If you're consuming too few calories your body essentially goes into starvation mode and receives the message that it needs to protect itself. This means holding onto weight for protection's sake. The body perceives reduced calorie intake as a stressor.
At the most basic level, not reaching your weight loss goal can occur when calorie intake is equal to or higher than calorie use. Try strategies such as mindful eating, keeping a food diary, eating more protein, and doing strength exercises.
1. Your Metabolism Will Slow Down to Store Fat. The more you work out or manage your calorie intake to lose weight, the more your metabolism wants to compensate by slowing down to maintain your current weight, this is called metabolic compensation. It kicks in to preserve and store fat for future energy.
It simply takes time. Another common reason why people report not losing weight despite reducing their calories is that they don't give it enough time. Our bodies will do their utmost to hold on to our fat reserves and you often have to be in a calorie deficit for a while before you will see any meaningful weight loss.
Many overweight people have built up resistance to a hormone called leptin. Fat cells in your body make leptin, and leptin tells your body when you have enough stores of fat, decreasing your appetite.
You've gained muscle.
And here's an often overlooked fact: Muscle tissue is more dense than fat tissue. So as you gain more muscle and lose fat, you change your overall body composition, which can result in a higher weight, but a smaller figure and better health.
When the calories you burn equal the calories you eat, you reach a plateau. To lose more weight, you need to either increase your physical activity or decrease the calories you eat. Using the same approach that worked at first may maintain your weight loss, but it won't lead to more weight loss.
You will likely gain muscle mass and may begin to lose some fat mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, but it also burns more calories. Closely tracking your weight during this window can be confusing—your clothes may feel looser while the number on the scale stays the same or even goes up a few pounds.
Start your diet by setting your calorie deficit at 20-to-25% (eat 20-to-25% fewer calories than you burn every day). Once you stop losing weight (and you've already tried the other strategies in this article) reduce your daily energy intake by 100-to-150 calories per day (take them all from carbs).
Drinking Water Can Make You Burn More Calories
Drinking water increases the amount of calories you burn, which is known as resting energy expenditure ( 4 ). In adults, resting energy expenditure has been shown to increase by 24–30% within 10 minutes of drinking water.
Cheat Often
A planned cheat day can sometimes shock your body into breaking through the plateau and going back to weight loss mode. It can also give you a mental break from being so careful with what you eat.
It's often due to fluid retention, abnormal growths, constipation, or pregnancy. Unintentional weight gain can be periodic, continuous, or rapid. Periodic unintentional weight gain includes regular fluctuations in weight. One example of unintentional weight gain is experienced during a woman's menstrual cycle.
“When you start exercising, your muscles start gobbling up fuel called glycogen,” says Krista Scott-Dixon, Ph. D., Director, Headspace Adjustment Bureau, Precision Nutrition. Since glycogen stores water, you could gain up to 10 pounds in water weight alone, says Scott-Dixon.
Lemon water can promote fullness, support hydration, boost metabolism, and increase weight loss. However, lemon water is no better than regular water when it comes to losing fat. That being said, it is tasty, easy to make, and can be used as a low-calorie replacement for high-calorie beverages.
You should step on the scale first thing in the morning. That's when you'll get your most accurate weight because your body has had the overnight hours to digest and process whatever you ate and drank the day before.
Once your BMR changes, your calorie requirement changes. So, while eating 1,800 calories per day, for example, might result in weight loss for a few weeks, that same amount could be too much once your BMR decreases. Continuing to eat the same would then result in a plateau.