Read a Great article today in the New England Jounal of Medicine on What works and What doesn't so I'm working on a blog post on that topic.
What does work that we knew about ~ Eating breakfast and eating more fruits and veggies
What does NOT work ~ and this surprized me ~ setting "reasonable" goals. It kind of makes sense when you study coaching and read the article, kind of an OMG moment but if you set the goal to lose 10lbs you will lose 10lbs so if you really need/want to lose 70lbs set the goal for 70lbs, you will lose the 70lbs faster and with a higher chance of ultimate success if you make that your goal.

Can you send us the link? Or at least the citation (author / title / which NEJM issue) so that we can look it up in Google Scholar? I'd be very interested in reading the whole thing.

My summary is at http://coachmarybacon.com/blog.html
The full article is http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1208051#t=articleDiscussion
Enjoy IT's a summary of A lot of original research ~ very thorough and a huge eye opener when you consider how we've been taught to be reasonable. My theme for the new year is to stop being reasonable and start being REAL!

wow Plateaus suck!! All I can say they SUCK!!
I keep saying in my head "what would you tell a client?" and I'd say if you're eating healthy and exercising be patient, The truth is I've been eating healthy and exercising and for some strange reason not losing and despite all the weight lifting the body fat percent stays the same. I regret not takin measurements at the start because I keep getting complimented on my weight loss (smile and nod) and just wondering how on earth I can look smaller yet weigh the same and have the same percent body fat. My legs DO look smaller to me when I'm at the gym on that leg press machine.
Then 3 days ago I got my fitbit. I'm a nurse practitioner in a doctors office, so I am up and down the halls all day long. I chose "lightly active" because I stand a lot like a teacher. ~ WRONG.
I was somewhat surprized to see how little activity I logged the first day, sadly my fitbit doesn't sync with the phone so I had to disable negative calorie adjustments.
the way this neat little device works with MFP is that at the end of the day if your activity is more than you said you get extra calories, in fact it actually updates whenever you sync (you lucky iphone users)
So I reset myself down to sedentary and on day 2 walked at lunch and that day earned 37 calories from "fitbit adjustment" What that means is that on every workday I had been eating 250 calories too many because I thought I was lightly active when in fact I am not. 37 calories over "sedentary" for walking 20-30 minutes up a rather steep hill, I am truly sedentary the rest of the day.
The great thing about this is, it actually won't let you "double dip" so when I came home from the gym this morning I had 137 extra calories from fitbit, they vanished when I entered the spin class, so I got credit for the workout, but I won't get double credit.
the other change I made is to leave out the food scale so I am more accurately tracking.
There is always a reason for the plateau, we just have to keep searching, Rest assured it's not genetic, it's not a curse, and we call CAN do it.

Maybe you can answer a question about the fitbit for me. I have an HRM but a fitbit would be easier for everyday use. How well does it work for cardio where your arms are stationary? Most of my exercise is on machine where I hang on so my arms don't move much.

I use both, I have a polar HRM and I use that to track calories burned at the gym, I take spinning and if the FITBIT does not move, it records nothing. So I get no "credit" for spinning unless I manually enter it.
However the fitbit told me "hey you sit too much at work, lightly active -- HA -- NO way you're sedentary" Ok well that's what I heard not what it said, I started out with neg calories enabled and was losing 200-300 calories on a workday, I have a rather sedentary job although not a DESK job, it's NH so it's 16 below with windchill right now and a lunchtime walk is not an option. I set my MFP setting to sedentary instead of lightly active and beat my plateau. I get more calories on days off or when I go shopping and move more IE if I am lightly or moderately active on a given day it adjusts me UP instead of having MFP just guess.
When I see neg calorie adjustments I walk until it's at least 0 I have a goal even on freezing cold days I run up and down the stairs until I at least have 1 fitbit calorie. I refuse to ever be less than sedentary unless I'm very sick.
Going to the gym 4x a week and sitting the rest of the time doesn't work. Since I write and blog and research a lot on days off this was a problem. by cutting calories and taking more short movement breaks it's helped not only my weight but also my focus.