How did you get through your plateau?

I personally don't believe in the idea of a plateau. If my weight loss slows down more than I like I need to eat less or exercise more.

I'm not particularly scale obsessed though. I mostly measure success by eating the calories I want to eat and getting in better and better workouts over time. The scale is just sort of there to make sure things are moving along mostly as planned.

I think a lot of folks like to imagine that at some fictitious point called a plateau the rules of the calorie get tossed out and they become helpless victims to this new concept of unchangingness. Clearly that's nonsense. The body requires energy to operate and if you stop losing weight and have excluded water weight / muscle gain (extremely rare when losing by the way) then the only plateau you have reached in a new level of maintenance calories so you should just adjust accordingly.

Hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Clearly this is just my view and others certainly have opposing points that they believe just as much.

I'm already eating at 1200 calories, so I can't really go down anymore. I do plan to start knocking more off my exercise calories--about 10% to make up for any error. I wasn't eating back my exercise calories for a while. I think that may have been part of the problem.

Yeah there was a study a while back (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701) where they basically found that people that diet often are the worst at underestimating calories eaten and overestimating calories burned. For the calories eaten it was WAY off... like they thought they were eating 1000 calories and in fact had eaten 2000.

Personally I don't eat back exercise calories and honestly question the idea that anyone who is not losing weight needs to eat more food. Call me old fashioned but that just seems anti-intuitive.

Honestly though if you are SURE you are eating the calories you think you are and burning the calories you think you are, then I would just ignore the scale. My weight goes up or down all the time. Several pounds a day, sticking for a while and then dropping like a rock.

I just do my best to get my food logging as tight as I can and make sure I press myself as hard as I can for workouts and that's all that matters to me. If I'm not acting like a fat guy I'm going to lose weight.

for the few days i saw logged in your food diary, your sodium intake seems on the high side. Possible the reason that you are seeing water retention.

I also measure myself which can help, as you would see if your measurements are getting smaller even if the scale isn't moving for a bit.

But I would reduce the sodium intake for a week and see what happens if I were you.

You have dropped weight which is good but you need patience in order to reach your goal.

I call my plateaus "unintentional maintenance." The first time, I bought a food scale and started weighing everything religiously. Now, every time it happens, I can usually pinpoint it: Maybe I had a few binges or started sneaking late night snacks without logging them, something like that. Then I have a little talk with myself about how I'm going to change that and then I promise not to stress about it and then I eat ice cream (if I have enough calories, of course).

My body has changed so much since I started doing this, that I think it's okay to plateau for a while. I feel like my body can rest from the stress of weight loss, I get enough fuel for my workouts, and I'm "training for maintenance."

I learn a lot about myself when my weight loss plateaus.

Our bodies do what they do. Don't fret so much about it. If you really are eating at a deficit, the scale will eventually move again.

Fact: You need to change your training. It even helps to change types of food. You also need to increase the intensity of your training becuase your body has now adjusted to the level of training you have been doing to get where you are now.

You could even drop your daily cals by 100?

I did the following because i stayed at a certain weight for 3 weeks despite always managing to shake it off easily.

- drink more water
- i changed from interval running to long distance, even if thats 10 mins at a time
- if you do weights, change the type of exercise and maybe increase the sets of lift a slightly heavier weight
- look at your macros, are you eating too much fat?
- analyse your food intake, are you eating any processed foods stop now and eat cleaner
- how much fast food do you eat? Cut it out now.

Hope that helps...