Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.

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Set Point Theory: a few more thoughts

As I talked about in my last post, the set-point, starvation-response, and metabolic-adaptation theories have kept changing over the years as their advocates attempt to maintain a viable theory. The Truth? Are there physiological changes associated with energy restriction? Yes. Do they prevent weight loss, or maintenance of weight loss? No.

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Set-Point Theory: Fact or Fiction?

It’s not uncommon to hear both lay persons and professionals matter-of-factly refer to the “starvation response” (also called metabolic adaptation) and “set-point theory” as if they were accepted facts. The supposition of these theories is that the body reacts to reduced energy intake, or weight loss, by lowering its basal metabolic rate in an attempt to maintain the current weight or return to a higher weight.

These theories however, have not survived sound scientific investigation, and those researchers who are familiar with this area of medical literature have known that for almost 20-years. Three comprehensive reviews of the literature in 1992, 1994, and 1995[i]^,[ii]^,[iii] all reached the same conclusions that:

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“Fat-burning” workouts: founded in fact or fiction?

At some point you’ve probably heard the term “fat-burning,” and if you’ve ever set foot on a piece of cardio equipment it probably had a “fat-burning” mode. The implication is that there is something especially important about burning fat in maximizing weight loss.

Weight loss however, is a function of creating a calorie deficit (taking in fewer calories than you burn), and not the substrate (carbohydrate, protein, or fat) that your body is fueling on. In fact your body is always burning both carbohydrate and fat. As the intensity of the activity that you are engaged in increases the percentage of fat you are burning decreases, while conversely, the percentage of carbohydrate (and total calories) you burn increases.

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Do your supporters outnumber the saboteurs in your life?

Because you live in a culture that’s unfavorable toward weight control, the people you live and work with are very important to the success of your weight management efforts. There are three roles they’ll play:

1. A positive influence—supportive
2. A negative influence—a saboteur (either consciously, or not)
3. A neutral influence—not actively supportive, but also not a saboteur

The purpose of developing a support network is to ensure that you have more people on the positive side of the ledger than on the negative side. Weight Loss Mastery Skill #5 is Support. The people most likely to sustain new behaviors (in this case healthy eating and an active lifestyle) are the ones who have social support in doing them.

I’ll be posting a more detailed discussion on 1) how to create your support network, 2) using support to prevent lapses from becoming relapse, and 3) sabotage, and handling saboteurs.

Stay tuned!