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3 Secrets to Supercharge Your Weight Loss and Break Through That Plateau Without Starving Yourself!

I hear it all of the time. “I’m eating right, I’m exercising… but the weight isn’t coming off. I don’t know what else to do!”
While important, diet and exercise aren’t everything. Mainstream thinking tells us that if you work-out 1 hour 7 days a week and starve yourself that your dreams of fitting into your favorite jeans will come true. Maintaining that lifestyle takes time and frankly isn’t much fun.
What if I told you that breaking through that weight loss plateau is not only achievable, but can be accomplished without training for a marathon or fasting?
Other lifestyle factors affect your body’s ability to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Try these three secrets so you can stop the frustration with your weight and start living your life feeling beautiful and confident with more time for your hobbies, work and loved ones.
Secret #1: Make sleep a priority
Anything less than 7-8 hours of quality sleep per day wreaks havoc on our metabolism… particularly hormones. Studies show that less sleep increases the hormone that causes hunger. Alternatively, longer, quality sleep activates the hormone that tells you to stop eating. Not getting enough quality sleep might actually be sabotaging your efforts and causing you to gain weight.
How do you get more rest? Create a habit in which you go to sleep and wake up at the same time each day… even weekends. Eliminate the TV, phone and computer from the bedroom. Consider making your pets sleep in another room. Try meditation or breathing exercises before bedtime to help quiet the mind.
Bottom line, making sleep a priority results in a happier, leaner you.
Secret #2: Detox
We are bombarded everyday by pollutants in food, household cleaners, medications and the air we breathe. According to recent estimates, 3.93 billion pounds of toxic chemicals have been released into the US environment [1]. Our bodies must break down and eliminate (detoxify) these pollutants to minimize the negative effects.
If toxins accumulate in our tissues, one of the many side effects includes an impaired metabolism. What does this mean? In simple terms… you may not be able to lose weight efficiently and effectively. It might affect the way you sleep or your ability to handle stress.
What can you do to help support your body’s natural detoxifying abilities? In addition to minimizing your exposure to external toxins, such as commercial household cleaners, it is important to eat a ‘whole foods’ diet rich in organic vegetables and fruits and limit processed foods as well as food intolerances to help boost the body’s natural ability to excrete pollutants.
Once detoxification occurs, the body no longer struggles to keep up with the barrage of pollutants and diverts its efforts into a more steady state, allowing it to relax and release excess weight and stress.
Secret #3: De-stress
Stress is good… in small doses. It prepares the body for ‘fight or flight’… it keeps us on our toes. However, many of us live in a constant state of stress. Our stress hormones remain in overdrive.
Stress hormones give us energy to get through a given situation. However, when the hormones don’t shut off, they increase our appetite to ensure we have energy to get through the situation at hand. This coupled with the fact that many of us use food to dull our feelings or sense of anxiety makes it very difficult for the body to release and let go. We have tricked it into ‘thinking’ it needs the energy to survive as well as for comfort. We created a scenario where our body no longer works for us, but rather against us.
Making time for yourself, incorporating regular exercise (i.e. yoga or Pilates), as well identifying potential foods that affect your mood and trigger a stress response are all important strategies to start managing stress and ultimately helping you break through that weight plateau.
In conclusion, think of these secrets as the three legs of stool. All three must be in balance for the stool to function properly. Keep your body in balance by implementing and practicing all three!
[1] US Environmental Protection Agency. 2010 Toxins Release Inventory National Analysis Summary. Web site.…

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Healthcare Articles

The Weight Loss Plateau – What is it and How to Get Around It

If you listen to some experts you will find that there is a way that the body works where you get to a certain place in any weight loss plan and you are not able to lose any further weight. This is known as the weight loss plateau and can be a serious detriment to people trying to lose weight beyond a certain point. In this article I’m going to talk with you further about how to go beyond that weight loss plateau and lose that extra weight.
The human body is able to achieve just about anything, even things that are outside of the realm of things that science can understand. There is a willpower that athletes and highly trained individuals have which can take that person beyond an extreme point. This can even happen in the average person, for example, if they experience a severe accident of any type and are unable to walk. Those people are usually able to get to the point where they can walk again by going beyond what is normal. Many people look at these actual physical reactions to the body’s predicament as unfavorable. They consider the weight loss plateau as one of these situations, but it can be overcome.
In normal vocabulary a ‘plateau’ describes a situation where you cannot go beyond a certain point. In weight loss this plateau is a situation where your body is not able to lose further weight because you have reached the end, for the last tolerance that your body can achieve; for the method that you’re using to lose weight. Normally what happens is that your body adjusts its own metabolic rate to the situation that you have developed (using the weight loss, and/or exercise program that you’re working with). Many times you will find that diet plan will not even tell you about this plateau, because they don’t want you to know that you might get to that point. But there are ways that you can counteract your own body’s tolerance for the plan that you are working with to go beyond the plateau.
Your body and its metabolism likes to work within a pattern of natural adaptability. Your body likes to stay within that pattern, and when you change that pattern your body will adapt and try to maintain this new pattern that you present to it. So once you have followed a diet plan for some period of time, your body has adjusted to that, and eventually your body will fall into that pattern. Your body will not want to adapt or go further in achieving weight loss using that plan. So what you need to think about doing is tricking your metabolism, but without doing any harm to your body. What you will do is tell your metabolism that it’s time to follow a new pattern, so that you can lose further weight.
What are the best ways for tricking your body’s metabolism safely so that it will follow a new pattern and let you lose more weight? Here are some valuable ways that you can do that:
1. Adjust the time period between when you eat. As your body’s internal clock and digestive system gets changed, to follow this new eating pattern, it will again trick your body’s metabolism, allowing you to lose further weight in the diet or meal plan that you are working with. You can use anything such as changing the actual schedule of when you eat, or by adding more smaller meals. The main idea here is that your tricking the body into burning this food off faster because it’s happening at a different pace and you are then able to overcome the plateau.
2. Try adding strength training to your exercise program. As you are increasing the amount of exercise, the difficulty of exercise, or you are changing your exercise. These new movements are targeting different muscle areas which are causing your body to re-adapt to these new changes and your body will be busy adapting to those changes. It will lose track of the old pattern that it used to follow, allowing you it to switch to a new pattern, where more weight loss can begin. So changing up your exercise regimen: including strength training and/or adding strength training may do the trick.
Just keep in mind that one of these ideas might work for you and not for someone else, or that you may have to combine each of these two techniques to get beyond the plateau. Try one at a time to see if you can go beyond your plateau. If you cannot, then think about combining them. The most important point is to find a method that works for you; that works well, and consistently for your metabolism. Once you find …