Stuck

These are the things I wish someone had told me when I plateaued for 8 weeks:

1. If it's been less than 3 weeks or so, don't sweat it! Normal fluctuations happen and unfortunately sometimes we stall for a week or two even when we're doing everything right. Give your body some time to catch up with the changes you're making.

2. If you aren't already, be sure that you're logging everything. Sometimes people forget about things like veggies, drinks, cooking oils, and condiments. For some people these can add up to enough to halt your weight loss progress.

3. Consider buying a food scale if you don't already have one. They're about $10-$20 dollars in the US and easily found at places like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Measuring cups and spoons are great, but they do come with some degree of inaccuracy. A food scale will be more accurate, and for some people it makes a big difference.

4. Logging accurately also means choosing accurate entries in the database. There are a lot of user-entered entries that are off. Double-check that you're using good entries and/or using the recipe builder instead of someone else's homemade entries.

5. Recalculate your goals if you haven't lately. As you lose weight your body requires fewer calories to run. Be sure you update your goals every ten pounds or so.

6. If you're eating back your exercise calories and you're relying on gym machine readouts or MFP's estimates, it might be best to eat back just 50-75% of those. Certain activities tend to be overestimated. If you're using an HRM or activity tracker, it might be a good idea to look into their accuracy and be sure that yours is calibrated properly.

7. If you're taking any cheat days that go over your calorie limits, it might be best to cut them out for a few weeks and see what happens. Some people go way over their calorie needs without realizing it when they don't track.

8. If you weigh yourself frequently, consider using a program like trendweight to even out the fluctuations. You could be losing weight but just don't see it because of the daily ups and downs.

9. Some people just burn fewer calories than the calculators predict. If you continue to have problems after 4-6 weeks, then it might be worth a trip to the doctor or a registered dietitian who can give you more specific advice.

Either decrease your calories in, increase your calories out, or some combo of the two.

If you're in a true plateau (at least 4-6 weeks with no change on the scale), then you need to tighten up your logging. This may include any of the following: making sure EVERY item that you eat/drink gets logged, weighing all solids on a food scale and using measuring cups for all liquids, double-checking the accuracy of the items you log against nutrition labels and the USDA database, utilizing the recipe builder over "homemade" or "generic" entries, and being mindful of the exercise calories you burn and eat back.

Tess_Christine wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

Two weeks isn't a plateau, a plateau is six weeks or more on plan without any change in weight.

My advice is to stay on plan and be patient. There will be temporary pauses like this when you're losing weight.

I did not know that, thank you

Yep, it's so frustrating but it happens. Knowing that other people were going through it sometimes too helped me get through it.