my stomach thinks my throats been cut

Seriously folks! The problem with being overweight is it didn't take long before I've reached my first brick wall. I am eating healthy as I've talked about in previous blog posts. I have been a busy bee keeping active in the garden my ass is no longer plastered to the couch as much as it used to be.

But.....the scale has not moved in two whole weeks. [btw....my doctor is thrilled with my progress, when he saw me last week.] So back to the scale, not up and not down, not by one tenth of a pound! My mother has one of those fancy digital scales I want to throw it out the window.

I'm sticking to it. I'm eliminating flour or sugar and butter. I'm enjoying veggies, fruit, fish and lean meats, oatmeal, organic yogurt and good olive oil and some eggs and cheese once and a while.

So my dilemma, how do I get over this stuckness? If that isn't a word it is now!

So I did some research and my body has hit its first plateau. Great! And rather quickly I might add. Basically what I've learned is that my body is reacting to the changes in eating habits and lower caloric intake. It's basically thinks it's being starved so it's shut down.

My weight loss has stopped.

Notice how I've used the term eating habits? Diet seems so temporary I'm feeling like this is a life change that I could actually live with.

I found this article which i thought was pretty interesting. And although I don't count calories I am just eating healthy to shed the pounds I think I can use these  principals and apply them to move past this plateau.

Tip#1: Calorie Cycling

In order to lose weight, you need to cut back on your calorie intake. But if you do that for a sustained period of time, your body may play a nasty trick on you: It may start conserving energy by lowering your metabolic rate. The result? You don't burn as many calories and your weight loss slows -- or stops altogether. Although this feels like the worst kind of sabotage, your body is actually trying to look out for you. Your lizard brain has noticed that food supplies seem to have been scarce for an extended period of time. It's trying to increase your chances of survival in case the famine continues. Of course, when you're trying to lose weight, this is not very helpful.

You're stuck between a rock and a hard place: You could try eating even less in order to nudge off more weight, but that just confirms your lizard brain's suspicions about the dwindling food supply. Or, you could eat more in an effort to restore a more robust metabolic rate -- but that's hardly going to help with weight loss. There's a way to outsmart old lizard brain: It's called intermittent fasting, or calorie cycling.

What is Calorie Cycling?

Let's say you've been eating about 1800 calories a day and steadily losing weight. Now suddenly, it's not working anymore. Rather than trying to eat even less every day, try alternating high and low calorie days. For example, you could alternate between 2000-calorie days and 1200-calorie days. Over the course of a week, you'd trim an extra 1400 calories but the higher calorie days should help keep your lizard brain from panicking -- and your willpower from flagging.....

You can read the rest of this Huffington Post article here.
Regardless of the scale not moving I feel great and I notice the clothes are looser. I put on a pair of shorts the other day that were to tight last summer, so that makes me happy. I'd like to see the scale move but I'm not going to let it get me down, or have it throw me off my promise to myself to get healthy. 

I'll let you know how it goes....

And don't forget to visit me over on A-Z where I did a guest post... maybe you missed it!

You can read it  here.

My next post will be a thanks to my friends Jolie over at Precious Monsters and Angela over at Whole Foods Living who were very sweet and each gave me a blog award. I'll be answering some questions and giving you some facts about myself. I thought I'd give them an early shout out now. They are such nice women and they have great blogs. If you haven't done so please go visit them, you won't regret it!