@jwright219 I’m in a plateau, too. I began working at taking weight off at the beginning of this year. I was at 178 (5 feet tall; so I was WAY into the obese numbers). I’m at 135 - 137 now with a goal of 127 pounds, and it’s
really hard not to just keep increasing the deprivation and intensity — eat less! hardly anything! work out more! all the time! — but I do believe the stuff I read about how your body metabolically shuts down (to the extent it can) when it perceives itself as starving.
Everything I read makes high-intensity interval exercise, muscle-building exercise, lots of protein, lots of vegetables that have high water content, lots of water, good sleep, and patience sound like the answer. I have an Apple watch. I walked 3 miles yesterday with intervals of running that amounted to maybe 1 mile of that total.
It shows:
Total time: 1:02:09
247 active calories
326 total calories
One pound is 3,500 calories. Exercise truly is not the most powerful weight loss tool. Eating right is. Exercise has countless benefits, better heart health and mood among them, but it can only do so much.
Getting frantic over a plateau is, at least for me, the worst possible response to it. It alters my perception of time, like, “I’ve resisted that specific food I’ve been craving for HOURS and I can only spend so much time working out!”
So. One thing that helped me is to read the stories of people in the National Weight Control Registry —you can google it. These are people who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least one year. They’ve beat incredible odds, doing that. Almost everyone who diets regains the weight (I think it’s 80% of dieters), but these people didn’t. The findings are that they tend to eat breakfast and walk but, naturally, their behaviors vary.
Also, it helps to know how the hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, work. Again, google. It’s fascinating and it gives you perspective on what you’re actually asking your body to do. Like, for another thing, how on earth does fat
leave the body? It used to be there, in your belly, in your arms, in your thighs, and now it’s GONE? I used to think it left in feces, urine, and sweat until I read about it, and the answer turned out to be that it leaves mostly through respiration, if you can believe that. No wonder it takes time!
Also, I’ve used my plateau as a time to experiment. I counted calories successfully for 9 months and then absolutely could not move below 135, so I tried eating without counting. Gained 2 pounds in no time. Yesterday, I thought I had those 2 off after a week or so of eating better and counting, when I looked at the scale and saw 135, only now I’m up 2 today. Those 2 this morning
can’t be fat. The body can’t create fat that fast. It’s water. If I stay with good eating, I’ll be back at the 135 plateau in a couple days.
I don’t know that anything I’m saying is “advice,” exactly. My intention is more to tell you that you’re not alone and to say what seems most true to me: that sticking with it is the only hope there is. Trying new things — foods, habits, exercises — until you know what your own body responds to and can do. And what you can mentally, emotionally, physically adopt as a way of life.
Because the worst news? The worst news is, I read one article that said if you take two people of the same weight and one of them becomes obese
and then takes the weight off that person will ALWAYS have to eat 400 calories fewer per day than the person who never gained at all, even though now they are at the same weight again. Obesity followed by weight loss seems to permanently slow the metabolic rate. That dismal bottom line shows up in a lot of articles.
And knowing this actually helps me. It tells me we’re not weak-willed people. We are people constantly surrounded by highly caloric, highly palatable food, who have countless stressors that impact our ability to do good self care, who are fighting hormonal systems that are as old as time, the entire design and purpose of which is to never give fat away until forced to.
Hang in there!
