What are the common things that plateau weight loss?

imgritz

I lost five pounds and nothing for the last month+

I eat clean 75% of the time. 25% processed foods.
I drink 40 oz of water each day.
I walk 4 days a week.
I stay within my caloric goal 5 days out of 7.

For some reason, I don't track my calories on weekends. Can these two days blow out 5 days of eating right?

LukesGreenMilk

Yeah, it's common to see someone maintain a 300-500 calorie deficit all during the week. Then on the weekend, one picnic with a few beers and burgers can override all that. Portions matter on weekends too.

KrissFlavored

Track your calories for a weekend and actually see what you're doing, we can say yes it is possible but you can see for yourself what your doing to your own deficit

janejellyroll

It's incredibly easy to cancel out a weekly deficit with two days of eating. People who have excess weight typically like food and it's not at all hard for us to eat a lot of calories if we're not managing it in some way, especially if we feel like we're "making up" for days of restriction.

PAV8888

Track and you'll know

Don't track and wonder and approximate.

Since your weight will vary unevenly, use your averaged weight trend level over a 3+ week period.

Check out happy scale, Libra, trendweight.com, weightgrapher.com

Don't forget that with your pattern of eating your lowest weights will trend to be on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and your highest on Saturday, Sunday or Monday

lgfrie

Not only possible, but likely for a certain personality type. Long ago my wife and I went on hardcore diets. We lost 10 pounds a month each for a couple months and decided it was getting sloggy and that we deserved an "off day" each week. Our weight loss promptly stopped completely. Frustrated with dieting 6 days a week and not losing any weight, we started shoveling all those delicious high-calorie foods we'd been denying ourselves down our gullets, and proceeded to gain all the weight back, and then some. Which is how many diets end for many people.

You can't expect great results taking the whole weekend off, unless you are very diligent about controlling those weekend casual days. If you really want to bust through your plateau, start with looking at those weekends and, as @krissflavored says, tracking calories on those days. Not specified in your post is whether those weekend days involve a couple hundred extra treat calories, or thousands of extra calories that are unwinding your efforts the rest of the week.

Eating clean vs processed and drinking X ounces of water don't impact fat loss. They don't seem like a bad idea but they're irrelevant as far as numbers on the scale.

imgritz

Thanks for the advice.