We all hit plateaus throughout our fitness journeys, but how can you sustain weight loss over a long period of time? 

 

 

The Body Tends to Lose Weight in Waves

 

Throughout the weight loss process, it is normal to hit periods where you don’t see any change, whether it’s over a few days or even a week. The reason why the body experiences plateaus is a survival strategy. Your body recognizes when it starts to lose weight quickly and begins to pump the brakes because you’ve switched up your routine. The body has learned to adapt to challenging, stressful situations that were commonly associated with lack of food for our ancestors. In response to this change in routine or typical fuel supply, the body can throw up resistance to losing that weight. 

 

When this resistance happens, it’s a signal that the body wants you to eat rather than burn the fat that you have stored. Fastercise directs the body to go ahead and use the fat to get energy immediately, rather than wait for the fuel from food.

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Tell Your Body to Use Storage​

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The body has intrinsic survival mandates. You either forage, meaning you fight to collect enough food on a regular basis to meet your caloric needs, or you use storage, which is when the body stores fat for later when food might not be as available. The body doesn’t care which method you use, you just need to direct it. To lose weight, indicate to the body that it needs to get energy from stored fat rather than fueling with food at every hunger pain. This means that you are using the foraging method. By being active and not eating all the time, the body learns that it needs to use stored fat when it’s hungry and that it will receive food when it can. And to be able to receive and collect food, it needs to be lean, quick, and agile, therefore stimulating more weight loss.

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Dealing with Plateaus

 

If you're on your weight loss journey and you're trying to get past a plateau, don’t stress! A plateau is actually an indication of success. Your body has released some energy and you're losing weight. Now it’s taking a pause and putting up resistance because you’re losing weight fast. That is normal. The way to overcome that is to continue doing the right things. 

 

One possible solution is to try adjusting your carb levels. By eating fewer carbohydrates and getting into ketosis, it will kickstart your body into burning stored fat, helping you lose weight and continue to in the future. When you hit a plateau, it’s not that the program isn't working anymore, it's that your body needs to realize that weight loss is still a good thing for you to do and it's not dangerous. 

 

If your weight loss was charted, it will likely slope down for a little bit, flatline, and then slope down again. Sometimes after a plateau, if you continue with the weight loss program, you're going to have a very steep drop-off. Try to push through those hard times when you're having a plateau, and remember that it is normal and will likely happen multiple times.

If you're on the weight loss program for six months to a year, you can expect to experience this around six times. The plateaus will vary in length, and will not be the same every time. But by sticking with it, you will see the results. All the functions of the body are interrelated and affect one another, so as you begin to adjust one thing in the body, the other things will change, even though there may be some resistance initially.

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Minimized Rebounds with Fastercise

 

Fastercise works well because it changes how your body processes calories. By helping to build and grow your mitochondria, the rebound that many people experience when they stop a fitness program does not occur. Rather than gaining back all the weight you just lost, the body has become adapted to a new base point.