Weight loss plateau: a real stall, or water hiding your progress?
You have been careful for weeks and the scale will not move. Before you change anything, find out which of two things is happening. Either water is hiding fat loss that is still going on, or your body has reached the point where your current diet no longer makes a deficit. The fixes are different.
When it is water
Water can hide a lot. Your body stores carbohydrate as glycogen, and it stores three to four parts of water with every part of glycogen. Salt makes you hold extra water too. A few days of more carbohydrate or more salt can add water weight that hides a week or two of fat loss.
The signs that it is water:
- The stall is short, two weeks or less.
- Your waist is still shrinking.
- You can link the stall to a change, such as travel, a holiday, a new training plan or, for many women, a point in the menstrual cycle.
The fix is patience. Keep going for another week or two and look at your trend weight, not the daily number. When the water goes, the scale catches up.
When it is real
There is also a real plateau, and it comes from how bodies work. A smaller body burns less energy. So the diet that gave you a deficit of 500 kcal a day at the start gives you a smaller one as you lose weight. Your loss slows, then stops, at the weight where your intake and your burn match again.
A 2014 review in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics describes what a dieter notices:
a gradual slowing of weight loss, at some point almost imperceptible, and eventually cessation of weight loss occurs when energy equilibrium is restored at a new lower level.
A model from the US National Institutes of Health puts a number on the speed. After a lasting change in what you eat, your weight takes about a year to move half of the way to its new level. The early months move fastest.
The signs of a real plateau:
- The trend has been flat for three weeks or more.
- Your waist has stopped shrinking too.
- You have lost a fair amount since you last set your calorie target.
What to do about a real plateau
- Work out your daily burn again with your current weight. Our article on calories burned per day shows how. The number will be lower than when you started.
- Set a new target a little below the new number, and watch what the trend does.
- Or move more. A daily walk adds to your burn without any change to your plate.
- Check your portions for a week. Small extras creep in over months, such as oil in cooking, drinks and snacks.
- Give the change three or four weeks before you judge it.
Downtrend has a plateau check built on the trend. It calls a plateau only after the trend has moved less than 0.1 kg a week for three weeks running, and it shades your slowest stretches on the chart, so a short water stall does not set it off.
If you have been eating very little for a long time, a doctor or a dietitian can help you find a plan you can keep. Losing weight more slowly is still losing weight.
Sources
- Kreitzman SN, Coxon AY, Szaz KF. Glycogen storage: illusions of easy weight loss, excessive weight regain, and distortions in estimates of body composition. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1992.
- Thomas DM and others. Time to correctly predict the amount of weight loss with dieting. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2014.
- Hall KD and others. Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight. The Lancet, 2011.
- John Walker. The Hacker’s Diet, chapter Signal and Noise, on salt and water.
This article is general information, not medical advice. Talk to a doctor before a big change to what you eat or how you train, and especially if you are pregnant, under 18 or have a health condition.