My First Plateau. Comments welcome.

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  • neugebauer52
    neugebauer52 Posts: 1,120 Member
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    Plateaus are nasty things and they seem to be never - ending. I understand that the body needs to adjust to a number of things and there is also something called water retention. But eventually the weight drops again - and soon after we hit the next plateau! Patience is something I just don't have, but in this case I need it more than ever. I just take it day by day, meal by meal and weigh myself only once or twice a month.
  • LivingtheLeanDream
    LivingtheLeanDream Posts: 13,345 Member
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    6 weeks plus at same weight is a plateau, not one week - stick with it, eat consistently at calorie deficit and you will lose. When I was losing I would go usually 3 weeks at a time before I saw any loss, then it would stagnate or spike upwards until the next 3 weeks. The main thing is the overall trend is downwards. It takes time and patience.

  • jbud52
    jbud52 Posts: 9 Member
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    Good Morning Everyone!

    Another quick update. Down 25lbs according to the most recent movement on the scale. 106-day MFP streak and counting, and 58 days since beginning working out again after breaking my foot.

    This week marks my first diet break where I eat at maintenance for the entire week. I've coincided it with my workout routine (Book of Muscle, Beginner Program) which is a 6-month program broken into 4 stages. Upon completion of each 6-week stage, it recommends a full week of rest from lifting. Stage 1 is an anatomical adaptation stage that's mostly a HIIT style routine designed to get you back into lifting and correct imbalances. I've tried this program before and could never finish the full 6-months. If memory serves, I stopped halfway into Stage 2, or a little over 2 months in. Stage 2 is hypertrophy, and the workouts get much harder. I feel very confident this time around because I feel great physically but I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm nervous to start these hard ones next week!

    I don't intend to become sedentary this week--instead I'll still be doing my bike rides for cardio. It'll be interesting to see what happens after a week of maintenance while still eating my exercise cals back (albeit very conservatively: I try to only eat back half of the cals being reported into MFP). I'm expecting to gain a little, but that happens naturally day-to-day anyways. I'll really be shocked if eating maintenance works and I just **maintain**. So far my experience has always been that when my intake increases, those first 5lbs pop right back on. Full disclosure: I never once tried to track for maintenance. I probably gorged myself once I lost all MFP accountability so it's funny to say "I'll be shocked" when in reality I was probably waaaay over maintenance cals. Oops.

    But I tell you what - if I can float around +/- 198~200 for a week, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. My last post was one month ago, and I'm down 4 lbs from then. Sure enough, after changing my settings to "lightly active, lose 1lb/week" it appears that I'm tracking right where I should be! I want to lose another 25~30lbs, so if I continue the trend I'm hoping to hit goal around September/October. I've sorta augmented my thinking on that goal however. I think it's more important to me that I lose pure fat, and not just pounds. So I have a new primary goal: completing Book of Muscle Beginner Program while still in deficit/periodic breaks at maintenance. If I'm gaining muscle, but that process slows my weight loss, well, I think that's okay as long as I'm still moving in the right direction. More importantly, I should be losing body fat % even if the scale isn't showing it.

    So now I've started to incorporate more data. I'm beginning to track body fat %. Still haven't gotten up the courage to bust out the tape measure and start tracking all my dimensions, but I sorta figure why not add that too? I've been using one of those little hand-held sensors to track body fat %. It seems wildly inaccurate because that thing fluctuates worse than my scale does... However, you all have helped change my thought process and now I think about the trend "over a sufficiently long period of time" instead of day-to-day. Since I just started tracking, it'll take a while before I can see the trend in that data set.

    For those wondering - my Beginner Program should end right around the beginning of August.

    Ahh, life is good.

    Cheers,

    JB

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