Weight Loss Plateau: What Causes The Human Body To Slow Down Weight Loss?

Weight loss is tricky and understanding how the body works during the journey will help us stay ahead of it and avoid a weight loss plateau.

The rate at which people gain and lose weight never remains constant. At time weight loss can happen very fast but some events can impact the process and we might end up regaining the weight that we lost or the rate of weight loss might decrease. This sudden dip or pause in the rate of weight loss has been termed by experts as a 'weight loss plateau.' By understanding what causes a weight-loss plateau, you can decide how to respond and avoid backsliding on your new healthy habits. Lets us find out what causes this plateauing and how we can prevent it.

Lets Us Understand What Is Weight-Loss Plateau?

First, it is important that we understand what weight loss plateau is and what causes it. When we first start working out and following a specific diet, a rapid drop is natural and easy. Why? During the initial stages when the body is cut from calories, it starts functioning on the stored energy that is released from the glycogen. So when glycogen is burned for energy, it releases water, resulting in weight loss that's mostly water. But this effect is temporary. This is pretty much the first stage of weight loss but after this as we lose more and more weight, our body will start functioning differently.

What Slows Down Weight Loss?

When we lose weight, we also lose some amount of muscles. The function of muscles is to maintain the rate at which we burn calories. As we also lose muscles along with fat, our metabolism starts to decline and we start burning less calories than what we were at the start. This will inevitably slow down our weight loss. We hit a plateau when the calories we are burning equates the amount of calories we are eating. It does not matter if this number of calories helped us lose weight at the start. Once these two are equal, they cancel each other out and we stop losing weight.

This may come as a surprise to people who do not know how weight loss and calories consumption works. It may also be confusing to not see results when you are putting all the hard work required by exercising and eating less calories. However, this is fairly common and there is certainly a technique to avoid it.

How To Prevent Weight Loss Plateau?

To lose more weight, you need to either increase your physical activity or decrease the calories you eat.

• Now is the time to cut more calories.
• Push yourself harder while working out and aim at more hours of cardio to lose weight.
• Stay active during the day
• Monitor what you are eating and make sure you are not eating any food that can cause your weight loss journey to slow down again.
• Even if you are not able to lose a lot of weight, make sure that your weight loss plateau does not turn into an avalanche.