Stuck at a plateau.. am I not eating ENOUGH?

How long have you been stuck? When did you start? Do you use a food scale to weigh everything you eat? Eating your exercise calories back will be important in the long run.

2 weeks doesn't seem long to me - some weeks you don't lose weight or even go up a tad, weight loss is not linear.

If you have lost 50 lb and then have 2 weeks of same weight I would just continue on the same.,

Not sure how increasing your calories would help?

I would wait a couple more weeks to see what happens, but if you are stuck still AND have noticed an increase in fatigue or tiredness, eating a little bit more (like 100-200 calories per day more, or eating back a portion of your exercise calories even if not all) might be a useful experiment. If you're undereating and fatigued, your body might compensate by slowing you down, stopping you from fidgeting, etc.

leggup wrote: »

Adding calories can't get you out of a plateau.

A true plateau (same calories in - measured, same calories out- activity level) would be longer than 2 weeks and would indicate you're eating at maintenance level.

Can you open your diary?

Well, it CAN get her out of the plateau. It just wouldn't go the way she wanted it to. 😀

Besides what heybales said (when heybales types, smart MFP people read attentively, IMO!), I'd point out that human bodies are dynamic systems, and our bodies figure out how to get better at handling things we train them to expect.

Under-eat, and we're training our body to expect famine. It gets good at conserving energy. No, this is not "starvation mode makes your body hang onto fat and you'll stop losing weight". (If that were a thing, no one would ever starve to death. Sadly, thousands of people worldwide starve to death every year, and they aren't overweight when the time comes. We relatively well-off folks aren't physiologically different, we're just luckier: We're dealing with food surplus, not the periodic food shortage that's characterized the long sweep of natural selection's effect on human physiology.)

That energy conservation can be quite subtle: Fidgeting less, slowed hair/nails growth, putting off or simplifying home chores or work-life tasks, lowered workout intensity or skipping workouts, leaving behind active hobbies thinking we're "just not interested anymore" or "don't have time", etc. It's doing less, burning less than we would if our body didn't think it was facing regular food shortages (that we think of as "diets"). It can be subconscious. The result is a daily calorie expenditure lower than it could have been, with a better strategy.

Like I said, bodies are dynamic systems, not static. If we eat too little, things slow down. If we eat a bit more, the energy level can perk up, via those same subtle mechanisms (even if that added eating's not enough to wipe out a theoretical calorie deficit). It's not super unusual in the maintenance part of the Community here to see people maintain for a few weeks to a month or so at the calories they'd expect, then start slowly losing weight again. Same kind of a deal. Anecdotally, I suspect the dynamic response to intake is somewhat variable among people, but I don't have any science to support that. (Nutrition or other factors that vary with calorie intake might have an impact, too, who knows.)

Under-eating is counter-productive, certainly for health, and probably even for long-term weight management. Instead of training our body to expect famine, a better strategy IMO is to manage calorie levels and nutrition, trying to convince our body to expect good treatment over the long haul. Rather than teaching it to limp along on minimum calories, scrimping and saving on energy expenditure where it can, eating adequately (and getting reasonable exercise, all that good stuff) is more like training the body to thrive. That can happen alongside weight loss, if the loss is taken at a sensible rate, plus includes some refeeds, maybe some longer breaks.

This effect would apply in addition to the water retention effects heybales (and the very good articles he linked) talked about.

OP, a thread here with some other relevant info is this one:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

I can personally speak to what AnnPT77 mentioned. As I approached the end of my dieting time, I started adding an extra 100 calories a month. First month, lost at exactly the same rate as before. Second month, same thing. Third month, again! Not until I was eating 400 calories more did my weight loss slow down. I never would've guessed that I was subconsciously slowing down to conserve energy during the earlier months, but I must've been. I wish I had been eating more the whole time!

newlifegoals2020 wrote: »

In similar boat but so much worse...... lost a great amount of weight (over 60 lbs) but now been stuck for several months in the same 5 pound up and down range. It’s driving me nuts...... how do I get out of this. I am active-work out daily. Trying to stay around 1400-1500 calories a day.

Help!!!

Have you adjusted your calories?

If you have lost 60lb you may need to reduce your calorie amount now - re put your stats into MFP and see what it gives you now.

Usually a true plateau means you are eating too much.

This might sound odd but try changing your scale batteries and weigh something a different weight than you. Sometimes low batteries in a scale cause it to stay on the same number.