Plateaus.

The Bane of My Existence.

Okay, that my be a bit melodramatic, but they do drive me nuts.  I’ve done some reading and some experimenting the past few weeks, and asked every health care/fitness type person I know for advice.  Here’s what I’ve learned about busting off a plateau.

There are three areas to focus on for your breakout: Food, Exercise and  Attitude.

DISCLAIMER!!!  Food intake and exercise routines are best coordinated with your doctor or nutritionist!  Check with professionals before you plunge in!

Food

Eat Right – if you aren’t tracking your food intake, do so for a week. A slice of bread here, a handful of tortilla chips there – it all adds up. Seemingly benign snacks still count.  Keeping a food diary is an honest look into what you are actually eating, not what you think you’re eating. So for one week, write down everything that you eat. Everything. From the sugar packet you dropped into your coffee to the two bites of chocolate ice cream you snuck from the offsprings’ bowl,  to the handful of goldfish crackers – write it down. A food diary is an honest look into what you’re actually eating, not what you think you are eating.

Eat Smarter – Cut those refined carbs out of your diet. Think of refined carbs as ‘white food’ – pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, cake, cookies, donuts – anything made with white flour or white sugar.  Substitute whole grains, veggies and fruits.

Eat Balanced – There is no magic number of carbs, protein and fat you need to eat in order to lose weight.  However, a good place to start is:

• 50% of the calories you eat should come from complex carbs and…

• 30% of the calories you eat should come from lean protein and…

• 20% of the calories you eat should come from healthy fats.

Complex carbs are full grain, high fiber type carbs, such as those you find in whole grain pastas, breads, lentils and beans.  Lean protein can be found in chicken, fish, turkey and very closely trimmed beef. Healthy fats?  Is there such a thing?  Yes!!  Healthy fat refers to vegetable based oils, such as olive or canola, and yes, you need it in your diet!  You wouldn’t think of driving a car without oil, right?  Your body is a machine and needs lubrication, too.  Healthy oils provide it.

Need a calculator to figure out how to get these percentages in? Here’s one online.

Eat More – Get off your very low-calorie diet.  Your metabolism may slow down if you have severely reduced your daily calorie intake.  Your body needs fuel to operate! Even if you sat on your tush and did absolutely nothing, your body needs a certain number of calories just to keep your heart beating and your brain functioning.  Starving yourself is not an effective weight loss tool.  

THIS was my “Ah-Ha” moment of the week.  Several folks told me I wasn’t eating enough every day to support the amount of exercise I am putting in.  It seems so counter intuitive to eat more in order to shed pounds.  I took a leap of faith and ate more this week.  I lost a pound.  It may be a fluke – we’ll see on next week’s weigh in.

Exercise

Work Out Harder – walk a little faster, pedal a little faster, run up the hills instead of down.

Work Out Unpredictably – Over time, your body gets used to the same exercise.  It’s called ‘muscle memory’.   (Don’t believe me?  Ask a piano teacher about muscle memory.) Your muscles get used to a specific routine and go into super-efficient autopilot mode when you do the same repetitive routines over and over.  Been using the treadmill?  Hop on the elliptical instead.  Bike a different trail, add hill climbing.  Tired of running?  Try swimming, or Zumba.  Play basketball with your kids.  Accidentally let the dog off the leash and then chase it down the street.  Keep it fun, keep it varied!

Work Out Longer – If you’ve been walking 30 minutes a day and have stopped losing weight, it may be time to step it up and start walking 45 minutes a day.  I’ve upped my exercise from an hour to an hour and a half.

Work Out More Often – So you don’t really want to up the intensity or duration?  Then work out more often.  Add an extra day [or two!] to your workout schedule.  Work out twice a day instead of once.  That hour and a half?  I get an hour during lunch, and added a thirty minute bike ride in the evening.

Attitude

This one is hard, I know.  It’s hard to keep a good attitude when all you want to do is scream, kick your heels and throw shoes across the room.  Patience is the key.

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience.”  ~Unknown~

We didn’t become overweight overnight, and we won’t get back to healthy overnight, either. When you’re sitting to the far right on the weight number line, it is very easy to shed the pounds.  Your body wants to be in balance and quickly tries to get there.  As you get closer and closer to your goal weight, just resign yourself to the fact that it will take more time to lose that last 10 pounds.  Be Patient!  Be Persistent!  While you wait, remind yourself of all you’ve accomplished and how far you’ve come.

Take a look in the mirror.  Do you look better?  Are your clothes fitting better?

If you gained weight but look the same, you’re gaining muscle mass! (That’s me!!  Gaining weight, and not just looking the same, but shrinking more!  My clothes are literally sliding off my body.  Why am I so obsessed with the number on the scale?)

Do the math and keep track.  Check your body fat percentage – if it’s going down, then you’re getting healthier!  Here are the directions for calculating your body fat percentage.

Focus on how strong you are becoming and how healthy you feel instead of that number on the scale.  It’s just a number.  Hear that, Self?

JUST A NUMBER!!

It doesn’t tell anyone about how amazing you are, how smart, how creative, how funny.  It doesn’t dictate who your friends are or whether or not your spouse and offspring love you to pieces.  YOU are uniquely you, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Psalms 139:14) and that number will eventually get down to a range you can live with.

WI – 161.0 lbs, Down a pound!  Yeah!  Finally.  As you can see, I made a very concerted effort to eat my daily points and then some.  I also didn’t exercise as much this week, only 46 AP’s earned, and I swapped 24 of those for food points!  It’s so nice to see that number shrink, despite all my going on about how “the number isn’t as important as the person” to several folks in Blog Land.  Does that make me a hypocrite?

I’ve published the followup PSA – Plateaus and How to Break Them. You can read it here.  You’re welcome.

Recap of the weekly goals:

• Tracking food and exercise consistently and honestly – Done!
• Stay within my daily point allowance – Done  – actually ate them over the whole week!  I’m keeping up with this; apparently my body needs more fuel that I was feeding it.
• Earn a minimum of 50 activity points a week – 46 APs is pretty darned close, especially considering that every day last week was over 100 degrees.  Ugh.  Welcome to summer in Texas.
• Blogging – Running late this week, and post dating, but I did get it done!
• No quitting?  Nope.  Still moving forward.
• Supporting fellow challengers – I continue to pray daily for our entire group. You are being lifted up by a total stranger in Texas!  I didn’t do a lot of blog hopping this week – loads of extra stuff going on at work that required my attention.  It comes first because I’m getting paid for that!

I loathe the frustration of being stuck on a plateau.  I dislike frustration in general, but when it involves my weight loss journey, it escalates to the point that I want to throw myself on the floor and scream like an irate toddler.

How do I handle it?  Research to educate myself and to figure out how to fix it. Because I’m a natural born fixer of all things broken.

When I first started losing weight, it came off fast.  Lightning fast, as in 4-6 pounds a week.  I lost the first thirty pounds in about three months.  Then the weight loss slowed down. I was still losing, but at a slower pace.  Then next twenty pounds came off over the next year or so. Then…it stopped.  Some of the stalling is due to injury (broken ankle!)  and bad luck (stroke!).  I gained some weight back, lost it again and hit a brick wall.  I was keeping to my points, exercising like a demon and not losing a single ounce, week after week.  The weeks have stretched into months and I’m getting pretty desperate.  Those brick walls in weight loss? Experts call them ”plateaus”.

When you first start losing weight, rapid loss is normal.  When you reduce your calorie intake, the body gets the energy it needs by releasing its stores of glycogen, a type of carbohydrate found in the muscles and liver. Glycogen is bonded to water, so when glycogen is burned for energy, it releases that water—about 4 grams of water for every gram of glycogen—resulting in substantial weight loss that’s, well, mostly water.

Once your body uses up its glycogen stores, it starts to burn fat for energy.  Fat isn’t bonded to water the way glycogen is, and it gives off twice as much energy as glycogen when it’s burned by your body.  The result is that weight loss slows down a lot when you start to burn fat.

After the slowdown comes a complete stop in weight loss – you’re on a plateau.  A plateau is inevitable, and they last several weeks for some, several months for others.  So what happens when you get to a plateau?  Experts aren’t completely sure why they happen, but they have a few working theories.

One area of current research involves a possible link to reduced levels of leptin, a hormone produced by fat cells that is involved in the regulation of appetite. Research has shown that weight loss causes a marked decrease in serum leptin levels, which may, in turn, increase appetite.  Yes!!  This is exactly what happened to me. When I was on a plateau, I felt like I was starving all the time, no matter how much I ate.  As I said, those experts aren’t completely sure about this leptin theory, and they need to do some more research on leptin’s role in human weight regulation.

Another thought on the how and why of plateaus happen concerns metabolism.  Losing weight can lower metabolism since a smaller body carries less lean muscle mass and burns fewer calories to move it around. Additionally, lower calorie consumption means it takes fewer calories to digest and absorb food. Taken together, a state of energy equilibrium could result, with weight remaining steady for a period of time

Then there’s what I.T. folks like to call the ‘User Error’ theory to explain plateaus.   We get familiar with a weight-loss plan, we get relaxed in sticking to the plan, not paying attention to what – or how much – is going into our mouths.  We also get a little bit lazy with our exercise regimens. Of course a plateau is going to happen!

There you have it…leptin, metabolism and good old user error…three contributors to a weight loss plateau.  It’s hard to say exactly which one makes a plateau happen in any given body.

I’m betting it’s a combination of all three.

I have a little more reading to do and ‘professionals’ to talk to.  Stay tuned for PSA#4 – Plateaus and How to Beat Them