Weight loss plateaus

Factual Questions
1

Anecdotal experience:

I am someone who has varied up and down in a 20 or even 30# range. Years in which I am disciplined, training for an event or otherwise exercising with some obsession, and eating with great restraint, I eventually get down to 150, even 140 my Marathon year, and a 30" waist - even snugly in a 29. (5’6" middle aged male). Years that I am “off the wagon” I have gradually gotten to the mid 170’s and needing 33’s and then wee tad snug. I am now in a disciplined phase, feeling fit, and fitting comfortably into 31’s even though my weight is still far from past lows. I have great confidence that I will get another 10#off and wear those 30’s yet again.

Thing is that I read about the 2#/week guidance and get the impression that weight loss is, for many if not most, a linear process. For me it don’t work like that. At all. Ever.

I will stay consistently disciplined and feel as if I am getting fitter, fit in smaller pants, but have no movement, on the scale for weeks, or at most a pound or so. Then suddenly 5# comes off. Maybe some gradual loss then hold even again then another drop.

Now I am not complaining; I am thrilled that at 50 I can still get fitter when I decide to. (And planning to stay with it from here on out this time. Really. No more yo-yo.) But I really don’t understand the physiology behind the stutter step weight loss. I’ve read various sites about weight loss plateaus and don’t feel that any of those explanations apply. (I eat moderately, I do weight training and intervals along with occasional longer runs and mix it up quite a bit.) But the scale plateaus persist even as clothes fitting testing tells me otherwise.

Why?

And is my experience unusual or do others experience this as well?

2

I think that’s pretty normal. I joined Weight Watchers and lost 40 lbs in about a year. At the beginning, as with many men, I dropped a lot of weight quickly (something like 6lbs the first week) and then after a bit it sort of leveled off and then fluctuated up and down week to week (with an overall downward trend). So I might be up 1lb one week, then down 2lbs the next, then down 0.5lbs and so on.

As much as we can count calories and the like, it’s not like there’s some kind of Swiss watch mechanism at play where you’ll lose exactly 1.5lbs per week, that’s just a long-term average (1-2lbs/week being the commonly-recommended healthy, sustainable weight loss rate for most adults).

Think of all the variables that can come into play - exactly what you eat, how much, exact calories you burn through activity, water you drink, when you eat/drink, how much/when you excrete, how hot it is that day, what you wore when you went to sleep, how big you are and on and on…

3

I appreciate the attempt at an answer but I don’t think that that’s it. I cannot believe that my calorie intake and activity level (and elimination habits) vary enough to result in weight loss variations over a week’s time ranging from nil to 5#, especially since some of the nil weeks have been weeks of quite good discipline and some of the bigger loss weeks have been during looser weeks (but not consistently so).

The nonscientific sense I get is that the body has a set point that it is convinced is normal and does what it needs to do either metabolically or in fluid balance to keep it from going below. With persistence it becomes convinced that the set point is actually lower and allows the weight loss to occur, shifting out fluid, etc. I’m not sure if this concept is the same as this set point concept or not. That concept seems to be as much about regain as anything else. And I can find little to empirically support it.

I’ll keep looking but if anyone knows of any data on this I’d appreciate the point in the right direction.

4

You may want to seek support from sparkpeople.com. It’s a free site devoted to diet and weight loss. My wife has been a member for years. She’s now a coach there, manages a couple of teams, and it works.

5

I reached my Weight Watchers goal yesterday (71 pounds lost!), so I think I can speak from experience.

Plateaus are absolutely normal. So are small gains. Your weight-loss graph will stagger up and down, up and down. But if you’re doing everything right and keep pushing through those plateaus and gains, the general, overall, long-term trend will be DOWN.

Expecting to lose 2 pounds every week without fail is a recipe for disappointment. Ditto being bummed about losing “only” a pound or even less. A loss is a loss! And (as I reminded myself during some long months) slow weight loss is more likely to stay off.

I know it’s maddening, but the scale does jump around for no easily discernible reason. There are other helpful ways to discern progress when the scale isn’t budging. Clothes fitting better, body parts getting firmer (indicating gain in muscle, which weighs more than fat), smaller body measurements by the tape, better cardio fitness, less general fatigue, etc. Then there are the NSVs (Non Scale Victories): people saying they didn’t recognize you (and other compliments), walking or running farther, needing a new belt, being able to stop taking medication. The scale is not the be-all and end-all of progress. Quite often the scale would be stuck, but my measurements got smaller. I still considered that a good week.

One WW member said he uses the 10-day rule: sometimes the results you see were caused by what you were doing 10 days ago. I absolutely had weeks where I was 100% on track and the scale didn’t move, or went up. And conversely, weeks where I was less than vigilant and still lost. Plus I’m female (IIRC, you’re a guy), so there’s the whole hormonal and water retention thing going on. I suppose guys could get that too, depending on salt intake, salt loss during exercise, dehydration, etc.

So no, your supposition that weight loss is linear for most people is erroneous. It’s a crapshoot sometimes, but stick with it and you’ll get there.

I love WW but I’ll second the plug for Sparkpeople. It’s free but very similar to WW, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

6

I appreciate the intention of pointing me to support groups, but that’s not really what I am looking for. I am doing just fine and know what to expect for my own course; again, I am honestly very satisfied with how much my overall fitness and body shape have improved and am following my own advice in not really caring about what the scale says so much as whether or not I am keeping up with my renewed healthier habits … and (admitting to some vanity) the fact that I am fitting back into my skinnier pants. I expect the scale will follow but I also have internalized the concept that the scale is not the goal: my health and sense of well being are and those follow with the improved behaviors no matter what the scale reports. But (and only partly because I am a doctor and naturally curious about these things) I am unable to suss out the physiology behind the pattern and not able to find much that documents how frequent the stutter step loss pattern is. That bothers me.

I have been able to find a few studies of interest and in case any one else cares about anything I can find to answer my own inquiry I present them here …

This article mathematically models metabolism in the assumptions of varying resistance to leptin.

This is also interesting. Calorie restriction alone leads to significant metabolic adaptations with lower energy expended at rest and less physical activity. Calorie restriction plus exercise avoids those adaptations. Those adaptations do fade with time however.

So there are real metabolic adaptations that limit weight loss during calorie restriction, including different behaviors that we are not consciously aware of that result in our burning less at rest and that have us engaging in less vigorous activity. Exercise can decrease those adaptions (so long as you don’t increase your intake in response to the increased exercise). It may turn out that exercise accomplishes that result by altering peripheral sensitivity to leptin and if so the stutter step (perhaps phrasing it a “punctuated equilibrium”, a theft from the evolutionary biology lexicon, captures it better?) weight loss pattern is well captured by the mathematical modelling of the first cite.

I’m not sure if that is all actually true in my real world but it is a good enough stab for me to feel close enough to intellectually satisfied for now.

Congratulations on achieving your goal!