Not Losing Weight? Try These 5 Tips

Why Am I Not Losing Weight?

When you’re trying as hard as you can, few things are more aggravating than not losing weight. However, just because the scale hasn’t moved, it doesn’t mean that it won’t. Don’t give up! The problem may be something exceptionally minor. A few tweaks to your strategy, here and there, and you might discover that the pounds will start to slide away.

The following are some great tips to help you to get over your struggles with not losing weight:

What Can You Do If You Are Not Losing Weight?

1. Talk to your doctor – the first thing you need to do is make sure that there isn’t some underlying issue standing in the way of your weight loss. While you’re being examined, it’s also a good idea to speak with your physician about the efforts you’ve been making. Your doctor is a medical expert, after all, you may as well pick his or her brain about why you’re not losing weight.
2. Shake up your daily calorie intake – instead of trying to eat the exact same number of calories every day, think about calories in terms of weekly consumption and aim to eat more on some days and less on others. For instance, if you’ve been sticking to a 1,500 calorie per-day diet and your body has stopped dropping the pounds, then it could be that your body has adapted to this predictable energy intake and has slipped into a plateau.  However, if you take on a kind of zig-zag dieting technique, your body will be less likely to be able to “predict” how many calories you’ll have in a day and will not be able to adapt to the point of a weight loss plateau. For instance, if you eat 1,500 calories one day, try 1,800 calories the next, but then only 1,200 calories on the following day, and so on. After a period of time, you’ll have reduced your caloric intake by the same amount, without a predictable pattern.
3. Change your exercise routine – just as your body can get used to a set number of calories, it can also become accustomed to a workout. If the exercises that were once very challenging are now becoming easier for you, it may be time to add something different. If you’re doing the exact same workout every day, you might want to add some different activities into the mix so that you’ll access different muscle groups in different ways.
4. Walk more – no matter how much you’re already walking, the odds are that it would do you good to walk more. Stop using your car to make short trips. Instead, walk to the corner store or down the street to a friend’s house.
5. Include strength training – many people choose to focus on cardio instead of strength training because cardio workouts burn the most calories. However, while cardio burns calories as you work out, strength training helps you to build more lean muscle mass so that you’ll burn more calories all the time – even while you’re asleep!