6 Quick Weight Loss Tips to Tip the Scale in Your Favor

The problem: When you exercise, you gain muscle, which weighs more than fat. If you're really getting a lot out of an exercise regimen, oftentimes, the first four or five weeks will find you losing fat and gaining muscle at a similar clip, so it appears you're not losing.

The solution: Use a tape measure to chart progress. That will give you a truer representationand remember, muscle gain levels out quickly. The change is probably right around the corner.

The problem: Especially in this shove-it-down-your-throat consumer society, knowing the right way of eating the right things is tricky. There are lots of foods that are supposed to be good for you, yet actually work against you if you're trying to lose weight. The classic example is fruit juice. Great stuff, full of vitamins, but also devoid of fiber, so drinking a glass is basically a couple hundred calories of sugar water from a weight loss perspective.

Another example is peanut butter. Fats are highly caloric, meaning a little goes a long way and a lot goes too far. When the nutrition facts say a tablespoon is 100 calories, that means one flush tablespoon. Any amount of heaping can quickly double, triple, or quadruple the calories.

The solution: Go through your diet with a fine-tooth comb, questioning anything that's not whole fresh produce, whole grains, or lean protein. If you need help, pop over to the Beachbody.com Message Boards and ask the Advice Staff.

The problem: This is sort of a subset of the above dilemma. You eat like a monk all day, but you tell yourself you deserve one daily reward. A candy bar, a Coke, chocolate, a bag of chipsmaybe even something that doesn't start with the letter "C." As far as we're concerned, you deserve anything your heart desires, but will that help you lose weight? No. It doesn't seem like much, but that daily cheat can cause all kinds of problems. It can cause a sugar spike. It can send your fat percentage through the roof. It might just be those extra 300 calories that are holding you back.

The solution: Treat yourself once a week instead.

The problem: I know, I know, logic dictates that if you eat less, you lose weight, but it doesn't always work that way. In general, the body wants to have more fat than you want it to have. Fat is an emergency fuel source and it protects the vital organs. While your brain thinks in the 21st century, your body still thinks in caveman terms. If you don't eat enough and you're under stress (such as from exercise), the body can panic, fearing famine or drought. It conserves energy (or fat) and gives you less juice to do what you do throughout the day.

The solution: Bump your diet up in healthy 300-calorie increments until you start losing again. When you plateau, bump up again. Another trick is to zigzag, eating 1,200 calories one day and 2,000 the next, so your body thinks it's getting more than it really is.

The problem: People tend to think that the body can handle as much punishment as we can give it.

Won't happen. When you exercise, you're actually breaking down your muscles. If you don't give them enough time to recover, they just won't be able to do the work. You won't progress. What's even worse is when you overtrain your cardiovascular system, you're tiring out your heart muscles, which can lead to a chronic state where you're tired and lethargic.

The solution: Just do what the Beachbody program recommends. Take a day off each week. Take recovery weeks seriously. Another thing you can do is take your resting heart rate each morning. If it starts to go up even though you're working out, that means you're overtraining, tired, and it's time for a recovery week.

The problem: It's possible to go through the motions on just about any workout video without benefiting. Just showing up doesn't get the job done. Also, working out three or four days a week is fine if you're only trying to maintain fitness, but odds are it won't help you progress.

The solution. Make sure to hit it five days a week, minimum. Six would be great. When you exercise, make sure you're sweating. If you push yourself to a point where you need to stop, that's okay. Stop and take a drink of water. Better to get yourself to that point than to underperform. This might also be a good time to try a heart monitor, to make sure it's getting up there.