The fight with the scale is REAL and the body can be stubborn in giving it up too! Hang in there! As long as you know you're on plan that's what matters. The rollercoaster ride on the scale isn't any fun, and can mess with your head. Don't let it! Go with how you feel, always!

That's where the idea of a "set point" comes from.

Some things are tightly regulated -- sodium, glucose, pH, etc.

Some things are loosely regulated -- sleep, thirst, hunger, etc.

Can you change your set point? Maybe, but I'm not sure anybody really knows how.

You can reduce your weight, just like you can reduce your sleep. Eventually it catches up with you.

How do people get such a low body fat % then?

monikker wrote: »

How do people get such a low body fat % then?

It's loosely regulated, which means you can consciously override the hormonal signals to your brain. Sort of like the urge to go the bathroom.

So there's nothing stopping you from starving yourself. The question is how long can you continue to fight the resulting hunger signals. And can you change the set point?

We know that carbs seem to change the set point to a higher level, so step 1 might be to reduce carbs. Everybody here has made it to step 1.

Stephan Guyenet has more suggestions:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/01/body-fat-setpoint-part-iv-changing.html

This is a tough one to speculate on. The science is pretty thin. I'm going with exercise, since that seems to be the strategy adopted by 90% of people who have maintained their weight loss for over a year.

I find this curious since I literally hit a brick wall with weight that I've had to work much harder all of a sudden to get past.
At one point in late July, I commented on some post about how easily the weight was coming off. Being that my original weight loss goal was only to lose 34 lbs, not a whole lot really, at that time it seemed very out of the ordinary for me to have been averaging 1.6lbs a week consistently for over 2 months straight. Then I had a really good loss at the very end of July, losing 5.6 lbs in 2 weeks with a new lowest weight I've ever been in over 15 years on August 1. At that time I joined the August challenge during which i wanted to increase my average steps per week from around 3200 to 6000. I started going for some walks to do this, which I already did occasionally, but not consistently. I kept calories alone, carbs crept up a tiny bit due to some higher fiber foods, but barely. Still around 30-35 total from 25 before. The scale didn't move again until a .4lbs loss on August 27. I didn't have any muscle soreness at all. I want working that hard at just walking. I think the only reason I even had that .4 show up was because of painting and installing flooring for my dad the week before. Literally, as soon as I hit that milestone of lowest weight, everything changed. In order to get any further progress, I've had to introduce water fasting, egg fasting, significantly reduced carbs (5 or less) more walking up to about 7500 a day now and have seen a major decline in loss. I just went 21 days with no loss again until trying an egg fast. It seems like, unless I do something aggressive, I will not lose anything more.
Here's a graph that showed (green line) expected weight loss based on the recommended calories it gave me and (orange line) where I was actually trending toward the goal. The blue is my actual weigh ins and how they fluctuate compared to its estimated loss and to my own trend loss.
You can see the trend changes dramatically all of a sudden.