What to do when your weight loss progress stops....

Today's Post: Thursday, 7-29-2010

The overall strategy is actually not hard. It’s just like figuring out what to do when your car won’t start.

You check to see what went wrong and then decide what to do to fix it.

It can be a bit more challenging with fat loss and weight loss, but it IS doable.

Sometimes it can even be easy.

Another way is to find out how to do more of something that works.

Here’s a partial list but one that has most of the high impact problems and solutions.

1. Ingesting bad stuff. If you haven’t stopped 100 % or stopped 95 to 98 % of the time or you have allowed yourself to drop from 95% of the time to 55%, you can often restart fat loss and weigh loss by fixing this one.

For example, you stopped drinking regular soft drinks for awhile but have started having a regular or a diet soft drink with your weekday lunch. One source estimates that one of either daily will add or maintain 15 pounds of fat. So allowing yourself these soft drinks instead of insisting on water or tea or coffee with 1% lowfat milk at lunch is working towards ADDING about10 pounds of fat to your body. So, if you were losing 2 or 3 pounds a month and stopped, changing back to no soft drinks of either kind may restart your progress. (By the way, in case you missed it, diet soft drinks add the fat by their sharp boost to your appetite and sugar cravings. Their NAME says diet; but that is NOT their effect.)

Not eating any or virtually any refined grain foods IS much harder since there is so much in the foods most people eat. But the stuff IS fattening, so, if you haven’t yet made a very strong and focused effort to no longer eat them, you may well be able to restart your fat loss by doing so. For example, if you go out for lunch and get sandwiches, the bread does help keep the foods wrapped in the center from going all over and making a mess. But you can order the sandwich Atkins style with no bread and served in a dish. If the sandwiches are premade and that would be a hassle instead of a money saver for the restaurant, you can just ask for a plate, eat the insides & toss the bread. (I found this works great at Subway since they are OK with giving you extra veggies at no charge and they have many to choose from.) If you like pasta, you can eat it once a week instead of five times or make it at home and use Spaghetti squash or whole wheat pasta or combine half of one of those with chopped broccoli florets for a pasta primavera style dish. You can switch from having corn flakes daily at breakfast to once a week and eating eggs and lentils or cooked old-fashioned oatmeal instead. Most people today are fat in part because they eat a lot of refined grain foods. So, if you have been one of them, eating other foods instead of grain foods and only eating 100 % whole grain foods when you do eat grain based foods, may well restart your fat loss.

2. Overdoing eating extra on weekends or overdoing fattening treats because you exercise or eat health supporting foods is also sometimes is a cause for fatloss to stop for some people.

If you eat out or go to parties often on weekends, this can be a problem. One weight loss expert actually recommends weighing twice every week, once at the same time Friday morning and once at that time on Monday morning if this might be happening. If it is, there are several solutions. Eat more strictly on the other meals on weekends; when at parties focus more on talking to the people and less on eating; eat more of the health OK choices such as vegetables and fruit and protein foods – and do that FIRST when you are hungry -- and either pass on the sweet treats and breads or eat tiny servings; offer to bring health OK foods so the host or hostess has that much less to do and you then can be sure there will be food choices you like and can be OK with eating. If you have to, go to less of the parties where you wind up eating excessive fattening foods. Similarly, if you burn 200 calories by exercising and then eat a 500 calorie treat, the good news is that you’ll still benefit from the exercise; but the bad news is that your fat loss will not only stop but begin to reverse. So, eat the 500 calorie treat every TENTH time and not more or eat some fresh fruit that you like instead of a piece of apple pie as a treat or increase your amount of exercise by ten times to burn 2,000 calories.

3. Prescription drugs derail fatloss for some people. If you take any at all and particularly if since you started one, your fatloss and weight loss stopped, check with a knowledgeable pharmacist or look up the drug on Wikipedia to see if it tends to cause people to get fatter or to gain weight. With most drugs there are other kinds that will be safe and do the job that don’t cause this problem and with others there may be and often are effective nondrug treatments that work and don’t fatten you.

4. If you have low energy and have had less recently and your fat loss also has stopped, there are several common causes that can be corrected.

a) One is that you may have tried too hard and triggered your body’s famine response. If so, keep up your exercises no matter how you feel and focus more than ever on only eating health supporting foods and drinks while eliminating the ones that harm you or fatten you – BUT at the same time, temporarily allow yourself to eat more food total, particularly health OK protein foods and oils. Timothy Ferriss, who wrote the Four Day Work Week, found research showing that lower calorie intake without protein cutbacks avoided the famine response and health problems that lower calorie intake can otherwise cause. Then when you begin cutting back on calories again cut back a bit less and exercise more and try doing your fewer calorie days every other day instead of every day. Jon Benson discovered this trims off fat without triggering your famine response and even sell an eBook called the Every Other Day Diet. Even better, research studies confirmed that approach works to prevent the famine response.

b) You recently started taking statin drugs or had your dose increased. Statin drugs are far less needed to prevent heart attacks and are less effective in doing so than most doctors know. We post on the superior alternatives from time to time. But the good news is that your fatloss program, particularly NOT eating foods made with hydrogenated oils or oils high in omega 6 or foods with high fructose corn syrup or sugar or refined grains and getting regular exercise and the fat loss itself each fight heart disease. And, depending on your body’s responses you can turn down or turn off the de-energizing effects of statin drugs even if you keep taking them. Statin drugs do lower LDL cholesterol including some of the small particle kind that is actually dangerous and lower high levels of chronic inflammation as measured by the HSCRP test. But they also lower your blood levels of CoQ10 which turns down or off the mitochondria in your cells. Since the energy you have depends on the cells in your body and they use the mitochondria to ensure they have enough energy, the depletion of CoQ10 will make you tired and even help cause heart failure. Using other methods to protect your heart avoids this side effect. But so does replacing the CoQ10. Not all doctors yet know they should have you take some kind of CoQ10 if they put you on statin drugs. And, even some who do, don’t yet know that they need to have you take the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 for you to reverse this side effect of the statin drugs. The older you are, the more ubiquinol you should take even if you are not on statin drugs to keep normal energy levels. At age 66 I take 100 mg at breakfast and 50 mg at lunch. If I was taking statin drugs I’d also take another 50 mg with each dose of the statin drugs.

c) Particularly if you are female or are in or have passed menopause, you may be low on thyroid. Being low on thyroid is like taking a drug that lowers your energy level and makes you fatter. If the condition is mild, taking a multivitamin and mineral with 150 mcg of iodine, which most of them do have, and taking 1000 mg each early morning on an empty stomach of the amino acid tyrosine can help because your body uses those to make thyroid. This is also a great reason also to avoid soft drinks and packed snacks and treats. The bromine often used to retard their spoilage may cause your thyroid levels to fall. And, though it can be tricky to do well, lower thyroid levels than that can be successfully treated as well.

5. This last one happened to me quite recently. What if you have switched to health OK and un-fattening foods and are exercising and have cut back calories enough to lose down to your goal weight; but you still have visible excess fat you want to get rid of?

There are three solutions. Get a job that requires almost no sitting or very short and infrequent sessions of it – NOT a usable solution for most people although many people can manage to watch a LOT less TV for less sitting away from work. Do a LOT more total exercise such as adding a new 40 minute daily walk. Or, add more effective muscle building strength training exercises. (I added two short sessions of kettlebell training that I’m just beginning to do very many reps in to do this last thing and DID already lose a half inch off my waist.)

6. Try adding a fat loss supplement.

(Just stick to the ones that are for sure safe to use. The ones containing ephedra or some other kind of “speed” have killed people or given them serious health problems. This is simply bad strategy and not even necessary. Only choose methods that IMPROVE your health; and use enough of them to do the job and you won’t need to use such supplements.)

Some of the other weight loss supplements do work a bit. Some of them do work but only if you are already doing the right things because they increase how effective your efforts are instead of doing anything by themselves. And, some of the ones that work sometimes do so because they give the people taking them confidence the efforts they are making to lose fat and weight will be effective which in those cases means the people keep making an effort or increase it although it’s THAT effect that gets the results.

For example, I take two capsules of green tea extract every morning. There are some studies showing that I may eventually be 5 pounds less fat from the mild boost to my metabolism. But even if that doesn’t happen in my case, it does give me a daily reminder that I’m committed to the parts of my lifestyle that take off excess fat or prevent me from gaining it. Two capsules of green tea extract early in the day have a total of 32 mg of caffeine which is helpful in waking me up. Green tea extract capsules are one of the least expensive supplements and HAVE been shown to have heart protective and cancer fighting properties particularly if you take them on an empty stomach as I do.

Although taking steroid drugs to do the job is NOT safe or sustainable, there are some supplements that help to add muscle that are safe and I’ve found one of those that I will try later that may be effective. (It’s one that only works if you do. But it may allow you to use more weight which burns more calories and to build more muscle which also burns more calories if you already do effective strength training.)

I already take some supplements that help my body keep my blood sugar at normal levels; but for people who have more of a problem with that than I do, there are other supplements that are safe that may be effective. For people who have blood sugar issues even after they give up excess sugar intake and refined grain foods and do vigorous exercise every week, taking such supplements can help them lose fat. The ones I already take in part because they have strong health benefits in other ways are chromium polynicotinate and alpha lipoic acid.

Low energy levels from depression can derail fat loss but vitamin D3 and omega 3 supplements help turn off depression. I already take those and they have other health benefits also. Similarly, people over 40 or 45 and particularly those people who take statin drugs as we talked about above, may need to take ubiquinol to restore their energy level. I already take those. And, they help keep my blood pressure down and protect my heart in other ways.

There is also a supplement that may increase how much belly fat I burn with my exercise which is safe and said to be effective that I plan to try later.

And, if I still haven’t gotten the results I want after all these steps, there is yet another supplement that might be effective that I plan to try. It’s safe to take; but most of the supplements that began with similar positive press are no longer considered effective. So, when I try it, I’ll be pleased if it does work and willing to stop taking it if for me it does not work.