Fat lost Plateau

“fat loss plateau”.
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Not seeing your weight drop after a few days or even after 1 week is NOT a plateau. Seeing fat loss progress takes time. Give yourself between 2-3 weeks to gauge progress. Also, when you track progress, don’t just rely on your scale weight. Also, track your body measurements and take progress pictures. If you control your food-intake and exercise regularly, you generally will see progress. Even if it’s slow progress. Slow progress adds up over time. In 2 years from now, you won’t care if it took you 3 months or 5 months to lose fat. You’ll care about having achieved your goals and sustaining the fat loss progress.
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Now, if you have been in a fat loss phase for at least 10 weeks and now you notice that for 2-3 weeks in a row there is no sign of progress, I typically suggest a diet break. With a diet break, you purposely go out of a calorie deficit and eat around maintenance calories. This provides a mental break from restricting calories. This diet break is also intended to manage the “metabolic slowdown” you experience as you consistently eat at a calorie deficit and it may enhance muscle maintenance while losing fat [2, 3]. After your diet break, you return back to your regular calories. Still not seeing progress? Then decrease calories by 10%. See the 3rd slide of this post for more details.
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Lastly, if you just started your fat loss phase and you experience no significant progress after 2-3 weeks, it is also possible that your calorie deficit is too small. Increasing activity and/or reducing calorie-intake then is the next logical step. The first step I take with most of my clients whenever this happens is either reducing calorie-intake by 10% or adding a daily 20-30 min walk. This usually provides that boost in the calorie deficit that’s needed to lose fat again.
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1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28925405
2. https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-018-0256-5#Sec132
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28794207/