Plateau

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ensue66
ensue66 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I'm stuck! I stick close to my calorie goal but I have been at the same weight for about 3 weeks! I need to lose at least 8 more pound. Any tried and true solutions????

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  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,677 Member
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    Are you being meticulous in weighing your food and logging every bite? After a while, people get careless and start eyeballing portions or skipping small items like condiments, which can cause you to eat more than you think you're eating.

    You might try changing up your activity. Add half an hour of exercise every day or increase the intensity of your current exercise. That could temporarily backfire, causing you to gain some water weight, but even an extra 200 calories a day burned can help with those last few pounds.
  • nancysportale
    nancysportale Posts: 1 Member
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    Make sure you're drinking enough water every day too. I have a habit of leaving a 16 oz cup on my bathroom sink, and drink a whole glass when I wake up in the morning. It helps me get a jumpstart on my water.
  • allaboutthecake
    allaboutthecake Posts: 1,531 Member
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    I've been at plateaus before. 3 weeks, this is about right. So, how much weight have you lost and in what span of time? Is this your first plateau? sometimes if you don't have much to lose, it can be harder to get it off. Have you done Cheat Day to give your metabolism a boost? have you re-calculated your TDEE/BMI and diary set for these new numbers? Have you adjusted your macros to reflect this? Hitting all your target macros? A tweak here and there on your macros and calories may just be what's needed. Sodium? That's a big one (for me anyway). Getting all your carbs from mostly veggies & fruits and watching the added sugars?

    I bet a tweak in your setup is all that's needed. Also, account for sleep/rest. Pop back in let us know what you did to get it going again!
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,390 Member
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    3 weeks is nothing, and if you have so little to lose weightloss will be very slow. have you set your weightloss goal to 1/2lbs per week? Because that's what you'd be looking at realistically if you're not overweight. Thus if everything works out perfectly you might have lost 1.5lbs now. Normal water weight fluctuations can be more than that. Heck, people can hold more food waste in their intestines than that. Menstrual cycle weight gain might be more than that. Give it at least one menstrual cycle, presuming you're a woman.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,147 Member
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    Tried and true solutions? Patience, most likely . . . especially if you'd been losing at a reasonable rate, and it seemed to stop rather suddenly. (If you'd actually reached maintenance calories, loss is more likely to taper off, not stop suddenly.)

    3 weeks isn't really a plateau yet. Random things can cause temporary stall, in which water retention or digestive contents (on their way to becoming waste) mask continuing gradual fat loss on the bodyweight scale.

    While you're waiting, if you haven't read this, it could be informative:

    https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

    Bodies are weird.
  • nanastaci2020
    nanastaci2020 Posts: 1,072 Member
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    Patience, accuracy and honesty. Especially if close to your goal weight.

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