Take Off Those Last 10 Pounds

These tips can help you get to your goal

It’s been a long and sometimes difficult road. You’ve been sensible, taking off just a pound or so per week with more exercise, careful meal planning, and calorie counting. And now, you’re just a few pounds from your goal weight.

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Why then, has the effort become so much harder? You’re hungry more often. You’re not losing weight as quickly as you’ve been accustomed to. Frustration mounts. It seems you’ve hit some kind of wall, physical and emotional, that threatens to keep you from your goal.

You’re in the dreaded “last 10 pounds” zone (though in reality it may be more like 12, or 8, or 5). And it’s dreaded for good reason. Many dieters find this stage of weight loss the most difficult of all -- even harder, in some cases, than the transition from weight loss to long-term weight maintenance.

“We cannot precisely say that it is the last 10 pounds,” says Werner W. K. Hoeger, EdD, FACSM, director of the Human Performance Laboratory and professor of kinesiology at Boise State University in Idaho. “In general, weight loss is faster during the initial phases of a diet plan, while the last few pounds are more difficult to lose.”

Power Your Way Through a Plateau

To keep focused and motivated, it may help to know what’s going on inside your body, says Hoeger, author of Lifetime Physical Fitness and Wellness.

When you’re dieting, you may lose weight faster at first because of an initial loss of lean body mass. When the loss of this lean component stabilizes -- because your body needs lean body mass to perform the activities of daily living -- your weight loss becomes much more gradual.

“But when a moderate diet (1,200 to 1,500 calories) is combined with exercise, a much greater amount of weight loss is in the form of fat [rather than lean muscle mass] because the body requires the lean tissue to perform the exercise program,” says Hoeger.

So if you haven’t been exercising, now is the time to start. If you’ve been working out all along, consider stepping it up a bit.

“Exercise helps you maintain lean muscle mass while you are dieting, and it helps with appetite control,” says Judy Giusti, MS, RD, coordinator of the “Fit ‘N Healthy” program at the Joslin Diabetes Center.

Your exercise program should include strength or resistance training as well as an aerobic component, the experts say.

A good strength-training program should include about 10 exercises that include the major muscle groups, says Hoeger, who recommends that you do three to four sets of eight to 12 repetitions to near fatigue.

And make sure you’re working hard enough, Hoeger says.

“When most people strength train, they perform several sets but seldom max out during a set,” he says. “They may perform 10 repetitions in a set, but could still perform another 10 because the resistance (weight) used is not high enough to cause muscle fatigue at 8 to 12 repetitions.”

To make your strength-training program more time-effective, Hoeger suggests, alternate different exercises that use different muscle groups. For example, do squats to work your lower body, followed by pushups for the upper body. “In this manner, the person will not have to wait the required two to three minutes between sets for adequate muscle recovery,” he says.

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