Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

It's funny how that tiny scale on the bathroom floor can make grown men and women quake with

fear and break out into a cold sweat. Will it move? Will it not move? What strange forces influence

the mystical movements of the

body weight scale? And more importantly, why does it sometimes not budge, no matter how hard you

exercise? In today's episode, you'll learn how to exercise when you stop losing weight,

why you may not lose weight with exercise, and how to exercise to get off a weight loss plateau. There's generally

three reasons why you stop losing weight. Number one, your body becomes accustomed to the demands

you're placing on it. When you perform a motion over and over again, you become more efficient at that

motion, which means that you burn fewer calories doing it. For example, when you

first step onto an elliptical trainer at the gym, you might huff and puff and barely make it

through 10 minutes, but eight weeks later, you could be cruising through a 45-minute elliptical

trainer workout. The reason for this is that your muscles learn how to move in a way that

introduces the least possible resistance to movement.

Well, this would be handy if you were fighting for survival and in the wilderness chopping wood.

It's not so handy when you're trying to shed a quick five pounds and need to burn all the calories that you possibly can.

Whether your body is getting used to how much weight is on the barbell, how fast you're walking,

or how many times you bicycle during the week, physical adaptation is one of the top reasons for a weight loss plateau.

Reason number two is you're stressed.

If you watch The Biggest Loser, you may have heard trainer Jillian Michaels mutter that someone isn't losing weight because they're retaining fluids.

Both physical and emotional stress can play a role in this fluid retention. From a physical

standpoint, an increase in estrogen, decrease in progesterone, decrease in testosterone,

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