Why Do We Plateau? 

If you have lost weight in the past you probably at some point will hit a plateau, but why does this happen? 

Everyone eventually will come to a point where their progress will slow down or stop. 

This is very frustrating because for some, within 3 weeks your body adapts to the positive changes to dieting and we start seeing some of the negative side effects.

The thing is to remember that your body doesn’t particularly like you dropping weight and will do its best to maintain homeostasis.

This is why quick fat loss may not always be best fat loss. Dropping calories dramatically straight away may sound like a great idea as may lead to results quicker but at the same time your body will adapt quicker and you may have to drop calories further to keep seeing progress. 

One thing that happens when you diet is that your metabolic rate will slow down (burning calories when resting) so we need to be aware of this when dropping calorie intake. 

To prevent plateauing we can:

1- Reduce calories more

For some individuals this may be the best idea. Depending where they are in their diet and how much weight they need to lose. Personally I like to drop them further, if a client is coming to the end of their dieting cycle and close to their goal weight. Then we look at reversing the calories back up.

2- Diet Breaks

This is a period of 1-2 weeks where you bring your calories back up to maintenance. The idea is to reverse some of the negative adaptions when dieting. This is a preferred option for leaner individuals and you have to take into consideration whilst bringing your calories up to maintenance you wont be losing weight. 

3- Reverse Diet

This is really for someone who has his a plateau for a very long time. Living on low calories for months, even years. 

A typical example of this is someone who has dropped weight in the past but still wants to drop more but cant because they have lived on really low calories for far to long.

The problem with this is you now have no where to go, you are already living on crazy low calories, so dropping them more would be dangerous and unsustainable. 

The reverse diet is a way of slowly adding calories back in to your diet whilst not adding to much weight gain. Once you reach a point where your calories are back to base line, you can then slowly bring them back down again and start dropping weight on higher calories.