Q: I burn more than 3000 calories a day and I consume 2000 calories. Why is it that I'm not able to continue to lose weight?

A: This is an excellent question! It sounds like you were losing weight for awhile but now that's slowing down or stopped completely. What happened was that your metabolism has slowed so that you are actually burning only about 2000 calories. How can that be? Well, as I said this is a great question and I would like to answer it in detail.

Let's first understand that the way your body burns calories is far more complicated than a simple calories calculator can account for. Your metabolism is determined not just by your age/weight/height/activities, but also by your diet (both past and present), genetics, health conditions, and use or lack of weight training. Diet has a huge effect on metabolism.

Take Joe and Bob -- they both eat 2000 calories per day. Joe eats these calories in 2 meals which consist of pasta topped off by ice-cream. Bob eats them in 5 small meals of veggies and chicken or fish. All other things being equal, Joe will have much lower metabolism and gain fat much easier than Bob. So you can see that not all calories are created equal!

OK, Joe is obviously at a fat-burning disadvantage here. But how does Bob compare to Ned -- his workout buddy who eats the same way as Bob. Bob has been on this 2000 calorie diet of his for several months now. Ned, on the other had, has just finished bulking up by 10 pounds on a 3000 calorie diet and now wants to shed a bit of excess fat. Ned's body is used to running at 3000 calories! His metabolism is revving very very high right now and as he drops to 2000 calories, his body will be burning fat to make up for the lack of calories it's used to. Bob's body, however, is already used to his diet, and his metabolism has already dropped and is low compared to Ned's. Bob's body has no incentive to burn extra fat. So, even a perfectly good diet ceases to give results after a while because the body simply adapts to it!

So what should you do? First off, if you are like Joe, try to become more like Bob -- in other words, eat better and exercise, including weight training! If you are already like Bob, then you must become more like Ned! What does that mean? Well, your body is used to your routine and has no incentive to burn extra fat anymore. That means you need to shake it up. Either eat less and less OR boost your metabolism. Eating less and less will work up to a point, but at 2000 calories you are already not eating a whole lot. Check out the calculator in the weight-loss article to see how much you can safely eat to drop weight. Depending on your gender/age/weight you can maybe drop up to another 500 calories per day, but no more than that.

So if eating less is not an option and you are already eating well and exercising, you have no choice but to try and boost your metabolism. You need to *increase* your calories for a period of time. Don't eat junk food, but eat more of good foods. Add a whole extra meal into your daily diet plan. For how long should you eat these extra calories? Try doing it for 1 day every week or for an entire week every 2 months. Either way, your body will get the periodic metabolism boost needed to jump-start fat burning again. After the metabolism-boosting period go back to your 2000 calorie diet until the next such period. This way you get the best of both worlds: keeping your metabolism high and losing the fat!