So lets say you are doing everything I have posted so far. You have your goals that you have been meeting. You figured out your maintenance calories and thus your diet calories. Finally you have been exercising regularly. Weight has been falling off you slowly, but steadily. Until this week. For some reason nothing is happening. No weight gain and no weight loss. What happened.
Well there can be a lot of different reasons for a weight loss plateau. Some reasons might be overly simple while others are much more complicated. I will lay out a few things to try before getting to frustrated.
First thing is to just be patient and wait it out. It can take 4 - 6 weeks or even 6 - 8 weeks for a plateau to pass. I know that it will be hard during this time, but sometimes it best to just wait it out. If it has been longer then the 4 - 6 - 8 weeks then maybe you should move on to the next step.
Still plateauing? Maybe you need to do a hard reset. The next thing to try is to eat maintenance calories for two or three weeks. This is one way to let your body know that it is ok and it can still lose weight. This worked for me when I went into acidosis from dieting to hard for too long. After a short diet break the weight started falling off again. You can still exercise during this time, but try not to diet until 1 - 2 weeks are over.
Plateauing still going on? Maybe you need to recalculate your calories. I have noticed that with MFP and Fitbit that as you loose weigh they don't automatically adjust your calorie intake for your new weight. In MFP I know that if you adjust your goal from time to time it will adjust your maintenance calorie base. If you have been doing the cyclical dieting then this shouldn't be a problem, but it wouldn't hurt to try to just adjust your goal once or twice.
Ok Joe the scale still isn't budging after all prior steps being taken. Well then my last piece of advice to two fold. First is that maybe this is the weight you should be? Now if you are basing your weight loss goals on a scale like BMI and you are still considered obese then this weights probably isn't what you should be. However if you are in an overweight or average area of the BMI scale, then maybe take some time off eating maintenance calories. Still keep working out and weighing your food and start the long process of body recomp (see next blog post).
The final option is that there is something medically wrong. It is rare, but there are cases that weight loss in some extreme cases can cause thyroid, pituitary and even other hormone problems. Now this is a rare problem, but it is something to keep in mind. The only way to tell is by going to a doctor and getting blood tests.
I hope that the advice in this blog post is never needed as a weight plateau is a difficult and annoying experience. I hope no one goes through it.
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