Q: Hi Mike i am a 43 year old man allways been into any form of sport and kept relitivly fit...for the last 15 months i have made a very conserted effort to train with weights for about 45 mins 5 times a week and do hard cardio 4 times a week and also play outdoor 8 aside football for 1 hour twice a week, and i diet well too, around 1,500 to 1,800 quality calories a day i have gone from 235llbs to 205llbs in this time and am only left with love handles now, but how do i get rid of them and how many calories do you think i burn a week

A: Congrats on your weight loss and great job keeping yourself in shape like that! If your weight loss stopped lately, then the problem is not in the calories you burn but in your metabolism. Between weights, cardio, and football you could be eating 3000 calories daily and still losing weight. Instead you eat 1500-1800 and are not supplying your body with enough energy so it reacts by going in this defensive mode -- it'll use as little energy as it can to maintain the vital processes, but it sure as heck will not go out of its way to burn fat to fuel 'optional' metabolic processes such as building up your muscle. And when your body wants to be conservative with spending energy, it can! So those 1500-1800 calories are stretched to cover all the basic metabolic functions and your weightlifting and your cardio and your football.

So what you'll need to do is wake your body up from its metabolic slumber by eating more. This will not happen overnight or even in couple of weeks. But as you steadily increase your calories, your metabolism will eventually start responding. You might even gain a couple of pounds at first, but eventually fat loss will restart.

Take a look at this fat-loss diet -- this would be a good starting point for you (in fact you probably eat something pretty close to this already if you have a good diet). Start with that and ever so gradually increase serving sizes and eventually add a whole extra meal, so that a month later you're following this fat-loss diet (increase of 400 daily calories over the span of one month). By this point you should again be losing fat and weight again. So try this and see what happens in one month. If you're agressively losing weight then, I would then recommend eating even more: like this! But for now just start with the first diet I suggested and in a month time build up your portion sizes to the 2nd one at which point your metabolism should be revving again. Hope that helps!