Plateau

jordanlane07 · May 2019

I have lost 20 pounds since the start of this year and I’ve hit a plateau. What have you done to get out of this? How do you stay positive and motivated?

MichelleSilverleaf · May 2019

How long have you been at said plateau?

Buff_Man · May 2019

Look at your diet, calories, workout routine. You need to change one of these to break out of your plateau. Maybe drop your cals, go low carb for a while etc

LisaLethal · May 2019

I stay consistent, no matter what. I make sure I am measuring/weighing all of my food and logging correctly. I stay positive, because if I really am being diligent about my logging.. the weight will eventually come off, it's just a matter of when.

kimny72 · May 2019

It's perfectly normal to have a week or two here and there where you don't lose anything or even gain a little. The scale measures the weight of everything in your body, not just your fat, and that other stuff (but mostly water weight) naturally fluctuates up and down.

If your scale weight literally hasn't changed at all for several days - try new batteries!

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10084670/it-is-unlikely-that-you-will-lose-weight-consistently-i-e-weight-loss-is-not-linear/p1

diannethegeek · May 2019

These are the things I wish someone had told me when I stalled out 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.

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 and use it for everything. Everything. For a couple of weeks to see what kind of discrepancies you're running into. 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. Don't trust the barcode scanner or restaurant entries 100%.

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, happy scale, or libra 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.

wmweeza · May 2019

I learned #4 the hard way this week. I've always had caramel like candies on hand for my sanity as a small cheat, I have 4 every day and the database said they were 10 calories each...well they aren't, more like 50 calories each! This partially explains why my weight loss has been about a half pound a week if I'm LUCKY.
I log everything, I'm very careful, but the database can be wrong. In this case the company updated their packaging, but the user database here at MFP wasn't updated so I kept eating hundreds of calories more a day! Now I just discovered this 5 days ago, but I'm tightening up my logging again in light of this and hopefully I'll see a better rate of loss soon.

RovP6 · May 2019

The metabolism is very clever and adapts quite quickly to any changes to your energy balance. If you upset that balance by staying in a calorie deficit for too long your metabolism can adopt a new, lower set point for your maintenance calories. That can lead to a viscious cycle of cutting more calories to make progress and lead to eventual undereating. One way of keeping the metabolism guessing is to have a regular diet break or go into a reverse diet where you bring calories up by 5-10% for a few days. This will stimulate your metabolism to react and burn more calories through increased movement, fidgetting etc. After around 3-4 days of that you would stay at that new maintenance for a week or so before cutting that 5-10% out again. I prefer not to stay in a deficit for too long and recent studies (the https://bachperformance.com/the-matador-diet-study-how-to-lose-fat-dieting-two-weeks-at-time/matador study in particular) have shown that cycling in this manner can elicit more sustainable weight loss.

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