Before I started losing weight I had heard stories about plateauing which, in case you don't know, is when you are sticking to your program of diet and exercise but your weight loss just stalls at a certain point and you don't seem to be losing any weight anymore no matter what you do.
For me, when this started happening and I first noticed it about Friday of last week, I initially started blaming myself as I started to put everything under a microscope that I had done. For example on Friday last week I went and had beers with a friend on Friday and you may recall that my drinking day is Thursday only, that was the main reason why I started losing weight in the first place. So when I woke up on Saturday after having drinks for 2 days straight, I looked at the scale and thought "you deserve to have gained a kilogram" but let's be realistic here, you don't gain a kilogram from drinking 5 beers. That's crazy talk
I didn't read a bunch of articles about this phenomenon because I already have heard about it plenty. I was kind of effected by it though because I had been seeing a straight line of sorts as far as my weight is concerned and still saw jumps up here and there and not all of them actually came after a cheat day where I ate and drank 3000 calories in a day (which honestly, isn't very much anyway.) I just presume, since everyone talks about it, that the plateau is something that everyone experiences and therefore there isn't much reason to stress about it.
There are other things that I think could be the explanation for me specifically as well. For starters, even though I haven't been exercising terribly hard, I am exercising a lot more than I was before I started doing this and therefore it is understandable that I might be gaining some muscle in the process. Muscle weighs more than fat so I suppose this could be part of it. I'm dropping fat at the same time as I am gaining muscle but as I run lower and lower on fat that remain to be burned, the muscles are still growing?
Haha, I am just imagining something here. I don't really know, but since I haven't really deviated from my procedure of eating a high-protein and mostly whole-food diet, I don't know how else to explain it.
It is really annoying though, to spend 6 out of 7 days sticking to a rather strict diet and exercising for 5 of those days, not drinking, skipping parties, not ordering a pizza when you want a pizza, and then looking at the scale every day and noticing little to no change.
I started at 100 kg or so and now I seem to be "stuck" at 87. My goal at the beginning was to get to 90 and then once I got to that I changed it to 85. So I wonder if maybe I am asking too much of my body.
I am not going to give up because I have actually reached the point where I kind of enjoy the things that I eat now and I mix it up and have pork chops, steaks, pork belly, and nice things to eat like that every single day. The meal that is getting under my skin is lunch because I am dead sick of salads, that much is for sure.
Sadly, from the little bit of reading that I have done about this in the past few days while the scale just lingers at 87 the explanation i see written by people with doctorates who have studied this for decades is that plateaus are totally normal and get this, they can last up to 8-12 weeks.
From what this one researcher said the drop in weight loss is because over time of being a bit of a fatty, which I was, our bodies recognize that our body is "supposed to have" a certain amount of fat levels in it because it has had that much for a long time. Therefore, when you drop below that level that body temporarily slows down metabolism in order to "protect" your body. This is frustrating but from what I see it takes a little while for your body to overwrite the "code" that has been there for many years. You can't just do it right away.
All people are different as far as this is concerned but in a shell, your body really wants things to stay the way that things are because your body believes that the way it has been is the way that it should be and therefore will turn various switches on and off in order to attempt to achieve homeostasis.
What they recommend during this time period is to stop looking at the body scale so much during this time and instead to pay closer attention to the tiny one in your kitchen and focus on taking special care to ensure that you do not go over the allotted calories in a day during this period where your body is learning that your fat stores are meant to be changing.
The body is slow, and that is why when you were younger (for those of you that put on weight) you will normally need something like a FB picture reminder to even realize that you started getting bigger at a certain point. It didn't happen overnight, right? For me, seeing my friend for the first time in 5 years was what triggered my notice about realizing that I had gotten bigger because from my perspective the guy in the mirror had been staying about the same size week in, and week out.
According to this same study I am reading, the point of the plateau is actually the MOST IMPORTANT part of a weight loss plan. This is the time when your body is in the process of "rewriting your internal code" and if you go back to your old ways during this time, your body will stop the rewrite. If you can make it to the other side though, your homeostasis or the "weight you are supposed to be" will have changed as far as your brain is concerned and therefore your metabolism will adjust accordingly and then you will start losing weight again.
I guess it kind of makes sense to me so now I just have to make sure that I can stay motivated and keep with my diet.
One ominous warning in the study that I read was that 2/3 of people that get frustrated at the plateau end up gaining all the weight the lost back because they didn't allow their body the necessary time to rewrite the code. Almost all of the time the people returned to almost exactly the weight they started at and how would that be possible if this "internal code" theory wasn't true?
So if you are like me at some point in your life and you start to see results but then all of a sudden one day you stop seeing them, know this is normal. You don't need to diet MORE, you just need to stick with the plan you originally had and above all else, do NOT give up.