Weight Loss Plateau

Want to know what a weight loss plateau is? Well, it appears when the difference between the energy expenditure and the energy intake begins to balance out. Your body needs to have its energy in balance, in order for you to survive. To understand why it’s important, think about the ancient times, when cavemen couldn’t find too much food for long periods of time. If they lost weight all the time, they couldn’t have survived. The weight loss plateau insured that they were able to survive.

If you want to lose the extra weight, you should work to create either a calorie deficit or a negative energy balance. You need to cut enough calories from your diet to start seeing results. Cutting a diet by 500 calories each day, will allow you to lose weight for one or two weeks.

Even though the calorie number goes down, your body still needs as much energy as before. That means that your stored energy is used to compensate for the decrease in consumed calories. Still, in the end you can’t avoid losing proteins. Protein loss leads to lean muscle loss as well.

If you’re taking a look in a mirror to see the muscle slowly disappear, you can easily miss it. It will continue to slowly go away until the calorie deficit is so small that the fat loss is no longer affected. Since the body has adapted and now needs less energy to function properly, that previous decrease in calories is no longer sufficient for weight loss. While this process was great for humans in the ancient times, when they were roaming around, in our times it’s the main reason why we are fighting with obesity.

For all the reasons mentioned above, you should think about the weight loss process as something in multiple stages.