5 Reasons You Could Be Gaining Weight By Steve Edwards Nothing taps your panic button quite like gaining weight, especially when youre on a weight loss program. Unfortunately, its an inevitable fact of life. Luckily, youve got me here to tell you that, as long as youre following a solid program, results will come. Its a physiological certainty (unless you have an underlying issue, like hypothyroidism). I realize this might take further convincing, considering our instant-gratification society. But this aint my first weight loss rodeo. Ive seen almost every scenario you can dream up, most of which were solved by patience. That said, there are some strategies you can use to ensure youre getting the most out of both your diet and exercise program. Lets tackle five of the most common weight loss conundrums. Im following the program perfectly. Why isnt it working?! Cortisol is a word you should become familiar with, as its a key factor here. Youve probably heard that it makes you fat, but you have no idea why they say that. What is cortisol? Its actually a performance-enhancing stress hormone that serves an important function in survival situations. Unfortunately, when we force too much daily stress on our bodies, we shift into a state of chronic cortisol release. This can cause us to store excess fat as a survival instinct. While it sounds pretty dire, its generally only a serious problem in those with poor lifestyle habits. The beginning of a diet and/or exercise program, however, is a survival situation. In a very simplistic sense, your body releases cortisol, which, in turn, causes excess water retention to help you rebuild broken down muscle tissue. While this is cortisol functioning properly, it does lead to a period of water weight gain as you adjust to a new program. Its nothing to worry about. By following a solid plan, your body will adapt by repairing this muscle tissue. This results in an increase in your metabolism and leads to weight loss if thats your goal. The trick is that there is no hard line on how long this adaptation takes. Its based on your individual parameters. Just rest easy in the fact that it will happen, unless you force it not to, leading us to . . . Woman with Small PortionIm barely eating. Severe undereating causes cortisol release, as its the definition of a bodily emergency. Beachbody® offers many kick-start (or express) eating plans where you undereat for a few days, but youre always encouraged to get back to a solid maintenance calorie level quickly. A short period of strategic undereating with proper hydration will help your body dispense of unneeded food (most of us chronically overeat) and regulate bodily functions. Go too long, however, and chronic cortisol release is the result. This is a tough situation because our natural reaction to weight gain is to eat less. When youre exercising, its important to keep your eye on workout performance, as opposed to how much weight youre losing. You should be eating enough so that your daily workouts improve over time. As long as thats happening, your body is adapting, your metabolism is increasing, and you will lose weight provided you also dont overeat. Ive been doing hard workouts for weeks. On the performance theme, you need to continually improve, which is why workouts get harder as you move through any of Beachbodys programs. Its also why we add resistance (via added weight or gravity, as is the case with jumping) to workouts. If youre doing the same workouts at the same intensity constantly, you are not forcing adaptations that lead to changes in your metabolism. This is called a plateau. A plateau, technically, isnt gaining weight—its remaining the same—but a proper diet and exercise program should continually force improvements (in the form of adaptations). Otherwise, your metabolism wont continue to increase, which is the goal of most weight loss programs. My friend and I are doing the exact same thing and shes losing. Back to adaptation. We all react differently. The only absolute is that our bodies will change over time with a healthy program. A fitness rule called the Specificity of Adaptation states that it takes the body between 3 and 12 weeks to adapt to new stimuli, which is a very broad range. This is why its vital that you stick to your program and not change it repeatedly based on your daily results! In our test groups, two-week results have almost no bearing on who does best in the end. In fact, many people that undereat early and get off to a fast start will stagnate, while those who stick to the plan and eat as advised will start slower but train harder over time, leading to rapid weight loss as the program wears on. Woman with Small PortionI lost weight for a while but now its stopped. For ages on the Team Beachbody® Message Boards, this was our most frequently asked question. You eat less to lose weight. Things are going great, but suddenly you plateau—or start gaining. Odds are, your metabolism has slowed down in order to deal with the decreased calories. Youre starving your now fit body, so its doing what it needs to do to survive. The answer to this problem is pretty simple: eat more. Again, this is a tough sell, so heres an example. One of our early Success Stories lost 40 pounds during a round of Power 90®, eating only 1,200 calories a day. He then stagnated for a long time and was very resistant to eating more, fearing it would kick-start a regression. We talked him into adding calories until, finally at around 2,000 calories, weight loss resumed. It then became so rapid he dropped through his goal, and about 20 pounds below, until finally, at around 3,000 calories, he leveled out. Then a daily diet of around 3,500 calories a day got him to a ripped 175. So the moral of todays lesson is to trust your exercise program—at least if its a Beachbody program. Weve been doing this a long time and we know what works. There are no magic bullets. Body transformation is based on making consistent, healthy lifestyle changes. Do that and youll never need to ask yourself why youre gaining weight again.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:00:01 +0000
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