It’s the wall that has taken down countless people in their attempts to lose weight.
You have a diet and exercise plan, you’re sticking to it, and you’re watching the numbers on the scale fall. You’re cruising along and suddenly, bam! The weight stops coming off. What gives?
Almost everyone who tries to lose weight hits a plateau at some point. You’re maintaining the same routine that let you lose weight before, but now your weight won’t budge.
If you think you’ve reached a weight loss plateau, here’s what you should know and how body sculpting can help.
Why Weight Loss Plateaus Happen
There’s a reason that no exact weight loss plan works for every person. Each person’s body is unique, and as a result, there are many potential causes for a weight loss plateau.
A Changing Metabolism
In common terms, your metabolism is the number of calories your body burns to maintain life on a daily basis. Metabolism varies from person to person and it varies at different times in your life too.
As you lose weight, your body has less body mass to supply with energy. It takes fewer calories to operate a 170-pound body than it does to operate a 200-pound body. As a result, your metabolism burns fewer calories without exercise than it used to.
This is especially true if you aren’t building much muscle during your weight loss. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn on a regular basis. If you aren’t exercising much, you may lose muscle while you lose fat.
Pushing Too Hard
The basic principle of weight loss is that you need to eat fewer calories and burn more calories with exercise. If you take your diet too far, though, it could have the opposite effect.
Your body is smart. If it sees a sudden, massive drop in calorie intake, it thinks you’re in a situation where food is scarce. To protect you from starving, it starts retaining more fat and storing more fat to use as energy in the future.
Change in Hormonal Balances
Your hormones play a large role in your weight management. Some hormones make you hungry and others make you feel full. Some hormones make your body retain more fat while others give you energy to work out.
If your hormonal balance changes, it can stall your weight loss. These changes can come about because of several factors, from your age to your stress level.
How Weight Loss and Body Sculpting Go Together
Some people think of body sculpting as the “easy way out” for people who need to lose weight. The truth is that it’s a powerful way to complement your natural weight loss.
To understand this, you need to understand what fat cells are. A fat cell isn’t a unit of fat. It’s more like a balloon that can store as much or as little fat as it needs to.
When you eat too much, your body stashes more fat in those fat cells. They enlarge, which creates a visible increase in your size. When you lose weight, those fat cells release some fat and shrink in the process, which shrinks your size.
The problem is that during weight loss, you don’t get to choose which fat cells shrink. Your abdomen may be the area you want to slim the most, but the fat cells in that area might not respond as much as the fat cells in your thighs or buttocks.
Body sculpting treatments like laser lipo are different. Laser lipo removes some of your fat cells in a specific target area of your choice. This shrinks the exact “problem area” you want to tackle.
In other words, you can lose weight first to reach your health goals, and laser lipo can then fine-tune your cosmetic results.
Laser Lipo vs. Surgical Lipo to Complement Weight Loss
When you’ve reached a plateau at a weight you’re happy with, how do you know if laser lipo or surgical lipo is the best choice to enhance your results? Laser lipo is the better choice for several reasons.
Recovery Time
Like any surgery, surgical liposuction requires recovery time. This means that for several weeks after your procedure, you won’t be able to exercise much if at all.
As you can imagine, it’s easy to gain back weight you’ve lost when you can’t exercise for weeks at a time. Not only will this limit your surgical results but it takes away some of your hard work from your weight loss.
Laser lipo, on the other hand, is non-invasive so it doesn’t require any recovery time. You can keep up your workout routine during your entire course of laser treatments.
Swelling
Many people who get surgery don’t realize how much swelling they’ll have afterward. They also don’t realize that it can take months for the last of that swelling to go away.
For someone who has worked so hard to slim down, seeing that size increase can be frustrating. It also means that you’ll have to wait weeks or months before you can reap the benefits of your treatment.
Laser lipo doesn’t cause swelling. The results improve gradually between your sessions, so you’ll see continuous results that improve for weeks.
Skin Tightening
Laser lipo works by shining a precise type of light on your targeted treatment area. This shrinks some of the fat cells in the area over the course of nine sessions.
While the fat reduction is the key goal, the laser treatment also increases collagen in the skin around your treatment area. Collagen is a natural protein that makes your skin firm.
In other words, laser lipo not only reduces your fat but tightens your skin too.
Surgical lipo doesn’t have that perk of skin tightening. It won’t be able to address the common problem of sagging skin after weight loss.
Making the Most of Your Weight Loss
Whether you’re putting an end to your weight loss due to a weight loss plateau or reaching your goal weight, you don’t have to accept your results for what they are. Laser lipo is a great way to maximize the results you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
To learn more about laser lipo or to take advantage of our full weight loss package, contact our body contouring specialists.
