How To Get Past and Fix A Weight Loss Plateau
I absolutely love this image.
Because in one fell swoop it has summed up this horrible term that the Fitness Industry has perpetuated over and over and over again as a negative happening.
The Weight Loss Plateau.
Just the word plateau is horrible to say - “plateauuuuuuuuu….”. And the connotations of what it means are even worse:
If you are in a Plateau - you probably think:
You are failing
You are never going to reach “your goal”
You need to try something new
You chose the wrong path
You can’t seem to “crack” it
That everyone else knows something you don’t.
And not one single one of those feelings is true.
I can promise you that.
In this article, I am going to take you through How To Get Past and Fix A Weight Loss Plateau - and I almost guarantee it isn’t going to be what you were expecting.
Which is exciting - but not as exciting as what I am about to offer you.
I want to be your friend.
As your friend - I will obviously stay in touch, send you things, some educational, some thoughtful, and probably some that are a bit near the mark - but hey ho - I think that is the hallmark of a beautiful friendship: balance.
If you would like to be my friend also then please send me a friend request right here:
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR HOW TO GET PAST AND FIX A WEIGHT LOSS PLATEAU:
What is a weight loss plateau?
Why do weight loss plateaus occur?
How does scale weight actually work?
How to actually get past your weight loss plateau
What Is A Weight Loss Plateau?
If you’re in one…replace the word “fetch” with scale weight - and this GIF sums it up pretty well.
A weight-loss plateau (urgh) is when your body weight seems to have stopped going down on the scale - even though you have changed very little in your behaviour compared to when it was coming down.
It is normally regarded as a temporary stalling of scale weight.
There was a study done in 2021 called: Management Of Weight Loss Plateau [1].
In this study they define weight loss and a weight loss plateau thus:
“Studies comparing different diets have shown that a similar degree of weight loss can be achieved in an 8 to 12-week period, as long as a caloric deficit is achieved.[1] However, when looking at individuals in the longer-term, 24-weeks and beyond, only about 10 to 20% of those individuals successfully maintain their weight loss”
This doesn't mean they successfully maintain the weight they got to - this means the actual stats of the scale falling.
It also goes on to say:
“A misconception to beginners attempting to lose weight is that the process is linear. Therefore, one can expect that weight loss will occur more rapidly in the early stages. Still, then in the coming weeks, the weight may stay steady or even slightly increased despite maintaining the established calorie deficit”
This sets us up nicely for the rest of this article.
Why Do Weight Loss Plateaus Occur?
This is a very loaded question because as I always say “everybody is different” and every body is different.
And the solution to a weight loss plateau is likely not one sole thing for each person.
However, the most important point to this question is not a physical thing.
It’s not “your calories need to come down” or “you need to do more exercise”
It’s a psychological point that needs to be made - and it is so very important that I am putting it front and centre of this article.
Why do weight loss plateaus occur?
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You Have Been Conditioned To View Them Negatively
Let me be very clear here.
Maintaining your body weight is a true success.
Sadly, we live in a world where allowing you to actually be proud of what you have achieved thus far, and promoting the fact that the scale may not be going down - but by golly - it isn’t going up…that is a true success.
This is what you and the fitness industry has allowed you to view as a:
“Plateauuuuuuu”
As a negative happening in your life. When actually it is a true success.
I am sure you have heard the phrase: “80% of all diets fail”. The definition of successful weight loss maintenance is:
“Successful long-term weight loss maintenance is intentionally losing at least 10% of initial body weight and keeping it off for at least 1 year.” [3]
Therefore if you are currently in an active deficit, and you have lost 10% or more of your body weight and your weight loss has “plateaued” you are actually on the path of being in the top 20% of the world’s population when it comes to dieting.
“Research has shown that approximately 20% of overweight individuals are successful at long-term weight loss when defined as losing at least 10% of initial body weight and maintaining the loss for at least 1 year” [2]
Therefore you aren’t stalling, failing or just not good enough.
You are actually in an elitist group of people. A rare cohort of incredible success - and you have been told to see it as a failure.
That’s a damn fucking shame.
I am sorry that we have done this to you. I am truly sorry that you have been led to believe that it is possible to keep dieting down and down and down and if that process ever stops then you are simply not good enough.
This has led to many people getting frustrated, angry and feeling shame at their inability to see scale weight continuing to tumble and it has to stop. Right now. Right here. With this post.
How Does Scale Weight Actually Work?
Scale Weight is a very fickle thing. You may or may not be aware that scale weight when you are in an active calorie deficit and trying to lose weight, will fluctuate.
Wildly.
Up and down. It will be stubborn at times. One day you can weigh on things, and the very next 24 hours later you can weigh 5-7lbs more.
This is normal.
In fact let me show you some of my weight readings, when I was in a caloric deficit and weighed myself each and every day.
This is July into August of 2021 - I started at 85.4kg and then deficit down to 81.9kg.
It looks like the best rollercoaster you have ever been on.
But as you can see I was constantly trading peaks and troughs. This is actually a very normal graph of scale weight. If you ever see a graph that is more linear than this - that is indeed not giving you the full picture of someone’s body weight.
I have Coached many people through weight loss and every single one of them have had this experience.
These fluctuations mainly occur due to:
Hormones and Menstrual Cycle
Medications
Sleep
Types of food you consume
Digestion
Exercise
One of the most common reasons scale weight will fluctuate is because carbohydrates retain water. When you eat any Carbohydrate your body will absorb 3g-4g of Water to help store the glycogen from the food.
This is not body fat and is perfectly normal - and is a big reason you see a big reduction in scale weight when someone goes “low-carb”
There is just one other thing to say here and that is that when you are tracking scale weight as a marker of success or not when trying to lose weight, you must gather more data than weekly scale readngs.
This is another common reason that plateaus occur - you just aren’t getting enough data.
Looking at the same graph from my weight as before I have circled every seventh reading - to repllicate one a week weigh ins.
As you can see every other week my weight was up from the week before.
Looking at the last circle, which is seven days from the one previous if I was weighing in weekly, and weighed in on the 6th day I would have had a reading that was lower than the last reading 7 days previous as opposed to one that was higher.
This is when data can become your best friend - and the more you gather the more insightful you can be when it comes to analysing what is going on.
If you have Scale Anxiety then please read my article that has helped hundreds of people overcome gravitophobia:
How To Actually Get Past Your Weight Loss Plateau
I guarantee I could find someone on the internet telling you very opposing things in relation to this question. You will be told to:
Reduce Calories
Increase Calories
More Exercise
Less Exercise
More Water
Less Water
And each person is just confusing you more and more and more - adding to your frustration and not knowing where to turn.
In truth, each solution could be correct.
Reducing your calories may lead to a calorie deficit as you will be consuming less in the short term.
Increasing your calories may lead to a calorie deficit in the long term as you might be less likely to binge and more adherent to your calorie moderate calorie deficit as opposed to always reducing and cutting and restricting.
More exercise might lead to a calorie deficit in the shorter term by way of burning calories (but this is a very silly way to go about losing weight) but it might lead to more hunger.
Less exercise might lead to a calorie deficit due to less hunger from exercise - especially with things like HIIT.
And water might help reduce hunger, but it does have a weight to it, and that will show up on the scale.
But I understand none of this is overly helpful right now.
Therefore I propose these solutions to your weight loss plateau problem.
Reframe it as a Success
What is the opposite of weight loss not going down? It going up…
And if weight loss is your ultimate goal, but it is in a “plateau” then you are indeed doing a fantastic job as your weight is stable and you are learning to manage your new body and its new weight.
I do feel like I want to caveat the above statement.
A lot of people, women especially, but men too, do feel great shame when their weight increases. This is because they get so much praise when their weight is coming down. Praise from friends, family, coaches, and society at large. This leads them to feel like failures when their weight may increase again, even if it is only slightly. As I mentioned before learning to maintain weight loss is incredibly difficult, and there is no shame or failure attached to regaining weight - because what the scale doesn't show is how much you have learnt, how much more skill you have developed in the gym, how consistent you have been with your actions, how much better your mental health is as a result of working hard and trying, how much more energy you have and how much better you are sleeping.
Even if you learn to manage your new body at its new weight and it is slightly up from the lowest scale reading you have - you are still succeeding at so much more than you are giving yourself credit for.
Remember, 80% of people cant maintain their weight.
A plateau really isn’t a bad thing.
Trust Yourself
Look at it this way…you got to the point of which a plateau can actually occur. You must have done something right thus far.
So now you just need to trust yourself. Trust you know what you are doing, trust that your actions will lead to the result you are after. One of the hardest things for people who are trying to lose weight is this element of trust.
Usually, because they have been sent on a path of yoyo dieting and then been made to feel like they themselves are the thing that is broken - not the diet itself. And relearning to trust yourself is very hard
To get to the issues of a weight loss plateau, you have a process that has worked, you have a process that is sustainable for you and you have a process that you know you can trust - you’re at this point already - and now it’s just a case of making sure that you trust that process, and trust yourself.
Remain Consistent, Remain Patient
The more weight you lose the slower it will occur. This is because many people who want to lose weight probably want to because they view the body fat they now have as excess.
They are above their body’s settling point that they are used to for themselves.
This can happen for many reasons, mainly lifestyle factors like becoming parents or changing from an active job to a sedentary one.
At the beginning with a tiny bit of focus, and dialling up a few things in terms of their diet, increasing some steps, in fact living by my 5 Awesome Rules for Fat Loss Life (please excuse how cringy the video below is), they then manage to lose that “extra” body fat relatively quickly.
But the closer you get to the point upon which you’re near when you want to be - think the classic last 5lbs of stubborn fat - then it will take an awful lot longer to get there.
The curve will always level off.
There is more at play in terms of this as well - which I go into further down.
But generally - you will lose weight quickest in the beginning - and this is also why many people do 6-week challenges that are all about losing lots of weight in that time frame - it’s a safe and easy way for personal trainers to get all the glory without having to actually do the hard work for people - get them through the moments when it feels hardest for them.
It’s a huge reason I don’t do them. I’m a Coach and there is no glory in not supporting people properly.
I digress.
As the curve levels off (something you have been told to view as a plateau), the most important thing to do here is to be consistent. Is to not change anything drastic, and just keep ticking off the days and the process.
Begin to enjoy the process more, begin to appreciate that you are doing so much more good for yourself than necessarily losing weight.
And the more you focus on the process provided it has been set up correctly (preferably with the aid of a Coach - I know a good one wink, wink, nudge, nudge: head here) then the results will eventually take care of themselves.
Patience is a virtue - and I’m sorry but if your weight hasn’t decreased in two weeks you are not in a plateau. In fact, if your weight hasn't decreased in a month, you are not in a plateau. If you are executing the behaviours that constitute a calorie deficit and your weight hasn’t moved from month one to month six, and you have investigated the areas of your life that you think might be getting in the way, then we can look into the possibility that you are indeed in a plateau.
Without a doubt, one of the main ways to get past a weight loss plateau is be more patient with yourself and the process.
Realise there is so much more to celebrate
SO MUCH MORE!
I used to call my coaching program this - because the list of things you can celebrate and crucially should celebrate away from weight loss is so much more empowering than celebrating the reduction of your body.
Getting Stronger
Being Consistent with your own health
Better Sleep
Eating in a more balanced way
Having more energy
Improving your relationship with you
Improving your relationship with others
Being in nature more
Learning new skills and applying them
Improving your relationship with food
Improving your relationship with exercise - more on this here: How To Love Exercise Again
Building your confidence through keeping promises with yourself
Building your self-esteem
Improving your mental health
Burning more energy
Increasing your Metabolism
I’m sure there’s more - but I’m a little hungover today so let’s leave it there.
But look at that list.
It’s a bloody good one isn’t it?
Why would you want to give up all of those benefits simply because you aren’t losing weight? Or you have lost weight and it appears to have stalled.
If you are engaging in a health and fitness journey and you are not working on all of those things that I have listed - and only working on losing weight - you are setting yourself up for complete failure - because naturally, your weight loss will stop - and when that happens you will feel like you are failing.
I always say:
I appreciate that list might look overwhelming, but many of it is the by-product of just engaging in physical movement and an active lifestyle appropriately - and only focussing on weight loss - that is not an appropriate way to engage with not just movement, but yourself too.
I understand and appreciate that weight loss might be a great tool for which people begin, get started and can discover all of this - but once you have got over that initial moment of engaging because of your body weight - you need to transfer your thoughts onto that list I have laid out.
Be proud of what you managed to lift and how you managed to lift it. Be proud of the fact that you are eating in a more structured way and that is having huge benefits on your relationship with food.
And if you aren’t doing those things and if you aren’t focussing on that list …it could be an indicator as to why your weight loss has plateaued.
Bodyweight Settling Points
Set Point theory is the premise that you have a predisposition to a certain body weight. This is due to a number of factors, but genetics and lifestyle are the two main ones.
It is only a theory, but it is backed by quite a lot of evidential studies. [3, 4, 5].
This doesn’t mean that you are predetermined to always be overweight if that is where your set point is. It means that changing it might be a lot harder than you ever thought possible. Having worked with thousands of people on weight loss over my career I have found this to be true as well. Very few people lose the 3 stone of weight that they were aiming to, and then also manage to stay there for the rest of their lives. Most people I have worked with, we are always trading around 5lbs here and 5lbs there - and those who do lose more, have to overhaul a lot in their lives both mentally and physically to manage it, and it takes a lot longer than you would ever believe.
Setpoint theory is also why we define successful weight loss as losing 10% of your body weight and keeping it off for at least a year. You may lose 17% initially - but that might be an amount too great for your body and therefore 10% is the marker of successful weight loss.
Because weight will come up and down.
You can change your set point - which is why I refer to it as a “settling point”. At different phases in our lives, we will probably have different bodyweights. Think of it like this - if I took you out of your environment right now and placed you on an island somewhere to live - it is likely that your bodyweight will change - as you have different access to different foods.
This happened to me - when I moved to Australia - trying to learn the nuances in the different foods here took a while - and it meant I stuck to things I knew a little more - which were obviously brands that generally pack their food with calories.
Added to that my activity levels were very different whilst I was trying to find a job, get used to being out of the sun for certain hours of the day and not having the money to be able to pay for a Gym whilst I was setting everything up.
Then once I got used to my environment, my body weight started to decline again back to where it nearly always sits at around 80kgs.
Therefore your body settles depending on its environment - and the more comfortable you are in an environment the more likely you are to hit a plateau.
Added to all of this, we also have mechanisms in our body that when it realises calories are being reduced, it changes your hormones to increase hunger to protect you. These hormones are affected by Adipose Tissue (Fat Cells) and the more of them you have the more the hormones will affect you making things just that little bit harder for you.
And as you can imagine, the closer to that point you get - the more your body will fight back - the more likely you are to be in a plateau.
This is exactly why you should focus a lot more on the list above than just the scale readings you are collecting.
Metabolic Apdation (check in with your numbers)
Metabolic Adaption [6] is the very simple fact of life that a smaller organism needs fewer calories to survive. As you lose weight, you will require fewer calories to maintain that weight.
Therefore if you have been losing weight, and that seems to have slowed down for a long enough period to quantify an actual plateau (at least a couple of months) depending on the amount of weight you have lost in that time, it could mean you need to check your calorie deficit numbers again.
The caloric maintenance of your body has literally changed - and it is quite common for someone to still be eating the same amount of calories that were designed for when they started their fitness journey as opposed to where they are now - as they have noticed a big slow down in weight loss.
So always check in with your maintenance numbers, which will then allow you to adjust your calorie numbers.
For more on Bodyweight Maintenance head here: How To Find Your Calorie Maintenance Level
And if you want a free Calorie Calculator then please head here: Free Fitness Goodies
Build More Muscle and Be More Active???
It would be remiss of me to write this whole article without touching on these points.
And I have put a question mark next to the points for very good reason. For this article, I have written it with the perspective that you probably already are being very active - and probably don’t have the privilege. to increase that part of your life too much.
If you are stuck, and you aren’t doing 2-3x strength sessions a week, you aren’t regularly hitting 8k steps a day at least, then yes - please do that.
By doing that I almost guarantee your weight will change again.
I also want to discuss the art of building muscle here.
Everyone is different - but building muscle takes time. It takes more time if you are female and it takes more time the more experienced you are at doing it.
For a woman, you are looking at about 1lb a month in the first year, then 0.5lb a month in the second year of training.
For a man, you are looking at about 2lbs a month in the first year, and then 1lb a month in the second year of training.
1lb of Muscle at rest burns 5kcal a day.
Therefore after your first year of training as a woman, you will have only added an extra 60kcals a day to your metabolism, and if you are a man, you can double that.
Yes, building muscle will help your metabolism because you will also burn calories as you exercise, and after you exercise. But in order to improve your metabolism enough to see it on the scale and to help break through a plateau you are going to have to be very dedicated to the cause of building muscle for a period of time a lot longer than you probably believed before you read this article.
Of course, I am an advocate of strength training for all people - I just wanted to bring to your attention that when people tell you to build muscle to improve your metabolism, it is true, but not in the manner you may interpret it, or the manner in which they believe it would help you also.
Just be aware, that building muscle probably isn’t the quick fix you are hoping for to break through a plateau - but it’s a blinking good thing to do for your health.
What’s Next?
I really hope you found this article useful, and that you feel a lot better about your struggles at the moment. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my work, it really does mean a lot to me to have you here.
If you would like a Free Calorie and Macro Calculator then just put your email in here:
References:
Sarwan G, Rehman A. Management Of Weight Loss Plateau. [Updated 2021 Oct 29]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2022 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK576400/
Wing RR, Phelan S. Long-term weight loss maintenance. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Jul;82(1 Suppl):222S-225S. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/82.1.222S. PMID: 16002825.
GEMA FRÜHBECK,, JAVIER GÓMEZ‐AMBROSI, Rationale for the existence of additional adipostatic hormones, The FASEB Journal, 10.1096/fj.00-0829hyp, 15, 11, (1996-2006), (2001).
Hoeger, W., Hoeger, S., Fawson, A., & Hoeger, C. (2019). Principles and labs for fitness and wellness. Cengage.
Liao, T., Zhang, S.-L., Yuan, X., Mo, W. Q., Wei, F., Zhao, S.N., Yang, W., Liu, H., & Rong, X. (2020). Liraglutide lowers body weight set point in DIO rats and its relationship with hypothalamic microglia activation. Obesity: A Research Journal, 28(1), 122-131. doi: 10.1002/oby.22666
Trexler, E.T., Smith-Ryan, A.E. & Norton, L.E. Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete. J Int Soc Sports Nutr 11, 7 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1550-2783-11-7