How to Break a Weight-Loss Plateau

If you find yourself trying to shed pounds that just don’t seem to budge, it’s easy to get discouraged or feel like you’ll never reach your goal weight. But don’t go there! There’s often one key reason why you’re seemingly stuck in a weight-loss plateau. It’s likely that you’re simply not creating enough of a calorie deficit. The biggest mistake people make when trying to lose weight is not counting calories — or not counting them accurately (get out that journal and track everything you eat and drink for a week to see where you might inadvertently be sneaking in extra calories). The other huge mistake is bagging out on your exercise.

Let’s tackle this one at a time. First, you absolutely must burn more calories than you’re taking in. There’s no getting around it. A calorie is a unit of energy, so the energy you don’t use gets stored in your body as, you guessed it, fat. Of course, there are a couple of factors that play into this, which vary from person to person. One is your basal metabolic rate (BMR), the amount of energy your body expends while at rest; and the second is your active metabolic rate (AMR), your total calorie burn on an average day, minus exercise. So you’ll need to figure out how many calories you burn a day. To calculate your BMR, use one of these formulas, according to your gender:

Excerpted from www.msn.com

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