If you’re struggling to continue losing weight, here are my top five tips to help you break through a weight loss plateau and achieve your weight loss goals:
- Maintain a food diary to track your calorie intake consistently. While you may have been diligent when you started your diet, you might not be as accurate now. By being consistent with your journaling, you can overcome the weight loss plateau and regain momentum.
- Incorporate protein shakes into your diet. Replace two meals a day with a protein shake to help you stay within your calorie limit. With a protein shake, you have control over the ingredients and can accurately count the calories in the protein powder, milk, and fruit. Use the shake for two meals, have a nutritious third meal, and complement it with low-fat protein snacks, vegetables, and fruits.
- Reduce the frequency of dining out. Although it may be challenging, eating out less frequently can make a difference. It’s difficult to accurately estimate the calorie content of restaurant meals, and hidden fats and extra calories are often present. Cutting back on dining out for a couple of weeks may help restart your weight loss progress.
- Increase the intensity of your cardio and strength training workouts. Building muscle increases your resting metabolic rate. If you’ve been exercising for a while, you may have improved your fitness level. However, if you haven’t increased the intensity of your workouts, you might not be burning as many calories as before. Incorporate new exercises, boost the intensity, and consider adding strength training to your routine.
- Assess your body composition. It’s possible that you have reached a healthy weight for your body. If possible, have your body composition checked. Muscle is denser than body fat, so even if you weigh more than you expect, your body fat percentage might be within the normal range. If that’s the case, you may not have much more weight to lose, if any at all.