Not Losing Weight on Low Carb Diet? Cheating Will Help

Not losing weight on a low carb diet is frustrating for certain.  You are restricting the number of carbohydrate grams daily and passing on all of your favorite foods and yet the scale is not showing any progress.  Here are the three things you must do to make your low carb diet work including how cheating can help.

1.  Count your actual carbohydrate grams.  There are many hidden carbs in the foods you eat and you might be thinking you are eating fewer carbs than you actually are.  Every body is different but if you are consuming more than 50 grams per day your body may have found a settling point and adapted to your low carb routine.  Drop this number to 30 grams a day for a few days and see if the scale starts moving for you.  Note 30 grams is not many carbs, count every one.

2.  Are you eating too much or too little?  When low carb diets first became popular they came with the promise that you could eat as much as you want and still lose weight.  But this promise has quietly faded away.  You cannot eat anything you want but you can fill yourself up.  If you are not losing weight on your low carb diet then you will want to start by cutting your portion sizes by one-fourth until your weight starts dropping.  On the flip side, you might be eating too few calories and shutting down your fat burning potential.

To know how many calories you should be eating, Google the words "Calorie Calculator".  This will give you a cool little tool that calculates your daily caloric need according to your age, height and current weight and activity level.

3.  CHEAT!  When you have made sure that tips 1 and 2 above are working for you the best thing you can do to jump start your losing is to schedule a weekly "Cheat Day".  This is not some "sounds good but doesn't work" scheme, cheating is actually shown in research and real life examples to work.

Here is why cheating will help...

When you are dieting your body's metabolism slows, this is the last thing you want when your goal is to lose weight.  But you can keep your metabolism humming right along while you diet by scheduling 6 diet days followed by one cheat day.  This one cheat day will have carbohydrates allowed, in fact any of your favorite foods will be allowed: pizza, ice cream, bread...

Now you will notice your cheat day will cause your body to retain water but this water weight is quickly lost and you benefit from a metabolism that is efficiently burning fat for you all week long.  Joel Marion is one of the leading hands-on people showing how this cheat method works and he teaches a program called Cheat Your Way Thin which shows exactly how to make this work.

So if you are not losing weight on low carb dieting try these tips: count your actual carbohydrate grams, find your daily caloric needs and stick to them and add a "Cheat Day" to your low carb week.  These tips should get your scale moving down.