Why You've Hit A Weight-Loss Plateau...And What You Can Do About it!

I’m pretty sure we’ve all been there.

You’ve been losing weight steadily for a good amount of time, feeling good and confident, and suddenly you go weeks/days at a time without losing one pound. You feel frustrated and like a failure. What’ve I been doing wrong? Do I need to eat less?

What Caused the Plateau

You’re not eating enough. I’m sure you’ve heard before that your body goes into starvation mode when you eat less than 1200 calories, but you’ve probably ignored this and decided to try it out anyways. Bad idea. When you eat less than 1200 calories (approx.), your body lowers its metabolic rate, and stores any fat that you eat, rather than burning most of it (which it does when you’re eating enough). Your body needs energy, so it wants to hold on to everything you eat! This is why you stay the same weight. Yes, you’re eating less; however, whatever you’re eating is going straight to fat storage, AND your metabolism is slower, so you burn less.

Because you’ve lost weight, your body now requires less calories than before. When you started, you found how many calories it takes to lose a certain amount of weight each week, and you’ve stuck to that plan. However, if you’ve lost a good amount of weight, namely 10 pounds or more, your body doesn’t need that same caloric intake anymore. You know your weight factors in to your required caloric intake, so when you lose weight, you need less food! 

You’re not sleeping enough. Lack of sleep raises cortisol levels. High cortisol levels cause the body to store fat around the midsection. Also, with lack of sleep, the body is unable to maintain a beneficial level of serotonin. Low levels of serotonin cause sugar cravings, binges, and carbohydrate cravings.

Loss of muscle mass. If you’re not paying attention to strengthening your muscles, you could be losing muscle mass at the same time as losing fat mass. Muscle mass burns five times more calories then fat mass, so it’s obviously essential in weight loss. If you’re not maintaining your strength and increasing it, you could have lost muscle mass and now aren’t able to burn as many calories.

How To Move Past the Plateau

Make sure you’re getting enough calories. In order to lose weight, you need to eat a little less then what you normally would eat. To figure this out, go to a site that configures this amount for you, based on your body and how many pounds you’d like to lose a week. Many people like myfitnesspal.com. It lets you track your food and exercise, and keeps you around your goal caloric intake.

Get an adequate amount of sleep. Usually, this means 7-8 hours per night. It may be hard to make this change, but it’s very important. Read before you go to bed, lay in bed early, anything that may lead to sleeping earlier. Some may be very busy, but make sure that you’re getting the max amount of sleep you can with your schedule.

Continue to strength train. And, if you’ve been continuing your same routine, turn it up a notch and make sure to increase resistance as you get stronger. Keep your muscle building in tact! As you get smaller and lose weight, make sure to check and see how many calories you need. It may be different from when you started, and you need to keep up with the changes.

Track everything you eat and every time you exercise. Use a fitness-tracking site to help you track everything. You may be eating little things that you think don’t matter, but actually do contribute to your daily intake.

Keep up with your body! Your body is an amazing ‘machine’, and can get accustomed to things fast. Give it enough sleep and calories so it has an endless supply of energy, keep working yourself harder as your routine gets easier, and treat your body well! 

Crock-Pot Craziness--Blueberry Chia Quinoa

Happy Super Bowl Sunday Facebook! Instead of telling you what to eat and what not to eat at your parties later, which I am sure you have heard enough of, I am going to share a delicious little breakfast (or anytime snack!) recipe I came across the other day. I was inspired by a friends posting on different crock-pot recipes.

For those of you who do not own a crock pot, I highly recommend investing in one. You can get them for very reasonable prices at Target or Costco. They can make a fairly large amount of food if you are preparing something for a party or just for yourself to eat for the week. I usually prefer to use mine for savory dishes like soups and stews, so when I saw this recipe I thought it would be fun to try something a little different.

Behold...Blueberry Chia Quinoa. Maybe it sounds a little odd to some of you folks who either don't eat breakfast or have no idea what chia seeds or quinoa are, but basically this is a cool little spin-off on your basic boring oatmeal. This recipe calls for quinoa, chia seeds, fresh or frozen blueberries, coconut or almond milk, water, honey and one vanilla bean, split down the middle to soak in the mixture. So you take all these ingredients, put them in a crock pot for 6-8 hours and you have this delicious, healthy, tasty meal.

So, in a nutshell, use 2 cups of water, 2 cups of coconut or almond milk (I used coconut, because I prefer its flavor and nutritional value to almond milk). Then pour 1 cup of quinoa (I prefer Trader Joe's White Organic quinoa for this particular recipe), 4 tablespoons of chia seeds and 1/4th cup of organic honey into the pot. Then take your vanilla bean and split it down the middle and try to scrape the insides out into the pot...this can be a bit tricky, but this was my first time making a recipe that called for the REAL vanilla bean, so I was excited to try it! Then you put the casing of the vanilla bean in the mix as well and let it sit in the crock pot until the quinoa is cooked.

I actually halved the recipe, so I only left mine in the slow cooker for 3 hours. It is a great thing to make when you have a little extra time one evening or are working at home. But the cool thing about a slow cooker/crock pot is you can set the timer and when the allotted time you want to cook something for is up,  it will automatically go to the "keep warm" setting and you can wake up or come home to a warm meal as well.