Sunday, March 21, 2010

Weight Loss Plateaus

I got a great question from a reader:
"i was looking at your weight loss log & i seems that you never really plateaued or temporarily stopped losing weight. congrats on your weight loss by the way! ive made a huge plateau right now and i think im going back to calorie counting to get off the final 20 pounds - any feedback on how to stayed on the weight loss train without getting off periodically?"

Oh yes.....I plateaued A LOT during my weight loss journey. If you look at the dates in my Log, you can probably see that I didn't always "weigh in" each week. In reality, I weighed in once a week EVERY week for the two years I was losing weight. However, if the scale didn't budge, or I gained weight that week, I didn't log it, I just wrote down whatever it said the following week. The reason behind this was that for me, I didn't want to get discouraged by seeing my log go up and down, up and down. So I just recorded losses.


In a previous post, I said my friend Rachel (above) started Weight Watchers. She's weighing and measuring every Saturday and logging it online. I think that's fantastic. It shows her progress on a graph too. So if she happens to plateau or gain a few during her time at WW, the graph will show that.

There was a time when I plateaued for MONTHS. It was really frustrating. After seeing so much progress each week, to be at a standstill for weeks (sometimes months) of hard work, it was discouraging. Keep at it! Don't get discouraged.


The above picture was taken at my 27th birthday (I think) when I weighed about 175.

The advice was I was given by my personal trainer to get over my plateau was pretty simple: DO WEIGHTS! A weight training program is the FASTEST way to lose weight when you get stuck. And it's important to mix things up!

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree with adding in weight training! Awesome job with your weight loss. Really inspiring.

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  2. Those darn plateaus! I agree that mixing it up is key!

    Thanks so much for visiting my new site :)

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  3. Yes, weights worked well for me too when I hit a plateau! And mixing things up is so important, too. But it can be hard to keep things fresh and exciting...

    Thanks for stopping by my blog, and to answer your question: Yes, the toddler liked the green juice. He actually wanted me to make more green juice after his nap today, but I'm not going to clean the juicer twice in one day (I had already juiced this morning)...

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