One of the biggest road blocks on a weight loss journey is when your weight stalls. It can cause all sort of psychological issues that often lead to people throwing in the towel even if they have lost weight. However, it should be expected well in advance that weight loss plateaus are completely normal and can happen multiple times throughout your weight loss journey.
There are several reasons for this with the main ones being how your metabolism adapts to changes in calorie intake and expenditure. In addition, by default smaller bodies burn less calories so essentially losing any amount of weight will decrease the number of calories your body burns. Finally, general movement (fidgeting, standing up, housework etc.) also slow down. Why does all this happen? Well your body is very clever in noticing when it has been receiving less calories than normal and therefore kicks into survival mode by compensating limiting the number of calories it expends.
This means that if you continue with the same eating and training pattern, things will remain the same weight-wise as you are no longer creating the caloric deficit to achieve weight loss you did originally.
Different people will hit weight loss plateaus at different times, These depend on how much weight they have to lose, how much exercise they are participating in and how low they have dropped their calories below maintenance and for how long.
Ultimately the answer is to change the stimulus again either by tweaking calories further or looking for ways to expend more energy or a mixture of both. If you have room for more energy expenditure activities like walking to more a few times a week, cleaning more or adding a gym session or two then go with these strategies first. You would be surprising how much all this stuff adds up and can often be enough elicit further weight loss. If you come to place where you cannot add any more physical activity to your current lifestyle then reduce calories slightly (250 – 300) to progress once more.
Hopefully now you can see that plateaus are completely normal and the reason why. Expect them but also plan so that you can overcome them when the time comes.
