If you push yourself to new levels of strength or exhaustion, you'll almost certainly see a shift. Here are some ways you can challenge your body:

·        Swap your jog for a bike ride.

·        Try weights with your cardio routine. (ChaLEAN Extreme or 21 Day Fix can help you do this.)

·        Add intervals of high intensity to really make you sweat. 

·        Drop to the floor for 10 push-ups right now!

The better you get at something, the easier it becomes.  Add more weight as you get and to move faster and jump higher as our programs progress. But it's also why all of our programs have phases of training. As your body adapts to stimulus, you need to change that stimulus in order to keep results happening.

3. Eat some almonds.

Almonds are a great snack, plus there's some research that indicates that they can help you burn fat. That's because they contain fiber and fatty acids—the good kind of fat that helps you lose weight.

So next time you grab a snack, try a small handful of almonds.  Any nut, really. While almonds are one of the better nuts, all of them have a similar nutritional profile and make excellent snacks.  You can eat any nut it would probably do the same.

4. Get more sleep.

You could be training too hard, which is about the quickest way to hit a weight loss plateau, because an over-trained body holds on to weight as if it were starving to death. There's no better way to test this than to try and sleep more. The reason is that your body recovers much more quickly from exercise while it's asleep, and if you're burning the midnight oil while trying to do INSANITY, you could easily plateau from lack of recovery time.

5. Relax.

Believe it or not, the one big thing besides diet and exercise that can cause you to plateau is stress. When you're stressed, your body sends out higher levels of the hormone cortisol and can encourage your body to hang on to fat. Cortisol is actually a performance-enhancing hormone.  We are living life in the fast lane.  Cortisol is released at times when the body is in an emergency state.  It increases performance, but only over a short period of time. When cortisol is released and forced into action at regular intervals, it causes your body to wear down and switch to more drastic means of survival, like holding on to excess amounts of body fat. Your life shouldn't feel like one big emergency.

We get stressed for many reasons, almost all of which are influenced by the society around us. One of the best ways to combat stress is to get some alone time to chill. If you're the type who can't let go, try some forced relaxation techniques, of which yoga seems to be one of the most effective. There's something special about the mind/body interaction of yoga that forces a relaxed state even from the most stressed of us.