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You Will Lose the Last 10 Pounds


When Weight-Loss Wanes


Is Your Scale Stuck?



Don't Fixate on the Number

So what's a frustrated woman to do? Beck recommends reassessing your goal weight; you may not need to lose any more pounds. "Perhaps you can reach your number. But the question to ask yourself is, once you get there, can you maintain approximately the same exercise and diet pace for the rest of your life?" she says. Instead of aiming for your lowest achievable weight, you might want to shoot for your lowest maintainable weight. "It's not giving up," she adds. "It's being realistic and shifting to a maintenance strategy before you get completely demoralized."

Another good way to gauge whether you've lost enough weight is to consider your body fat, says Dr. Levin. The simplest test is to see where it's deposited. "If it's in your stomach, you probably ought to keep trying, since abdominal fat poses a real health risk for everything from diabetes to breast cancer." See "The Best Way to Beat Belly Flab." But if the fat is in your hips and butt and your body-mass index is within the healthy range (18.5 to 24.9), Dr. Levin suggests rethinking your desire to lose those last 10 pounds. "They're probably not medically harmful, and in trying to get rid of them, you'll be triggering all of those protective mechanisms that in turn make it even harder to mobilize the fat," he explains.

Alternatively, measure your waist and hips. "If your waist is bigger, your risk of chronic disease is increased," says Diane Finegood, PhD, scientific director of the Canadian Institute of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes in Vancouver. In this case, you have medical cause to lose more weight; the same goes if your waist measures more than 35 inches.

Finally, there's your body-fat composition, the percentage of your body that is fat. This number is a far better measure of how fit you are than what the scale tells you, because muscle is denser than fat, says Steve Ball, PhD, an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of Missouri at Columbia. You can determine this number in several ways, but the one method you can use at home is bioelectrical impedance analysis, which calculates body fat based on how quickly an electrical signal moves through your body. Nowadays, it's available as a scale. (A great one is Tanita's FDA-approved InnerScan Body Composition Monitor, model BC-533; $120.) What's the number to target? "There's no absolute, but women generally want to be under 35 percent," says Ball.

Getting the Scale to Budge

If you still feel you could stand to lose the last 10, experts agree you need to change things up (and not, as I did, optimistically stay the course). Here are four strategies.


Slash 100 calories from your daily intake. You may need to cut back more than before, since the lighter you are, the fewer calories you may need. "When you're on a trajectory of losing weight, you've got to continually reduce intake," says Finegood.

Increase the number of calories you burn. Longer workouts aren't necessarily the solution, says Ryan Andrews, RD, an exercise physiologist at Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center. Try a new activity to work different muscles. "Or bump up your speed or intensity level, or do intervals," Andrews suggests.


Personally? I'm taking my run outside for a change of terrain and scenery; I've had enough of staying in one place, both body and weight. And now when I get on the scale, I remember it's just a number — not the only reflection of my health.

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