Hi Folks,

I am in need to hear from all of you experienced IPers out there. I have recently opened an IP clinic after losing 54lbs and loving the diet. I wanted to bring this system closer to all those people I love and share my success with them.

So I have a dieter who just switched from another clinic. She is currently in phase one and has lost 44lbs in 15 weeks. Not a bad average but she has only lost 5.8 in the last 4 weeks. She is a faithful dieter and follows ALL the guidelines to a T. Has anyone experienced this "wall" before? Any suggestions on what we could do to shake up her system. She still has 50-75lbs to go until she reaches her goal and she's very happy overall with her success but is getting a little discouraged. It's a hard diet to do if you're not going to see the results. Over the last week, we tried changing her veggies as she was mostly eating broccoli but this week's total loss was only 0.4lbs. Any advice would be appreciated.

I would try gentle exercise and no restricted to see if that boosts her loss

I would say increase her protein for a week and see if that helps. Have her eat an extra packet a day or a couple of whole eggs, not just the whites. I found when i had low weigh in results it was always the result of not enough to eat.

I have to agree with Travel Bug on this one -- I too went through the same thing - the first 40 or so pounds came off rather quickly these last 15 have taken more time. From what I can tell of others on this forum who have been doing IP for awhile - this is just part of the body adjusting itself. I would encourage your client to eat extra protein - for instance an entire hardboiled egg in the afternoon. (this helped me a great deal) also as counter-intuitive as this sounds have her add an additional teaspoon of olive oil to her day --on the weeks where I have more protein and fat-in the form of olive oil- I loose more. I have also added another packet in every other day -- have her do the orange drink - it is high in protein and the lowest in carbs (18 grams protein, 1 carb). If she is tall, over 200 pounds or as you stated needs to loose about 50-75 more and extra packet will help. Also I started eating my restricted every other day in the morning rather then at night (I usually have my night snack at around 10 so this was a bit too late for a restricted bar). -- Let us know how she does. -- a few other things to consider -- what is she doing for breakfast? I was spending the entire morning drinking my RTD with coffee -- my Doc advised me to eat/drink my breakfast within 30 minutes -which gives my body time to process, and rest before the next meal -- the thought behind this is that if I am continuing to eat/drink all morning my body never gets to rest between meals and resting is what we want IP to do for us. To keep her motivated why not do measurements and pictures -- I find that although my weight loss has slowed my measurements are moving faster then ever. Good luck to you and to her!!!!!

These are great ideas. I don't want to encourage a full on cheat and the client actually doesn't want to cheat so these ideas may be a good place to start.

try the extra protein suggestion first for a week. if that doesn't work, put her on phase 2 for a week to shake things up. that has really helped a lot of the gals who have been on plan for a long time. 1 week of phase 2, then back to phase 1. good luck!!!

Thanks, ladies. We tried a week with no restricted and still only a 1.4lb loss. Looks like we'll try to increase or switch to phase 2. Thanks for all the advice.

There's such good advice here, I'm hesitant to offer more -- especially if she or you have tried this. But I would advise her to buy a really good pedometer and not go to bed until she's walked, just walked, about 10,000 steps a day. If nothing else it will improve her breathing and the amount of oxygen she takes in. I have every [well, almost every] impediment to losing more weight than I have already -- age, hypothyroidism, medications that cause weight gain, you name it -- and regular, steady, walking, not weights, etc., is the only sure-fire way I know of goosing a loss. Hope this helps.

Edit: This should be the tag end of my signature: are you absolutely sure she's drinking enough water???