Does it seem like you diet and diet, you’re reducing your calories and
you’re watching what you eat. At first there’s some weight loss and you’re happy, you start to exercise more but at some point – you just hit the wall.

It happens. More than you think. It’s called Metabolic Slowdown and it happens to a lot of people who suddenly notice a plateau in their weightloss plan. It can be really depressing after seeing initial success.

How do you avoid it? First let’s talk about how it happens in the first place.

According to experts, a person who slashes too many calories at onece in their diet too soon can send certain signals to the body that tell it that it might be starving. It’s called starvation mode and it’s genetically encoded into our bodies as a defense mechanism, and that’s all well and good… if you’re actually starving. But if you’re trying to lose weight it’s not helpful at all. It makes your body conserve *energy* (spell that F-A-T) and even if you do continue to lose weight it usually comes from water out of lean tissue and not fat. Not ideal at all.

In actuality some level of metabolic slowdown will occur no matter what kind of diet or weight loss regimen you’re trying to follow. What matters is how you deal with it. You want to lessen the effects of it and there are some good rules of thumb as to how to do that.

The best one? Don’t lessen your caloric intake more than about 16% at a time from any given spot. That might make those signals start to fire off in your brain. You should also consider other factors that might be hindering your progress like your age, sex and level of physical activity.

A good diet based on this rule along with the right balance of exercise is sure to produce the results you’re looking for. But make sure it’s a *balance* if you overdo your exercise or do extreme cardio, this could create some big *imbalances* and stop your progress dead in its tracks. One good barometer of this kind of imbalance is if you seem to be frequently fatigued or have mad cravings of any kind.

Want to learn more about Metabolic Slowdown and how to avoid it? Learn Now!