What Hump?
Sage Advice for Conquering
Weight Loss Plateau

Written by Sky Taylor, Diet Bites

What to do with Weight Loss appears to be stuck in neutral....

Dieter Jane is on a diet and has been doing great....until now.

What's wrong with her weight scales?  They seem to have hit an ugly hump in the Diet Road.

Dieter Jane eyes a chocolate cookie with crème filling. It only contains a lousy 100 calories. Her diet doesn't appear to be working - so what the heck. After eating the cookie she thinks, "Just one more can't hurt, can it?"

Can't Stop Eating Syndrome

So she enjoys another and yet one more. And then a new craving erupts - milk, but not that skinny, fat reduced yucky-tasteless-white-liquid, rather full-blow whole milk. She pours herself a tall glass, drinks it - then decides it needs something. Chocolate syrup - yeah, that's right.

So she races to the pantry, drags out the chocolate syrup which she finds is already collecting dust due to her new diet plan. She squirts a generous amount into the glass, adds more full-blown milk - and six more cookies to her napkin.

Twenty minutes later she's holding her tummy and thinking that she never wants to see another cookie in her life again, much less a glass of chocolate milk. Obviously from the way her tummy was aching, that new diet plan had worked to shrink it a bit - thus resulting in tummy overload.

Oh no...her diet plan. And what had she just done?

Quickly, she tries to calculate the damage. Nine cookies at one hundred calories each - that's nine hundred calories alone!  Her glass that she used for the milk held closer to two cups than the recommended one cup serving - so she'd consumed at least four cups of whole milk at 160 calories per cup.

That's over six hundred more calories, so now Jane is up to over 1,500 calories. Then there was that crazy chocolate craving. That's going to cost her another two hundred calories.

Oh wow - in the blink of an eye, Jane has gobbled-up over 1,700 calories.

And she had began the day so well by having a serving of cereal for breakfast and a cup of black coffee. And for lunch there had only been that bean burrito for three calories.

Adding up the totals in her head, Jane calculates that before the cookie and chocolate milk disaster, she had consumed about 600 calories. That's a total of about 2,300 calories - with the cookies and milk.

What should she do from here? Just forget her diet? Surely, she's already blown it, right?

Oh no!  That would be a Diet Catastrophe because Jane's diet is alive and well.  She has only hit a temporary hump. Jane should be patient and learn from her experience rather than ditching her aspirations of weight loss.

Why should she deprive herself of a healthier body just because her appetite got a little too aggressive? Okay - it got way aggressive, but even so she should continue her diet plan.

This doesn't mean that she won't be tempted in the future. It does mean that if she learned from her dieting mistakes that the next time those ugly, bothersome cravings erupt - Jane should grab for a bowl of fresh strawberries as she waits for the weight scales to decline rather than the fatter things in life - like those evil high-calorie cookies.

In Summary

We would recommend that Jane forego lunch and enjoy a late afternoon min-meal of a bowl of soup or a healthy sandwich prepared with whole grain bread and mustard as a spread. This will nip the hungries in the bud and allow her to get through the day.

Tomorrow will look better in the new light - and if Jane sticks to her weight loss plan, she-too will soon be lighter. The damage that she done with her small mishap wasn't enough to create substantial weight gain. She would have to consume 3,500 calories in order to gain one pound.

As her daily weight loss plan is set at a maximum of 1,500 calories, even with an allowance of 300 calories for the afternoon soup or sandwich - her daily total equaled about2,600 calories. This is an overage of about 1,100 calories.

If Jane goes for a long walk, she can burn off a good chunk of the overage of calories. And if she continues to remain true to her weight loss plan, she'll eventually reach her goals.

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