Why Your Body Stops Losing Weight
Your Body Wants Fat
Fat is your bodies energy reserve. Your body wants some fat to stay alive. If you go on a diet and do not eat very often or do not eat enough your body will want to increase its energy reserves. It also likes to store more fat when you are stressed. The amount of fat your body wants is influenced by your thoughts and actions. So to a certain extent you can control how much fat your body wants. If it wants to store more fat then it uses less energy. When you consume more energy than you use your body stores the extra energy as fat.
If you do not maintain a balance by burning more energy than you consumed some of the time then the amount of body fat will increase. Over time this can cause you to gain a lot of weight. The reason people experience rapid weight gain after being on a restrictive diet and starving themselves is because they start consuming more food at the same time their body wants more fat. It can causes them to gain fat faster than they lost it.
When The New Routine Is No Longer New
You change your routine and start losing weight but then the weight loss slows down or stops. It happens when the new routine is no longer new. Instead of losing weight you are just maintaining it. If you want to continue to change your body you need to continue to change your routine. Increasing the duration or intensity of your workouts can help a lot. It can allow you to burn more and more calories so you continue to lose weight.
Doing more is not always enough because your body can become more efficient. When that happens you do not burn as many calories. To get results you need to give your body another challenge. Consider what it was like when you started a new exercise routine. You probably noticed that your body needed time to adapt. Once it did things became a lot easier. For example I gradually increased the distance I could run on my elliptical trainer until I was running 12.5 miles. At first I had trouble running for 20 minutes but after a while I could run for 2 hours.
If you notice that increasing the duration or intensity is not getting you the results you want then you should change the exercise. Switch to an exercise that tires you out right away and after your body adapts switch to something else. I started doing a different exercise routine every week. During the week I focus on increasing the intensity or duration. After the week is up I start over with a different routine.
Flesh And Bones
Your body weight is not just your fat weight. There is also muscle, brain and bone among other things. When you stop losing weight the first thing you should check is your fat. If you are still losing fat then your muscle weight is probably increasing. If you are doing a lot of cardio then this does not usually happen until most of the extra fat is gone. It is more likely to happen if you focus on strength training.
You can not choose your ideal body weight. My ideal body weight is around 125 pounds. It would be unhealthy for me to weight less than that. If you want to figure out if you have weight to lose see and feel how much extra fat you have on your body and keep in mind you need energy reserves. Your body can feed off of fat or muscle.
If you want a very small amount of fat then you are going to need muscle. You are also going to need to eat regularly so your body does not want to store more energy as fat.
