Plateau Help!

DownWith2020 · March 2022

I hit a little over a 2 month plateau, then bam I lost 16 lbs in one week. Unfortunately, right after I drifted back into a no loss zone and it has been weeks.

The app tells me I can have 2200 calories but I gain any time I'm near 1500 calories, even with exercise. That's increased because I used to gain at 1200 calories.

I need a breakthrough because this is becoming very discouraging.

yirara · March 2022

Ok, we really need more information here.
lets start with your gender, age, size and weight. And your chosen rate of loss.

If this website gives you 2200 calories per day then you're likely male or rather heavy. But we don't know that until you give us more information.

Also, it is physically impossible to lose 16lbs in a week. 1lbs of fat loss equals a calorie deficit of 3500. 16lbs means you somehow ate 56000 calories less in a week, or 8000 per day. Nope. You could not achieve that by eating nothing and running a marathon every single day. So something else is going on. a) is your scale battery fine, and the scale on a sold ground where it doesn't get moved around? Not broken? b) Water weight? if your body holds onto so much water then you really need to see a doctor. Urgently. But you'd know if that happened as you'd have peed out your soul in that one week.

Finally: how precise is your logging? Do you use a foodscale and make sure you use correct database entries? Every single day?

AnnPT77 · March 2022

It looks like you joined in early 2020. Have you been calorie counting that whole time? If so, was your loss-rate experience different earlier on?

From reading other posts here, there seem to be a small percentage of people who lose in a "stall then large loss" mode; and more people who reach that state after they've been either at severely reduced calories for a moderate length of time, or somewhat aggressively low calories for a very long period of time. In all of those cases, it seems like water retention is somewhere in the picture, and it can be in surprisingly large amounts sometimes, for some people.

One thing I'd ask is whether this sounds like you, to you:

https://bodyrecomposition.com/research/dietary-restraint-cortisol-levels

That's not the only possibility, but it's one.

Yirara is right: 2200 calories is a fairly high calorie goal for weight loss, for an average woman (and your profile says you're female), so it would be helpful to know where you are now in terms of height, weight and the other things yirara asked about.

If 2200 is the correct goal for you at your current weight (not just something you've used since a much higher starting weight), then eating lots lower than that could cause the kind of problems described in the link above, honestly.

I'm not trying to be mean here, but I am trying to be clear and honest. Sincerely, I'd like to see you succeed, so I hope you'll interpret this post in that way. I know I could be wrong, but I'm sincerely trying to help.

Sometimes, when we see people here say "when I increase my calories, I always gain", we ask questions and eventually learn that the person is reacting to overnight multi-pound scale jumps. Those are usually about shifts in water retention, and changing the amounts eaten (sometimes by relatively small numbers like a couple of hundred calories) can result in that kind of water retention increase. If you see a jump of a pound or more over a day or two, and you didn't eat 3500 calories above your then-current maintenance calories for every single pound of that - not just that many above your weight loss goal - and you didn't move that much less either in daily life or exercise, that gain is not fat.

Like I said, I don't know whether that applies to you, or not, but it's a common thing. Sudden multi-pound gains are usually water, not fat. They're not worth worrying about, they'll sort themselves out, usually over something between a couple of days and a couple of weeks. Seeing that kind of scale jump, then reacting by cutting calories hard . . . that can be counterproductive.

Like I said, I'd like to see you succeed, like to help if I can. The above are just some speculative ideas, not a "for sure it's this". If you offer more information, we might be able to provide better advice.

Best wishes!

Plateau Help!

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