Maintaining Your Momentum: Powering Through Plateaus

One of the most discouraging things about dieting can be experiencing plateaus.  This is a time that you stop losing weight.  With any diet, even the hCG program, you may find that you experience plateaus. 

Plateaus are a natural part of weight loss and if you know how to handle them, you’ll power through and keep losing weight.  These short breaks in weight loss don’t mean the end of your program.

There are many things that can cause you to have a plateau.  Sometimes knowing the cause can help you to fix the problem.  In this chapter we’ll look at the causes of some plateaus and how you can get back on track.

Exercise

With most diets exercising improves your results.  And even though you’ve learned that isn’t the case with the hCG diet, you may insist on trying to exercise.  If you are exercising and have experienced a plateau, you need to back off of the program.

You should be doing no more than 15 minutes of very moderate exercise such as walking or yoga during Phase Two of the program.  When you switch to maintenance and begin eating more calories, you can begin to participate in more strenuous exercise.

Too Many Calories

It’s possible that you are following the program, but you are still actually eating too many calories.  Take the time to write down everything you’re eating.  If you hit a plateau, you can go back and check to see if you have eaten too many calories.

Five hundred calories isn’t very many.  It doesn’t take much to meet that quota before you are over doing it.  Most people don’t feel hungry even with such a small number of calories, but if you experience a plateau, check your caloric intake.

Too Few Calories

For some people, the plateau can come from not eating enough calories.  You may be feeling very full because your body is using stored fat to burn calories.  It can be hard to eat when you’re not hungry.

But for the hCG diet to work, you need to eat at least 500 calories each day to make sure you keep your weight loss going.  Look at your journal to see if you’re following the program correctly.

If you’re eating too few calories, try adding a serving of lean meat or another food that’s dense in calories.  It can be hard to eat when you’re not hungry, but in order to keep burning the fat you’ll need to eat the minimum number of calories.

Hormonal Changes

The science behind the hCG diet is primarily based on controlling hormones in your body to burn fat.  That said, you may experience some plateaus that are simply due to hormonal fluctuations that are natural and normal.

Of course, you should check your journal to make sure you are adhering to the program.  But if you are and you’re still experiencing a plateau just keep going.  There may be a few days scattered throughout Phase Two where you don’t lose any weight or you even put on a pound.

This is not a reason to panic.  For women this can be particularly true.  Women’s menstrual cycles can often affect weight gain and loss while following the hCG diet.  The best thing to do is stick with the program.

If a week goes by and you’re still experiencing a plateau, you may want to speak with your healthcare provider to see if there’s an underlying cause such as thyroid disorder.  In most cases, your plateau will end and you’ll be back to losing weight quickly.

Remember Your Purpose

When you experience a plateau, it can cause you to feel like a failure.  Sometimes these feelings lead you to cheat or even completely give up on your diet.  Do anything you can to prevent that from happening.

Weight loss is a hard business.  It requires you to be committed, change your patterns, and be extremely regimented.  But with the hCG diet, you only have to commit to do that for 3-6 weeks at a time.

Once the second phase of the program is over, you can begin to loosen up a little bit.  You can gradually add back the foods you love and continue to keep the weight off.  Don’t let a little plateau keep you from reaching your goal.

It doesn’t matter if you lose weight every single day.  What matters is the pattern over a long period of time.  If you’re continuing to keep your overall weight loss total up and not gaining weight back, you’re a success!