Many of us find that we make good progress in terms of weight loss or achieving our fitness goals for a while; for a while the weight loss seems to proceed at the projected rate. At least to begin with, the gains seem to be satisfactory.
After a while however, one finds that they are not making the sort of gains that they started out with; that they have slowed down or stopped altogether.
This is due to several reasons: as a caloric deficit is created and is kept up consistently for an extended period of time, the body reaches a plateau. Here the metabolism slows down and does not burn calories at the rate that it used to.
since you have lost a significant amount of weight from the time that you started your fitness regimen, you have grown lighter, and it takes fewer calories for the body to do the same amount of activity now than it did earlier.
In other words, if you were able to create a caloric deficit of say 500 calories to produce a difference in your body, that deficit will no longer be sufficient with a lighter body and an altered metabolism.
So your caloric requirements and fitness regimen now need change. This is done into order to shock the body into once again offering the sort of gains that you made at the start of your program. In a sense you trick the body into once again start to let go of its fat stores and help to start to lose weight.
- One way to shock, or trick your system is to go off your diet for a while, so that the body recognizes that there is now no need for hording fat stores. Thereafter when you resume your diet, the body will be able to let go of those fat stores more willingly. You then go back to a newly adjusted caloric deficit, to persuade the body to lose fat.
- Carb cycling is another way to tweak your caloric intake; by altering the quality and composition of your diet. This can also shock the body sufficiently to once again kick start the gains made.
- You can also help to shock your body into changing further by tweaking your work out. By making it more intense, more rigorous and by increasing the duration also, you can shock your body into losing weight.
- Or you can fully overhaul your fitness regimen. If earlier you were doing cardio, substitute that with resistance and weights, or supplement cardio with weights.
