You're following the plan; however, the scales aren't moving.
What's up with that?
In this article, we go through why your weight loss has plateaued, then offer some practical advice on how to properly assess and get over a weight loss plateau. After all, there are plenty of articles out there that simply say "reduce your calorie intake and exercise more" (which I'm sure most of us can come up with ourselves) without actually helping you to understand a plateau in weight loss and how breaking it might not be as simple as just taking in fewer calories and increasing your physical activity.
Though, spoiler alert: it's unavoidable that CHANGES to your calorie intake and levels of exercise are likely to form at least some part of the solution! If you're looking to break through your plateau by upping your exercise levels, then browse the full Again Faster range now. if you're wanting to take a more informed approach to assessing and breaking through your weight loss plateau, then read on...
Why Does Weight Loss Plateau?
Our bodies are super, so when we go into a calorie deficit and we start to lose body fat, our bodies always like to find the norm, something stable. So, they adapt by trying to preserve more fat and energy.
In turn, we get decreases in anabolic hormones and increases in hunger hormones like leptin. We see drops in metabolic rate, plus a decrease in the energy cost of exercise. All these factors add up to make our bodies become more efficient. This sounds good, but it's not great for fat loss. This is why fat/weight loss plateaus.
What do you do if this is you? We first need to accurately assess the situation before coming up with solutions.
How to Understand and Break a Weight Loss Plateau
It's always helpful to try and get to the bottom of what might be causing your weight loss plateau first before taking drastic action. It could be a case of changing some small detail that proves to be the culprit of the stall in your weight loss. So, there are a few things you should consider primarily.
Are you Accurately Tracking your Intake?
You'd be surprised by just how often people take steps to track their calories more accurately and find that all the little things they're not tracking accurately are having a greater impact on their daily calorie intake than they realise.
- Are you just eyeballing your foods rather than weighing them? If you're just estimating, being out by 5-10% could be making a difference.
- Are you eating things and not tracking them? For example, the handful of cereal you eat before even putting them into the bowl, or the slice of cheese you try before adding to a recipe? How many times a day do you do this?
- Are you accounting for fluids too, like coffee, tea, and juice? Every calorie can count, but if you have 5 cups of tea a day, for example, the 5-10 calories in that splash of milk can soon add up.
Are you being Controlled by the Scales?
Weight could be influenced by many things people don't think about:
- Poor sleep - there have been a number of studies showing a relationship between good sleep patterns and weight loss. Has your plateau coincided with a period of poor sleep?
- Menstrual changes - fluctuations can occur based on where you are in your menstrual cycle, something often overlooked by women
- Different volume of foods - you may be going through a period of eating low volume foods for the same calorie intake, having a knock-on effect on energy levels, your feelings of fullness etc.
- Changes in your routine - small general changes to your daily routine could be having a bigger effect than you realise. A new office with fewer stairs? Have the kids grown out of needing to be carried everywhere? These could be making a difference.
- Digestion - your rate of digestion can be influenced by so many things, it's natural it can have an effect on your weight loss too
Are you Taking Daily Weigh-ins and Averaging them out?
Because you should be! Your weight changing constantly could be due to the above points. If you were to only weigh yourself now and again, you would get an inaccurate picture. But by weighing yourself daily, you will eliminate the outliers and be able to build a more accurate picture.
Another big factor in assessing and breaking through a diet plateau is patience! How long have you been implementing these changes in your diet? Also, when was the last time your body weight changed? We are often too quick to assume the worst, so patience is key - don't be so keen to make changes too soon.
What can you do if your Weight Loss Has Come to a Halt?
There are a few things you can do if your weight loss has come to a halt. Some are in the realms of common sense, but perhaps the most effective step you could try to get over a weight loss plateau is one you might not necessarily expect. With that in mind, the first thing we think you should try is the following...
Refeed Days and/or Diet Breaks
A "refeed day" is simply where you increase your calories back to your maintenance level, and this will be just for one day.
A "diet break" can be 3-14 days of eating back to maintenance.
The theory behind these strategies is that they increase your leptin secretion, so we should feel less hungry and therefore eat less. This should lead to mobilising more adipose tissue and losing more fat.
But more so than this is what diet breaks can do for you psychologically. The break can allow us to eat more, so we're not constantly hungry - and hey, we might even have room for social events! Then, when we get back onto the stricter diet, we feel more invigorated to do so.
More Options to Break a Weight Loss Plateau
Some other things to try, perhaps in combination with working a refeed day or a diet break into your schedule, are:
- Reducing your calorie intake further. You can do this by taking down carbs and fat (or a mixture of the two) by 5-15%
- Increasing cardio by 10% (this shouldn't feel like too much of an addition to your time and effort, but can make a massive difference)
- Increase your total number of daily steps - look for ways to get in more steps wherever you can, you'd be surprised what a difference it can make. Whether it's getting off the bus a stop early for a short walk or doing a few laps of the office/house while you're on a work call
- Increase hard sets in training by 5% (again, this shouldn't feel like too much but can make a big difference
Breaking Weight Loss Plateaus: Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you find this advice useful to help you break through weight loss plateaus.
When doing principal nutrition, we talk about all this in detail as part of our course. The idea is to give you greater insight and more of the science behind the why, therefore giving you a greater understanding of what's happening in your body. This should mean that (hopefully) you'll never come unstuck again and find yourself searching the internet for articles like this one!
You good? Good!
