Hmmm plateau

snoopy1704

Well June 17th 2024 I was 380lbs. Today with intermittent fasting I'm around 190. Amazing but all this month I haven't dropped at all. Seams like body fighting the weightloss. Any suggestions?

Lietchi

Are you counting your calorie intake or not? Intermittent fasting is just a way to be in a calorie deficit: if you're not calorie counting - having lost that much weight, your body now needs fewer calories - simply intermittent fasting perhaps isn't getting you into a calorie deficit anymore.

Aside from that, if you've been in a calorie deficit since June 2024, I think you are overdue on taking a diet break. A calorie deficit for that long a period is stressful for the body. If recommend eating more for a few weeks to give your body a break.

AnnPT77

I'd endorse what Leitchi said, and add a little bit. Bodies are weird, sometimes plateaus happen, and they can last a surprisingly long time.

Did your weight loss gradually taper off over a period of multiple weeks, then finally stall? If that's the scenario, you may have found your maintenance calorie level for your current weight. (That can happen whether you're counting the calories, or losing the weight in some other way.) A lighter body requires fewer calories than a larger one just to be alive, and also it takes calories to carry the extra weight through daily life besides.

A long period of dieting or a fast loss rate can make that effect more constraining. Our bodies can't tell a diet from a famine. Natural selection shaped our ancestors to thrive through famine, which used to be much more common than our current developed-world situation with ample/excess calorie availability. When we lose with, especially aggressively lose weight, our bodies may down-regulate our calorie needs in various subtle, wily ways . . . many of which aren't very health promoting.

I'm not describing a situation people sometimes call "starvation mode", where the body holds onto fat no matter how little we eat. That's not an actual thing. (If it were, no one would ever starve to death, or they'd be fat when they did.) I'm talking about something technically called "adaptive thermogenesis", where our bodies slow down some body functions that are less vital to survival, even though some of them are pretty important.

Examples: We may move less in daily life in subtle ways (think of it as less fidgeting, putting off high-effort home projects, generally getting more placid and efficient about movement). Our core body temperature may drop a little, so we feel cold more often. Our immune system may be less robust, so we can get sick more often or more severely. And so forth.

On the other hand, if your weight loss was going along at a good rate, and stopped suddenly without any noticeable change in eating, less daily life activity, or decreased exercise, there are higher odds that you're experiencing some kind of water retention weirdness.

In the "gradually tapering off loss" scenario, it may be necesary to reduce average calorie intake further. That's also true whether you're counting the calories or not.

If part of the situation is adaptive thermogenesis, that's where diet breaks (eating at maintenance for a small number of weeks) might help, perhaps gradually increasing calories to get to that level.

If the weight loss stopped suddenly, without any obvious eating/activity/exercise change, then simply staying the course and being patient may lead to a scale drop after a while.

People will come along and tell you to mix things up, change your exercise routine, change your eating hours - who knows what - in order to "break the plateau". I haven't seen any solid scientific evidence that any of that works, other than the diet break option. I think people believe mixing things up works because they tried various things to break their own plateau. If the plateau eventually broke, they give credit to their last "clever" change, even if the plateau would've broken at that point even if they'd just stuck with their normal healthy routine.