Help with a Stall or Plateau…

chrisboothllc
chrisboothllc Posts: 4 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I need some help…. I’m into my 30th week of eating healthy, working out consistently and improving my habits. But I’m either in a stall or a plateau - at least I think I am.

I weigh myself every Sunday morning before my morning workout. Over these 30 weeks I’ve gone from 383 down to 285.9 this morning. But over the last two months I have only lost a total of 2lbs overall and continue to bounce up and down each week over these past 8 weeks.

Last Sunday I weighed in at 283, my lowest weight during this journey. For sure I thought this monthly long yo-yo had been snapped. During the past week I have eaten cleanly and intermittent fasted on a 18/6 schedule. And I get on the scale this morning to see that I am back up to 285.9.

Some background to what I’ve been doing. For my daily calorie intake I average around 1600 and I workout twice a day. Cardio and weights at some capacity. My goal is more focused on cardio and spending 45+ mins with my heart rate in the 138-142bpm zone.

I tend to go into a 3week/1week recovery cycle. I spend 3weeks on a focused intake and then follow it up with a 1week recovery where i increase my calories each day in a balanced macro set. My goal in that week recovery is not to gain weight or lose weight.

During the holidays from Thanksgiving to Christmas I went into an extended recovery period. I wanted to see if I could maintain my weight and eat more without gaining or losing weight and I did. But ever since I have struggled with the ups and downs week by week.

Mentally I never set myself to a “goal” weight when I started. My goal was to just lose one more lb than I was at that time. At 383 my goal was 382 and so on. I rather focused on the long term and making good habits.

But now that I’m in a stall or a plateau i desperately need some help or advise on how to break this. Obviously I need a change in some part of my routine I just don’t know what.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Replies

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    edited January 2022

    Congrats on your huge loss so far.

    Have you read the Refeeds thread? https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

    Seems like you're doing something similar already...but 1600 calories seems awfully low as your daily goal. Are you adding in those extra exercise calories?
  • chrisboothllc
    chrisboothllc Posts: 4 Member
    I do not add in my exercise calories
  • 1234hmgross
    1234hmgross Posts: 2 Member
    Congratulations on what you have accomplished so far! It may be that your body has adjusted to what you have been doing; you may have to temporarily increase your caloric intake to jump start the metabolism. Not too much or too crazy, maybe a few hundred healthy calories, before backing down to your usual.
  • sbelletti
    sbelletti Posts: 213 Member
    Stalls suck but they happen to all of us, and you CAN get through them. Are you logging accurately? Are you drinking enough water? Are you consuming the right number of calories to remain in a deficit? Have you changed your workouts recently? How often do you recalculate your deficit after losing weight?
  • chrisboothllc
    chrisboothllc Posts: 4 Member
    sbelletti wrote: »
    Stalls suck but they happen to all of us, and you CAN get through them. Are you logging accurately? Are you drinking enough water? Are you consuming the right number of calories to remain in a deficit? Have you changed your workouts recently? How often do you recalculate your deficit after losing weight?
    I’m logging as accurately as I can. I track my water well and drink on average over 80oz/day. I feel like I’m already low enough on calories that I don’t want to try and cut anymore. During the holidays I went up in calories and averaged around 2000/day from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,885 Member
    1600 sounds low for a guy who exercises - I've been eating 1900+ on average (1630 +exercise calories) and losing weight slowly, as a 5ft5 woman weighing les than 150lbs.

    You mention logging as accurately as you can. Are you weighing everything? Making sure you're using accurate food database entries? Entering recipes for home cooked meals?

    Another thought I had: during my own journey, as long as I'm hitting new low weights I consider myself losing weight, no matter the upticks in between. As I've gotten closer to goal, the time between new lows has increased, but with daily weighing I can check out my trend and still see progress (I use the app Libra). Are you weighing yourself daily or weekly?

    You mention being in a plateau of 8 weeks, but technically it's only 4 even, since usually a plateau is an absence of progress while sticking to your routine and you have it fully been back on plan since Christmas. Also, since you have a 4 week cycle with one week being higher calorie, I would suggest comparing your weigh-ins not from week to week or day to day, but between the same points in that weekly cycle (a bit like what is often suggested for women with a monthly cycle 😁)
  • chrisboothllc
    chrisboothllc Posts: 4 Member
    Lietchi wrote: »
    1600 sounds low for a guy who exercises - I've been eating 1900+ on average (1630 +exercise calories) and losing weight slowly, as a 5ft5 woman weighing les than 150lbs.

    You mention logging as accurately as you can. Are you weighing everything? Making sure you're using accurate food database entries? Entering recipes for home cooked meals?

    Another thought I had: during my own journey, as long as I'm hitting new low weights I consider myself losing weight, no matter the upticks in between. As I've gotten closer to goal, the time between new lows has increased, but with daily weighing I can check out my trend and still see progress (I use the app Libra). Are you weighing yourself daily or weekly?

    You mention being in a plateau of 8 weeks, but technically it's only 4 even, since usually a plateau is an absence of progress while sticking to your routine and you have it fully been back on plan since Christmas. Also, since you have a 4 week cycle with one week being higher calorie, I would suggest comparing your weigh-ins not from week to week or day to day, but between the same points in that weekly cycle (a bit like what is often suggested for women with a monthly cycle 😁)
    Thanks for the advice. I may need to start the day-to-day and see how that trend looks. In the past I avoided daily because it made me mental and I worried about every small thing. Currently I weigh myself weekly, every Sunday morning at 6am before my workout.

    I do weigh my meals and meal prep my entire week. Make my own meals/recipes using the app.

  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    I see two possibilities:

    1. Congrats on losing 100 pounds! However, you did that super-fast, which could be contributing to your current stall.

    If you did that in 30 weeks, that would be 3.33 pounds per week, which would have been fine where you started, at 383 pounds. But since you've been in a stall for two months, if I use 96 pounds / 22 weeks, that's 4.36 pounds per week, which was simply too fast after the first month or so.

    Weight loss is stressful. Undereating is stressful. (I'm 100 pounds lighter than you, female, and presumably older and shorter, and I eat my exercise calories back and lose weight with a minimum of 2000 gross calories per day.)

    Stress raises cortisol, which can lead to water retention, which could be masking fat loss on the scale. However, your maintenance week should help with that. So that leads me to the second possibility:

    2. There are mistakes that people commonly make that cause them to not lose weight that we might be able to spot if you change your Diary Sharing settings to Public: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

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