“Help! I hit a plateau after losing 10 pound in 5 weeks!!! What should I do? By the way, I jog 60 minutes 4 days a week.”
Congratulations on your weight loss!
10 pounds in 5 weeks is excellent. It equates to only 2 pounds per week. That sort of weight loss does not come as a shock to the system and is considered sustainable, healthy weight loss. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to continue to lose 2 pounds per week until you reach your goal weight, providing all the other factors are ideal. Here are some questions to consider:
Has your diet changed? Have you changed the protein, carbohydrate or calorie content of the food you eat daily? If you have been eating less than 1200 calories per day, it could be that your body has adjusted and slowed your metabolism to accommodate what it believes is a famine. If you are eating more starchy carbohydrates than you initially did, it is possible that you are retaining more water than you did initially.
How much sleep are you getting every night? Americans are notorious for being sleep deprived. Generally speaking, anything less than 7 hours of sleep per night will put a person into a pre-diabetic state which will not allow them to lose weight. Although you may feel fine on 5 hours of sleep, your body really needs at least 7 hours. If you just don’t have the time to sleep that much, perhaps it is time you considered making some time to take a nap during the day.
You may be overtraining. You’re doing a great deal of aerobic exercise and if you aren’t getting enough protein, you could be wasting muscle. If you aren’t timing your high carbohydrate meals properly, you could be defeating the purpose of your jogs. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you’re just breaking your body down in a bad way.
My suggestions:
1. Make sure you’re getting at least 1 gram of protein per pound of goal body weight every day.
2. Make sure you’re consuming no more than 1 gram of starchy carbohydrates per pound of goal body weight every day.
3. Make sure you’re getting 8 hours of sleep every day in the form of overnight sleep and/or naps.
4. Cut your jogs down to 30 minutes each.
Give these suggestions one whole week and see how things go. I’m willing to bet you’ll drop some serious poundage in that one week.