How to Break a Weight Loss Plateau - How Cheating Can Help You Lose

How to break a weight loss plateau is really a question of how to keep your metabolism high as your body drops weight.

Most plateaus in weight loss come after you have been dieting or restricting your calories for weeks or maybe months.  You might have been having steady progress up until that point with a one or two pound loss being seen each week, but then things stalled and even if you started dieting harder your weight did not drop.

This is certainly frustrating but once you understand what causes a plateau and the physiology behind it you will see that the solution to how to break a weight loss plateau is not to diet harder, it is actually to take a break from all of your diet.

You must first understand that losing weight is not something your body necessarily looks at as a good thing.  Your body recognizes fat as stored energy and it wants to hold on to it so you always have a reserve built up.  Your body actually worries about you not getting enough food and has a hormonal check and balance system that prevents rapid weight loss which could result in starvation.

There is a hormone in your body called leptin.  It is the job of leptin to signal the brain when it fears starvation is near and when the brain receives this message it puts the brakes on your metabolism and you keep your fat.

Now think about what happens when you go on a diet.  Leptin notices that there are less calories being consumed and it signals the brain which in turn drops your metabolism and stops fat loss.

This is why traditional Diets CAN NOT Work!

But there is a way to outsmart your body and convince it that you are not starving so your metabolism begins racing again and you are going to love the way this is done, the solution is to cheat your way thin!

Think about this, if your metabolism slows when there is too little food, what will it do when it gets a lot of food?  That's right, it will speed up.  So by strategically placing "Cheat Days" in your weekly diet you can actually keep your fat burning potential at its highest as you lose weight.

But there has to be a catch...

Really I am serious the best way to break a plateau is to cheat on your diet but I understand your concern.  You think that you will reverse all of your hard work by cheating, but this is not true if you do it in the right way.  You will have to stay strict to your eating plan for 6 days and no that doesn't mean you starve, but then on day 7 you can wake up and eat pancakes, have fast food or pizza all day long.  These extra carbohydrates on day 7 will cause you to retain water for a few days but you are getting an entire week of boosted metabolism and that more than makes up for the water weight.

This is not someone's wild idea, in fact this is a very researched area of weight loss.  I think the best system out there to follow is Cheat Your Way Thin by Joel Marion.  He was a former Body for Life Contest winner and truly walks the walk.  I strongly recommend his work if you want to learn how to break a weight loss plateau.