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How to beat a weight loss plateau by cheating on your diet...

Have you ever found yourself stuck at a certain weight? And no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to shift those last stubborn 10 or 15 pounds of fat?

Losing weight is supposed to be simple. In theory, all you need to do is eat a little less and do a bit more exercise. And for many people, this approach does work. It doesn't, however, work for very long.

During the first few weeks of a diet, the weight comes off relatively quickly. But, sooner or later, the rate at which the pounds come off slows to a crawl.

It's easy to think the problem lies with you. Is it because your metabolism is slow? Is it in your genes? It worked before, so why isn't it working now? What's going on?

There are plenty of reasons why losing weight gets harder as you close in on your target weight. You get very hungry and find it almost impossible to control your appetite. Because your metabolic rate slows down you burn fewer calories each day.

There are also hormonal changes, such as a dip in testosterone levels and an increase in cortisol production. This increases the risk that you'll lose some muscle along with the fat.

When this happens, a lot of people find—quite understandably—that their motivation for staying with a diet can fade. Gradually, they begin to deviate from the plan.

The typical approach to dieting is to adopt an "all-or-nothing" approach. Maybe this is something you can relate to. Let's say that you've been following a diet without any kind of lapse for the last few weeks and your progress has started to slow down. There are days when you feel tired, anxious or just a little irritable. You don't always feel like exercising.

To make matters worse, you're getting cravings for some of the foods you've cut out of your diet. It's human nature to want the things you can't have. Maybe it's something sweet like chocolate, or savory like bread. You hold out for days until finally you give in. It might start with one cookie. But it doesn't stop at one, and you end up eating the whole packet. And that's it. The diet's over. You've failed again.

As often happens with the all-or-nothing approach, the end result is usually nothing.

A better alternative is to...

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