Hello. Please help me!! I’ve absolutely hit a plateau and it’s driving me crazy. I’m a 25 year old 5’8” man. I currently weigh 179 lbs, down from 209 lbs in December. I thought I’d finally figured out the real trick to this fat loss thing, there are no tricks. I began eating sensibly, hit the stationary bike a few times a week, and occasionally walked 2 miles or so. As I began to show progress and gained confidence in my ability to lose weight I kicked it up a notch. Over the past 2 ½ months I’ve adopted a vegan diet and dramatically increased my bike time. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to estimate my caloric intake but it’s low, probably too low. On the bike, I’ve managed to increase from 3.75 miles in 20 minutes 3-4 time a week to 10 miles in 40-42 minutes 5-6 times a week. I always monitor my heart rate and typically stay between 155-170bpm for 90% of the ride. My bike runs a program that automatically adjusts the resistance every 2 minutes and it’s pretty intense for the majority of the ride. This worked brilliantly for a while, but now I’m going on a month with practically no loss at all. Way I figure it I have 20-25 lbs more to lose and I’m becoming impatient. I’m playing with the idea of trying to jog, but that still seems a little out of reach. Weight training isn’t a very viable option due to access and time restrictions. I’m not expecting to become a fitness model any time soon, but I’m getting really frustrated with the lack of progress lately. Any advice y’all could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Hi,
what does your diet look like? It could very well be that you're not getting enough calories and your body has gone into starvation mode.. veggies are not exactly high in cals. If you've decided to go on a vegan diet for fat loss only - I don't think it is easier with avoiding meat and dairy.. not at all. It is possible of course, there is a bunch of vegans/vegetarians on this board too that do very very well.
Okay, to quickly sum up the three major factors for fat loss:

-) Diet: You need to estimate your calorie intake for maintainance and drop about 300-500 calories from there. You should eat clean (enough complex carbs, protein and good fats in 5 or 6 small meals a day) and drink lots of water.
-) Cardio: The stationary bike sounds good.
-) Weight training: This is very important as well since muscle burns way more calories than body fat.. build muscle to boost your metabolism and burn calories en masse

You should definitely try to add some weight training exercises. I've been in a pretty similar situation as you are right now; I've been doing LOTS of cardio and eating pretty clean, but still progressing rather slow. I cut back a bit in cardio and added some weight training - voila! The results came. Another important thing is rest. Take off at least one day per week.

Thanks a lot for the reply. I do think I need to tweak my diet some, but I don’t believe I’ve entered starvation mode. I eat plenty of soy protein, whole grains, and tons of fresh veggies. Where I think I need to tweak is how much and how often I eat. I typically eat twice a day with the first meal 4-5 five hours after waking and the second 5-6 hours after that. I’ve often heard to eat less and more often, but I find this extremely hard to pull off. I rarely have time to eat before work and adding 2-3 more small meals would be very difficult to do time-wise. This is especially true on a vegan diet. The near total lack of convenience foods is one of the many reasons that attracted me to it, but this also makes it harder to increase the frequency of meals. All that said, I still think yours is good advice and I’m going to give a whirl. Weight training is another thing entirely. What are your thoughts on equipment-free workouts, like push-ups, pull-up, lunges, etc? Adding this sort of exercise seems much more viable. Also, I’ve heard people argue for the benefits of working out right after waking. Do you think there’s any validity to this? I usually hear it in regards to weight training, but what about cardio? Any benefit there? Thanks again.

You should really try to eat more frequently as this will definitely boost your metabolism. There are ways to do strength training with only your body weight. You should aim for finding exercises to train your whole body and not only certain parts of it. If you had access to a bench and some free weights like a barbell or dumbbells you could do nearly anything with it.
Working out directly after waking has its benefits as your body will tap more directly into its fat reserves when doing cardio. However, you should have already "filled up" before doing strength training. It's also important to eat after your work out (preferably your biggest meal with enough protein and also lots of carbs).