Hi, I’m Elly, a registered nutritional therapist. I’ve teamed up with Weight Loss HQ by Treated to bring you helpful info around diet and exercise when using weight loss treatment.

In this video, we’re going to talk about plateaus.

Pretty much anyone who goes on a weight loss journey will plateau at some point along the way. They’re extremely common, and can happen for a range of reasons.

Basically, weight loss often follows a pattern of coming quite easily at first, before becoming more tricky over time.

There are lots of reasons why this might happen. For example, relying only on willpower. Willpower can play a big part in a new diet at first, because we’re making new conscious decisions about how to eat. So we might feel tempted to integrate these changes into our existing lifestyle too quickly or in an unrealistic way. But changing your diet should be part of a more sustainable, holistic approach, and work with the rest of your life overall.

Another reason is that our bodies are designed to hold on to energy stores, it’s part of its survival mechanism. So when you start to lose weight, especially if it’s rapid weight-loss, it adapts by using less energy. This is generally what causes plateaus: your body’s metabolism slows down to reserve your energy, whilst simultaneously increasing your hunger hormones to drive you to eat more.

If you lose weight quickly, but don’t do much in the way of resistance training (lifting weights) then some of this weight loss will be from muscle rather than fat, which can also affect your metabolism.

Generally, the more weight you lose, the more your metabolism will usually start to slow down – because your body will be smaller – meaning you’ll burn calories at a slower rate. But don’t worry. While plateaus are to be expected, there’s no reason why you can’t break through them.

First off, it’s important to note that something about your current routine has probably led to a stagnation. So you’re going to need to change something up. If you need to speed up your metabolism, you could try experimenting with different foods, such as getting more protein into your diet, or doing more resistance and weight training to build more muscle mass.

Sometimes it can be easy to slip back into old habits too, and let things go a little with diet— especially if you’re not keeping track of things with something like a diary or journal.

The main thing is to remain positive and motivated during a plateau, and not fall back into bad habits or be overly self-critical. So try to keep a positive attitude, and remember you’ve done well to get this far. It’s an indication that you’re going in the right direction overall.

We like to imagine that progress always goes in the same, linear direction. But the reality is that healthy progress can be filled with ups and downs, and the route that works best is a flexible one you can stick to. So focus on the positives rather than the negatives, and be kind to yourself. If you stick to a process and keep working at it, the results should take care of themselves in time.