Plateaus and Cutting Calories

K

katiebridges

New member
Hi

So I've read the stickies about cutting calories as you lose weight and hitting plateaus and how they all say don't cut down to 1200 straight away because you have nowhere left to go.

Well I'm 119 pounds and 5'3-5'4 so 1200 is about right for me. I need to lose another 7 pounds or so to get back to what is a comfortable weight for me.

I recently lost half a stone and have been maintaining for 2-3 months but at the start of Jan I started trying to lose again.

I've been eating my 1200 cals (weighing everything etc like I did before) and lost a pound a week for the first two weeks but nothing the last two weeks.

What do you do when your cals are already low? Do I kick my exercise up a notch?

Thanks!
 
Thats exactly what you do. Everytime I plateaued I changed up my excercise routine and the weight came off Ive been on a 1200 calorie diet for 11 months
 
Yeah. There comes a level where - especially for women who are usually smaller anyway - where you're so close to a healthy and low weight, that you simply can't cut calories any further and still be healthy.

At that point you have to ramp up the exercise some and be satisfied with smaller losses - 1lb or less per week.

That said, most peole who are that close to goal weight would benefit a lot more from weight lifting and body weight exercise to help reshape their bodies. Many women don't actually need to lose weight, they just need to change the composition of their bodies to become leaner and more "fit" looking (what the media refers to as "toned").

I'd suggest checking out the stickies on weight lifting in the exercise area of the forum and incorporating some of that into your routines.
 
Holy cow, a spot where I agree completely with Kara ;)

When you're pretty much at your healthy weight, weight loss is rough, but your body composition is where the change will likely need to happen. Check out the term 'skinnyfat'. Unlike those that need to do just straight up mass loss (like me) we can make bigger strides in our amount of change. Yours is more a game of inches (pardon the pun, think American football terms), so your best bet is to play smarter, and knowing where you have to play harder.

Weights, muscle, etc. Your weight may actually go up a bit for a time, but then it'll come back down as the muscle you put on will then start burning more of the fat you want to get rid of. Get some good body comp measuring tools, and make sure to check the labels and warnings. Some are not able to accurately measure the athletic or low body fat type of people, like my electronic scale thing.
 
I've hit a bit of a plateau myself so it's good to get some advice on this. My exercise routine is mainly running so I guess I need to mix things up a bit.
 
I agree completely with what Kara and Big wrote, just want to add that if you are intent on getting rid of more fat you might also want to look into just changing around your exercise if you've been doing the same exercise for a long time, perhaps substitute steady state cardio for interval cardio, or if you are in good shape cardio wise look into doing some HIIT training, I know Leigh P has an excellent sticky post on that subject.

The body is pretty amazing at adapting so if you repeat the same movement for a long time every day it gets better and better at doing it with less energy spent (this is a gross oversimplification but.. just to get the point across)
 
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