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Health & Fitness

Breaking through Plateaus

What to do when you're uninspired, unmotivated, or hitting a performance plateau with your weight loss

If you’ve ever worked towards a goal, chances are you’ve hit a plateau before.  Whether you’re trying to drop weight, hit an athletic achievement or just stick with a routine, everyone hits these speed bumps.

I’ve written a few suggestions to help you get through them, come out the other side, and make progress quickly again:

  1. Change your eating routine—get new recipes, try new foods.  Sometimes it’s just boredom with your options.
  2. Eat more fruits and vegetables—the first thing to go in any diet is often the right amount of fruit and veg, and this the most important food group to better health.
  3. Watch your sodium intake—too much packaged foods or eating out a lot often means more salt than you need.  And this is a sure-fire way to slow weight loss.
  4. Too much raw or cold food—I can explain this more in time, but it has to do with acupuncture theory.
  5. Eating too much or too little for your activity level.  Most of you are burning more calories in kettlebell class than you’ve ever done before.  You’ve got to eat accordingly, often increasing the amount.
  6. Are you pushing hard enough, or just going through the motions? Remember, pushing at an 8 is the best way to succeed
  7. Rest—Especially for athletes, if you don’t take days off, and at times a week off, you will just stop progressing.
  8. Are you being honest with yourself?  Or are you letting your diet slip?  Go back to the food log and write it all down.  Accountability is the key to breaking open success.

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