When you start a new eating plan, it’s common to see good weight loss results initially when your excitement is still high. And excitement tends to stay high…for about 4 days…until hunger takes over again. After the first couple weeks, the pounds that seemed to just fall off (that were mostly just water weight anyways) seem to slow down. But just because weight loss isn’t happening as fast doesn’t meant that it’s not happening. However for most people we work with, the complaint is always that it’s never fast enough. And that’s because there’s no quick fix to long-term and sustainable fat loss. 

It’s important not to make changes too quickly, as many people will panic and make changes before they even know if the changes are working. As a general rule of thumb, you should let at least 2 weeks go by before knowing if the change you made is beneficial (or harmful). But if you’ve been at it for longer than that, and you feel like your weight loss progress has stalled, here are 6 things to consider implementing to breakthrough any plateaus:

1: Track Your Food

While tracking food can feel like a chore for some people, it can be extremely eye opening to bring more awareness to how much you’re actually eating. While it’s easy to eat ‘clean’ most of the time, those little snacks throughout the day, calories in any drinks, or weekend celebrations can quickly negate all the other progress you made at your normal meals.

Try tracking everything for 1-2 weeks and see if you’re hitting the targets you need to be. This can be done on an app, manually, or with hand portions (the easiest and therefore our personal favorite way to 'track')

2: Adjust Calories (Increase OR Decrease)

Based on what you find when you track your calories, it might be time to adjust your calories. However, this doesn’t always mean you need to decrease your calories. If you’re already at too big of a calorie deficit, adjusting your calories can actually be beneficial for your metabolism and weight loss progress (especially if you are working out several days a week).

Once you identify how many calories you are consuming on average, and your maintenance calories, try making small adjustments (up or down) to see if that changes weight loss numbers.

3: Track Non-Scale Progress

Sometimes you can be losing fat without losing weight, especially if you’re following the proper resistance training program (see point #5). However, if ‘non-scale’ progress is happening, you don’t need to change things but rather stay the course.

Document your non-scale progress, which could be through taking body fat measurements, waist circumference, progress pictures, or having a certain set of clothes that you can tell are fitting better.

4: Increase Your Steps

One of the first recommendations we make for clients is not to train more, but to move more. Calories burned when you’re not working out play a big role in your weight loss progress, and it’s normal for this number to decrease as you cut calories to lose weight. Walking is one of the easiest ways to help increase these calories burned and break through plateaus.

Add one thousand steps per day each week without changing your diet to assess if that improves weight loss.

5: Add Resistance Training

Adding lean muscle mass is the number one factor in improving your metabolism at rest. Even a program that prioritizes full body lifts, done 2-3x/week, can create a dramatic improvement in weight loss and body composition over time.

Resistance training builds lean muscle mass, which makes it easier to burn more calories throughout the week (even when you’re not working out).

6: Keep Going

Sometimes the answer is just to keep going. If progress is slow, it’s still progress, and that’s the number one thing to be concerned about. This is where having ways to consistently track your progress is important to know if it’s time to switch up the plan or keep going. Many people end up doing more harm than good when they make changes to ‘speed up’ progress. Weight loss is never linear. Sometimes the scale stays the same for 2-3 weeks only to drop 2-3 lbs the following week.

If you are making progress, even if it’s slow, sometimes the answer is just to keep going. Losing fat or building muscle is a long-term process.

We help men burn 10 lbs of fat and build 10 lbs of muscle with our proven process - and we're so confident we guarantee those results. Click here to talk with one of our coaches to learn how you can get these results.