Low carb desserts? Check. Lots of chicken and fish? Check. Salads? Check.
Sometimes you can go right down the low carbohydrate checklist and STILL not lose any weight for exasperating lengths of time. This time period is called a plateau, or when your diet has stalled out and come to a standstill even though you are eating as you should.
What can you do to hurl yourself off a plateau - figuratively, of course, although sometimes it gets so frustrated you feel like doing that literally! - and begin losing weight again?
First, be sure your body has actually hit a REAL stalled plateau before you turn your back on low carb desserts and go back to the bad ones!
This is why it is important to measure your body before you embark on an Atkins, South Beach, Caveman or any other sort of low-carb diet, or even calorie-counting one for that matter.
You should pre-record the inches for your waist, upper arms, hips, calves, thighs and chest because you just don't know from which area you might be losing inches.
There will be weeks where the scale tells you that you've lost little or no weight because the body needs to make readjustments to itself - but rechecking your measurements could change the story completely.
You see, on a low carb diet especially, you replace some of your fat with muscle tissue, which is heavier and denser than fat. That means you will be losing inches off your measurement, but the added weight and density of your muscle makes up for the fat loss.
You can get slimmer and still weigh the same. Keep in mind that you not only want to peel off pounds, lose fat and get slimmer - you also want to transform your body into a lean, mean working machine and that includes turning fat into muscle, or even building muscle where there was none before. (Of course, there are people like me who want to lose the muscle between our ears, but that's another story!)
To determine if you have truly hit a plateau, after you step on the scale for your weekly check of your weight, check your inches, too! Track the progress of weight and inches together and you'll see that sometimes a stall is not really a stall, but a body readjustment.
In fact, you could go for a month or so stuck at the same weight, and want to hurl your scale out the window - or at least question it parentage! But things are still on track if you are slowly losing inches at this time.
Yes, there are times when your best diet buddy is your ruler, NOT your scale!
Of course, there is also the flip side, where you are losing weight but not inches. Probably means you are losing fat from the places you didn't measure!
All that is fine and dandy, so what about REAL plateaus? Frustrating as not being able to participate in "free donut day" at your favorite coffee shop!
We'll explore what to do about real plateaus in Part II of this article... Low Carb Desserts CLIFFHANGER!
Chocoholic and low carb desserts fanatic Kim Humphreys loves to share ideas, recipes, information and Sugar Free Chocolates at Low-Carb-Desserts.com. And the sharing goes both ways!
