Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel welcome back to the nutrition

divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous as anybody

who's ever lost a lot of weight, like say 20 pounds or more, will tell you,

the first five come off so easily and the last five are the toughest.

You're still doing all the right things, you're

eating less, you're moving more, but all of a sudden it stops working. The scale

won't budge or the tape measure or whatever it is you're using to measure your progress.

No matter where you are in the process, hitting a stubborn weight loss plateau is frustrating,

but don't let it erode your resolve. Today I have three ways for you to break through a

weight loss plateau. In order to lose weight, of course, you need to cut back on your food intake.

And if you do that for long

enough your body may play a nasty trick on you it may start conserving energy

by lowering your metabolic rate and as a result you won't burn as many calories

and your weight loss slows or stops altogether.

Although this feels like the worst kind of sabotage

your body is actually trying to look out for you.

Your lizard brain has noticed that food supplies seem to have been scarce for an extended period

of time, and so it's trying to increase your chances of survival in case the famine continues.

Of course, when you're trying to lose weight, this is not very helpful.

You're really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You could try eating even less in order to nudge off more weight, but that just confirms your lizard brain's suspicions about the dwindling food supply.

Or you could eat more in an effort to restore a more robust metabolic rate,

but that's hardly going to help with weight loss.

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