Your Excuse: "I Give Up on My Weight Loss Plan Whenever I Hit a Plateau!"

The Excuse Buster: Every person who has ever followed a weight loss program has undoubtedly encountered the same frustrating experience: the dreaded plateau. You can be going along just great, sticking to your eating plan, working out on schedule, doing everything you know will help you reach your goal in record time - and then suddenly the results stop coming. The scale gets stuck and you can't seem to make it move downward again no matter what you do. This phenomenon can last anywhere from a day to weeks on end.

Many people when encountering this situation automatically think they must be doing something wrong. They look back over their food journal for clues about what might be stopping their weight loss, they worry that maybe they have a medical condition that will prevent them from losing any more weight, or worse - they simply conclude they have failed and give up.

As frustrating and perplexing as plateaus can be, more often than not they occur for a good reason. Sometimes your body just needs to stay where it is and adjust to the changes you are making. Sometimes you may indeed need to make some minor tweaks to your program in order to nudge the scale downward again. But one thing you should never do is get angry at your body.

Instead, your weight loss journey will be much easier if you learn to see plateaus as just another part of the process of getting to a healthy, fit state of being. It doesn't mean you are doing anything wrong or your body is punishing you. It doesn't mean you are a failure and will always be fat. It just means that you need to be patient and trust the process. Do what you can to determine whether you can improve in certain areas but at the same time, trust the process. Trust your body's wisdom. The scale WILL continue to move if you don't panic and do something drastic. Simply take it one step at a time, and you'll get where you want to be.