How to beat a plateau?

It is so frustrating when you are doing everything right in terms of diet and exercise and you cannot move past a certain point. What are some ways to get past this? Is having one lazy day with a huge cheat meal helpful? Thoughts?

Answer

In my experience there are two types of plateaus. Ones that are related to you thinking you’re doing everything right but corporate interests have convinced you something is “healthy” and ok for you when it isn’t. And ones that are related to your body hitting a wall that it needs to learn to break down

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For the first, inspect your nutrition and make changes with things that you suspect might actually not be as healthy as you once thought. No shame in finding out something actually isn’t good for you - they’ve spent billions to fool us after all

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For the second, it’ll take time. Take a break from watching the scale. That won’t help here. You’ve hit a resistance level and your going to fluctuate your weight a bit to break through. Watching your hard work come and go will be discouraging

I suggest just changing your strategies to see how your body reacts. What actually works to break through is going to be specific to your body but here are some things that might work:

try changing your feeding style/number of meals/meal times
try IF/OMAD
shake up your nutrition (ex switching between keto, whole foods, etc)
change your exercise styles (changes in intensity, duration, etc)
try extended fasting with the goal of learning hunger control/discipline

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I don’t think huge cheat meals are great for breaking plateaus personally. It might work for you but they always mess me up for a few days and recovering is harder than just keeping on. I do use free feeds as a way to make sure I’m getting varied nutrition and psychologically washing out cravings. Sometimes just enjoying events with family friends. This works for me but could be disastrous to others and be a slippery slope (and what I normally eat “free feeding” isn’t junk - it’s healthy, complex carbs/veggies I don’t eat during keto - so my goal really is a nutritional boost)

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And I have to ask - depending on your goals and where you are - if you’re doing everything right, is it possible that you hit your natural equilibrium/healthy weight and now you’re seeing your weight stall because of muscle growth/size? If this is the case, time to stop looking at the scale and pay attention to (assuming) smaller fat deposits around your body. Keto might be the wave here to help isolate burning the fat you have left

Answer

Started off with 72hrs and slowly moved into 16:8.
Always had a fried egg at breakfast in order to keep full. Did a TON of cardio. And some simple weights. This helped my body expedite a lot of the processes involved in fasting. A 18 hr essentially was being processed like a 24 hrs with all the exercise.