Well, it had to happen sometime. I went to weigh in for my weekly weight-management group, and my weight was 300 pounds. Which was a moral victory last week, but ... not the number I was hoping to see this week. Alas, it appears I have hit that bane of all people intent on losing weight, the plateau.
A plateau is what happens when the body's metabolism notices that there's been a net deficit of calories over the past several weeks, and shifts into low gear to resist further weight loss so that the body's fat reserve lasts as long as possible. Now this is a brilliant mechanism for the body to have evolved in order to survive famines and such. However, when there is no famine but simply an attempt on your part to deliberately get rid of a major overage in the fat reserves, this brilliant mechanism turns into a royal pain in the butt.
Needless to say, this phenomenon has had a history of being vastly misunderstood by anyone who has never had to do any dieting themselves--including many doctors and nutritionists. But the phenomenon is annoyingly real, and knowing this can save one a great deal of angst and aggravation.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I've plateaued, given that my weight loss last week was a bit lower than I had been seeing up to that point. And then there were all those food cravings dogging me in recent days. I now suspect that these were both signs that my metabolism was beginning to do the shift, both digging in its heels to stop the downward momentum, and upping the demand for high-calorie foods so that the organism (me) would get busy and find some food already.
Never fear, though. As understanding of this plateua business has grown, so has the list of strategies for breaking a plateau. Interestingly, cutting food intake is not necessarily one of them. Yeah, it is prudent to do an audit of one's eating to see if there have been a few too many liberties taken, or if one has unconsciously been getting a little wacky with the portion control. But if one's food had been totally compliant, cutting the food level even further can be counterproductive--because then your metabolism will think the famine's getting even worse out there and will try to slow down even more.
No, what you've got to do is get the metabolism kicked into high gear again, and this is where exercise can be the great equalizer. Especially weight training exercise. I mean, cardiovascular exercise is fine too, but there is now documented proof that increased muscle work and muscle mass raises the metabolic rate, because muscles suck up a lot of nutrients when they're working. Soooo... it looks like it might be time for me to pick up a pair of those cute little handweights and pump a little iron. (In addition to some aerobic work, especially now that my knee seems to be recovered).
Changing up one's food is also a recommended plateau-busting strategy. I was just saying, in my previous post, that I had gotten into a bit of a food rut and needed to perk things up with new stuff. So I'm going to go with that idea. I also now realize I've been getting a little lackadaisical with the many-small-meals strategy -- i.e. the business about eating several small meals a day boosts one's metabolism and results in more weight loss than eating the same quantity of food in just two or three larger meals. So I'll give that a whack too.
There are other strategies as well, but I think I'll just try those for now, and see if it helps. Meanwhile, I have fixed myself a dinner that is a veritable umami extravaganza, full of glutamate-rich mushrooms seasoned with soy sauce. And I'm remembering that, regardless of what the number on the scale sez, I'm already ahead of the game because I haven't strayed from healthy eating one iota.
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