During the Low Carb weight loss journey, many dieters experiences a slowing down or a halt in weight loss.

The good news is that in nearly every case, it is avoidable and in all cases it is possible to overcome the stall, plateau or whatever else you want to call it.

In this three part series, I go over most over the most comprehensive list of things that can cause your at/weight loss to tail off and in the last part I’ll give you three ways that you can use to bust a stall or plateau… Guaranteed!

Part Two – 16 Ways you can Sabotage Your Weight Loss Plans

A Bored body.

Even if you are exercising and have reached a plateaux, this could well be a sign that you’re now not exercising enough. Simply put, your strength and stamina levels have reached a point where you are in fact cruising through your exercise session and it’s not causing you to even break into a sweat.  This will start to have the same effect as no exercise.
This is most evident for folk doing aerobic or low impact exercise. The best type of exercise for fat loss on a low carb regime (in fact for any regime) is one which ‘makes’ muscle. That has to be resistance training or weight lifting. That’s because this type of exercise is the only really effective way of building muscle. There are so many advantages in doing this. Not the least of which is you are getting a much better tone and body shape.  Better muscle tone improves the posture and makes skin ‘hang’ better. Look at anyone in the gym and see which bodies look better. As this improves, so will self-esteem and also you will find daily tasks so much easier as you have the strength to do them.

Not Enough Water.

You’ve heard it before I’m sure. Your body uses liquid to fulfil all of its functions. Without adequate fluid levels everything slows down and that includes metabolising and eliminating fat.  Remember, too, our requirement for adequate levels of liquid are increased if we are in dry or warm environments.  And lastly, you remember that you can see the excess fat excreted – floating on the water after you pee.  Well, to get the fat out of your body and into the bowl, you have to wash it through with something.  In a nutshell ketosis does not work without adequate amounts of water.
Now you will also have heard that you have to drink the magic 64 oz per day. Well, up to a point it is true that more is certainly better than less, but not all of that must be water. Teas, especially herbal ones can count too (but watch out for the fruit teas as they may have higher carb levels!).  The watchwords here are your beverages must be carb AND calorie free. See later for beverages.

Medications.

So many medications are just set to stop weight loss either by slowing down metabolism, or otherwise interfering with the body’s processes.  First on the list are diet pills (often just cause you to flush water); appetite suppressants (make you not eat enough); or anything that promises instant weight loss. (Many of these are filled with starchy fillers that just add to the problem).  Diuretics are again a major cause of stalls particularly if you are in ketosis simply due to the body not having enough fluid to complete the process.

Not so obvious maybe are meds designed to lower cholesterol. (e.g. Clofibrate)  They have just the reverse effect as they inhibit the liver’s ability to convert fat to glycogen, slowing down fat burning. Did I mention the side effects?

How many of you can testify that you put on weight when you started to take the pill? Similarly, oestrogen, HRT pills, steroids, cortisone, seizure medication, will all cause weight gain.
Aspirin slows down the metabolism and is know to cause hypoglycaemia.  I still wonder why they prescribe it for heart attack victims who need to lose fat. Other pain control pills like Acetaminophen, panadol and etc.

Others to be aware of are amphetamines, anti-inflammatory, antibiotics, antihistamines, anticoagulants, analgesics and tranquillisers.  Drugs like propanolol (used for angina) cause the metabolism to slow down.

If you take insulin or use oral diabetic medication then you can expect to see greater fat storage as fat burning slows down or stops altogether. (See Thomas Smiths excellent article on diabetes in the last issue)
But remember to consult your medical practitioner before making any changes to your prescribed medicines. That said, make sure your medical practitioner knows about these things as many don’t and merely trot out the stuff sold to them by the pharmaco’s. You won’t be able to convince them either, so if they’re not knowledgeable get another practitioner before the one you have kills you.  (Sounds dramatic but sadly there is truth in that)

Food Sensitivity.

Of the main food groups allowed on Low Carb diet, Dairy products such as cheese can cause quite a problem with stalling.  The first reason may be a simple one – processed food often contain added sugars and starchy fillers. The second reason you can get problems with these is a common allergy to the casein in cow’s milk. (This can often be triggered by the shocking amount of antibiotics and other growth hormones present in modern milk supplies – but whatever you do – don’t switch to soy milk).
Other common food allergies are from wheat and wheat gluten, corn, soy, eggs (Particularly the white and more from battery hens than free range).

Chinese Food.

The high levels of MSG found in Chinese restaurant food is known to cause many gastric disturbances. It’s also directly linked to obesity. (Not to mention the other side effects, some of which are shocking)

For all the above, use a food elimination method to find your particular culprit.

Using Net Carbs.

This has got to be the biggest scam to hit the low carb world since the diet first became popular.  It’s not so much that the science is wrong – one way or another everything, even fibre, is metabolised to some extent by the body and this differs from person to person.  Also, much is made about the spike using the glycomic index as a way of giving credibility to the method.  If the GI or spike mattered one iota, then Dr Atkins et al would have given carb levels for each meal or snack. Instead they all, almost without exception, set daily targets of so many grams.
Manufacturers have betrayed the consumer by tricks and stealth to kid us that because ‘xyz’ ingredient has such a low glycomic index it need not be counted.
I’ve said it before and here again.  They are lying and spreading those lies as if they were gospel and conning the public and professionals alike.  Don’t fall for it.  Count all carbs and you won’t go wrong.

Take a look at a sample taken from a nameless producer. The snack bar has a big 2g decal on it so you would be forgiven for thinking that it only has 2 grams of carbs.  But when you view the info you can see that the actual carbs are 17grams for the bar. If you’re on induction, that’s nearly all your daily allowance gone in two mouthfulls.  Tellingly, if you add up the fat, carbs and protein – the amounts come some 7 grams short of the whole bar’s weight.  My question is: where have they gone and what are these ingredients anyway?

Also, I have a big problem with the ingredients as they are listed.  Soy protein is at the top of the list – not my idea of a healthy food (See Kaala Daniels article in December’s Low Carb and Atkins Magazine or better still, read her book).
Also fibre cannot be automatically taken away, as many folk do metabolise fibre to some extent.

Wrong Type of Food.

Obvious, but often overlooked. Make sure you know what you are eating. The more processed a food is, the less healthy it is going to be. It will have more fillers, additives, flavour enhancers and the like, all of which may well cause you problems.  There is a growing understanding that it is important to eat food right for your type.  More on that later.

Post Induction Stall.

The most common type of stall and one that can, in most cases, be avoided if you know it’s a possibility. Firstly, apart from a couple of things I’ll mention later, this is not so much a stall but more a change in the way the body is handling your new diet and weight loss regime. It has in effect sensed that the food it is getting in is going to be something it will have to cope with permanently.

By now you should have understood that a lot of your initial 3 – 5 lb (1.5 – 2.5 Kg) weight loss on induction was water being removed from your body simply because you were using up your store of glycogen (glucose that’s used for instant energy stored within the muscle and liver).  For every gram of glucogen there are three grams of water stored with it, so when you use up the glucogen the water has to go too. Once this convenient store of energy has gone the body then starts metabolising fat using the process of lypolysis and gluconeogenisis (See note)

The good news is that you ARE burning fat!
The reason for this is straightforward and is a function of the way the body uses fat cells for water storage and the way that fat cells work themselves.

As I said earlier, when you start an LC diet your first losses are glucogen then fat, as ketosis kicks in, and a lot of water. This water loss can fool the body into thinking it is dehydrating and as a result of that it starts to hold on to all the water it can.  This has two results.  The first is that the metabolism slows down and the second is the processes which are causing fat loss slow down too.

But listen, you are still burning fat all the time your body is in ketosis – it does not have a choice.

Now here’s more good news. Each of us has a natural, personal ratio of fat, muscle and water. And as your body senses the change in that relationship, given the chance, it will tend to get back its own ideal ratio and soon will start to let go of the excess water too. (Note when we are fat this ratio is distorted so it will need a time for retraining). Also, each of us has a natural limit to the amount or rate of fat removal we can healthily sustain. Our bodies will determine that for us.

So one way to help this change of phase pass quickly is to drink more liquid (non diuretic ones) and exercise.  The liquid will help overcome the body’s sense of dehydration and provide the much needed fluid to aid the body’s processes.  The exercise will help build muscle and bring about a more rapid return to that ideal ratio.

Body Changing Speed.

When you’re on a lowcarb diet, think of the changes you are asking of your body. First, you’ve taken away it’s reserves of instant energy (the glucogen), then you’ve made it start to burn fat, turn that into amino acids and then convert that into glucose. You may even have started to exercise. All these are a good thing. But the body is just reacting to these things forced upon it, so don’t be surprised if it takes time to regroup and adjust to the new way of being. The point here is not to allow that to take too long. Go through the check list and make sure you’re not allowing new bad habits to settle into the place of the old ones. The secret here is to not let your body get too comfortable or set in its ways (And believe me it will whenever it gets the chance) – but rather set your body new limits and tasks.

Brain Body Link.

Undoubtedly, your mind is your most valiant ally, or your most vile foe. Many serious scientific trials have shown just how effective the brain is at telling the body what’s what. This is the same for all of us eating lowcarb to lose or maintain an ideal weight.
The first thing is to have a good, clear and complete set of positive goals written down. The part of our mind that helps us achieve does not really understand negativity so all goals should be in the form of positive statements. i.e:  Not “I want to lose 30 lb”,  But “I will be lean and fit into my size 10 dress!”  Not “I will not eat high carbohydrate food” It’s far better to use “I will eat good nutritious high protein food”.

The second is to obliterate the possibility that failure is acceptable and keep telling yourself that.
Though it might sound daft, tell yourself every day just what you want your body to be doing. You will be surprised how much difference this makes.

Commercial Foods.

The bane of lowcarbers. You cannot dictate exactly what ingredients are used in these ‘foods’, and remember they are made by commercial companies in order to make a profit – a maximum profit. Ostensibly there is nothing wrong in that, except when through avarice they start to use whatever cheap ingredients the law allows – whether or not it is truly healthy – just to maximise their profit.  Once they have got to this stage they will stoop to whatever depths they have to in order to get you to buy them, even if it means not being too friendly with the truth about the carb contents, protein contents, fat type and contents or what artificial poison (oops, sorry) sweetener they are using. And it doesn’t matter whose name is on the packet either.  You are going to stall if you eat commercially made low carb food – guaranteed.

My Way of Eating.

All good low carbers stick to the plan. It takes lots of experience to go off plan and is not recommended. When you start deciding that ‘well, I’ve been good, I deserve a treat now’, that could be your undoing.  It won’t be long before that piece of pie you allowed yourself at the weekend becomes a piece of pie every day.  Or that Friday night ice cream becomes a regular nightly feature of your eating routine.

To make any plan work – you have to work the plan – it is that simple.  So if you know you have been having the odd deviation from the low carb straight and narrow, stop it before it gets to be a habit. The experience of thousands of LCer’s is that one slip from the path will lead to a slide down the mountain.  No matter what the justification, no matter how much you kid yourself that you deserve it, that little ‘treat’ won’t do you any good. The best reward you can have is success and that means sticking to your chosen plan.

Not the Right Plan?

More as an aside here. We are all individuals and there are many Lowcarb plans. You owe it to yourself to investigate them all. It may be that the plan you chose initially is not the best one for you. At least by finding out about other plans you will have more information upon which to base yourself and make your plans. In diet and in everything else, knowledge is empowering.  Get empowered!

Yes, you do deserve a reward.  But in truth your reward should be more than something that you know is not going to be good for you. Why not make a nice dessert or a cosy meal for two for your reward and share it with someone special. Go out to the cinema or theatre. Make your reward something really special – you owe that to yourself and to your continued success.

Weekend Off.

There are a few individuals who can lowcarb during the week and take the weekend off – but they are the exception who effectively are losing weight as the amount they eat over the whole week measured by calories is  slightly less than they are using up.  In addition to be successful in this way, they will normally have a faster metabolism too. When anyone with a normal or sluggish metabolism tries the same thing it is a certain recipe for disaster. Considering it can take up to 2 or 3 days for some to get into ketosis (and for some, that’s a struggle too), then effectively the amount of days you are burning and losing fat amounts to about 3 days a week. That’s a very poor result and of course you have to use every ounce of will power to start again each week. This is not recommended in any way. The whole idea of a LowCarb diet is to keep blood sugar levels and fat burning process consistent, the Lowcarb way of eating trains the body to get used to the LC lifestyle and make the best use of the quality food you consume. To suddenly yoyo back to high carb is both a shock and unnecessary stress to the system and will be the cause of greater fat growth than fat loss. (See the side note on Insulin and glucogen to see why)

Splenda.

Not a carb nor calorie free sweetener. In the very few human trials done before FDA approval with, would you believe, less than 30 people, some of the testees absorbed ALL the sweetener.  That meant they were metabolising it. The average absorption (extrapolating the results from animal trials) is believed to be around 15%.  As that’s an average, some people will obviously absorb more.  If you are using it, then count at least one gram carb for every two grams sweetener.  Also remember that the bit that’s not sugar must be something else.  In this case it ends up being definitely carby.  But please note I am not recommending you use it, as its safety is unproven over the long term and there are many people who have had severe and dangerous reactions to it.  Not the least of the problems in my book, is that it is very likely to cause a stall.

Gained Weight.

Again don’t panic, particularly if it’s just a pound or two.  If measurements and volumes have remained the same then you’re still in the game. The most normal reason why our weight fluctuates is due to water gains and losses. And don’t forget, when your exercise routine is effective, you will be making muscle and this weighs more than fat for the same volume.

For ladies, then things like hormonal fluctuations can make quite a difference to weight. One thing to remember is that scales never tell the truth.