Losing Last 10 Pounds

Losing weight is so hard to do with as many temptations as there are around us. Our lives have taken a turn for the worse when we consider McDonald’s or Burger King as nutritional food choices. They not only are awful food choices but really are not even remotely good for us. But when we get to the point where losing weight is a matter of life and death, and we can buckle down to actually get to the point where we are losing weight is happening for us, we get stuck. We plateau and those last couple of pounds seems so darn hard to lose. But why is that? The other pounds melted off once we got right down to it.

If you have been spending countless months trying to lose the last ten pounds so you can hit your target weight you may have seen that the task is hard. It may even seem impossible at times. There are some reasons why and I will share them with you along with some neat tricks you can use to get those last ten pounds gone.

Let us use two dieters as an example. We will assume that dieter #1 and dieter #2 are identical in every way except in weight. They are both trying to lose that last ten pounds. These two dieters have the exact same metabolism, same body size as far as their frames go, same age and weight and even nationality and race. Like I said – identical.

Dieter #1 has one hundred pounds to lose in order to reach the recommended weight set by her doctor. Dieter #2 has just that last pesky 10 pounds to get off. Dieter #1 and Dieter #2 are placed on the same weight loss plan. They are eating the same foods, taking the same vitamins and even working out exactly the same. Their calories also are identical. By the second week of the diet plan Dieter #1 has lost 12 of their pounds. Dieter #2, on the other hand, lost only one half of a pound – a mere fraction of what they need to lose. The truth of the matter is that they only THINK they lost half of a pound. It is such a small amount of weight loss that no one is even bothering to count it.

The question has to be asked: why did Dieter #1 lose 12 pounds in the first week but dieter #2 completely stalled out and lost only half of a pound? Let us delve deeper into the dieting realm.

1. If you have a lot of weight to lose you will lose it quicker than someone who has a few pounds to lose. The more weight that your body has to lose the more calories you need to maintain it. This holds true even when you are actively dieting. This is why that many dieters, if they stick to their food and exercise plan, will lose weight at a much faster rate. Many dieters will confuse this with hitting a weight loss plateau, but they are quite different because in the case of a plateau it happens when you have lost a lot of weight and your body hits a starvation mode so it can catch up.
2. When you are close to your weight loss goal you have already pretty much cut as many calories as you possibly can. For the heavier dieter is much easier to trim 1,000 calories from your diet to make you lose 100 pounds. The same does not hold true with someone who has already lost 90 of those 100 pounds. Their calories have already been cut as far as they can be. Since there are not many pounds to lose it will take much longer to drop those 10 pounds.
3. In order to reach your goal weight you need to figure out how many calories you take in. Find out what your goal weight is and what your calories need to be maintained at in order to keep yourself at that weight. Then you simply have to take in that many calories each day from that point on. Once you reach that goal weight of yours that will be the calories you will have to keep eating in order to maintain.
4. Those 10 pounds are a pain in the butt so work it out. Exercise and rigorous activity can be your catalyst to losing those extra 10 pounds. You have to stick with it and push yourself to your limits in order to reach your goal. Exercise stimulates calories to burn which, in turn, will generate weight loss.
5. Patience and diligence will see you losing those 10 pounds. You have to stick with all of these techniques in order to reach your goal. Do not let it get you down.