Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 39: What is a weight loss plateau? (and why you probably haven't hit one)
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. In today's podcast, I want to talk about the idea of weight loss plateaus and why you probably aren't in one. Going a little bit controversial for this one, because why not? It's a Friday morning, just fancy it. Fancy being a little bit different. So I think this is a really common one, and this kind of popped into my feed because I think someone had posted in our sort of sixth intake just asking about if they have a slower week, could it be, in terms of weight loss that is, Could it be to do with the fact that they're eating similar foods and their body is getting used to those foods? So this is a great question and I think that it's a type of thing that people often get in their head about. The reality is that that isn't the case. So let's start there right. Someone could eat the same foods on repeat day after day, week after week, month after month and still see weight loss progress right. That is not something that influences the speed at which we would lose weight. because if anything, a lot of the time if people eat slightly more repetitively, it means they're more structured. So I tend to have like, you well know, if you've listened to the podcast before or followed me for any time, like I have a smoothie most mornings for breakfast, right? Not every day, but most mornings I do. So it means that I'm very, very consistent with that behaviour and that behaviour actually makes it easier for me to adhere to my nutrition more broadly because there's no thought, right? There's no decision fatigue. I don't wake up in the morning wondering what I'm gonna have. And I also know that I'm going to be getting like 200 grams of fruit to start the day. I'm also getting a good amount of protein in as well. So I'm getting 30, 40 grams of protein in as well early doors. And I know I'm going to be quite full. So if anything, for most people, the slightly more repetitive, not to the extreme end of it, because of course you could eat exactly the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for months. And that would be a bit miserable. You definitely don't need to be doing that. But repeating meals throughout a week is a sensible and pragmatic thing to do. Having the same lunch two or three times is definitely not a bad shout for most people. But when it comes to the actual impact on weight loss, could that be physiologically why we're seeing less weight loss? No, that's not the case. Your body isn't going to suddenly become really inefficient at digesting, or really efficient, I guess, at digesting porridge. more than normal, so suddenly the calories count in a different way, it simply doesn't work that way. Any different to, guess, your card needs the same fuel at all times, you don't just randomly change over to diesel, right? Like it doesn't need a change of fuel to be effective when it comes to kind of like weight loss, ⁓ or I guess if you're your body, because your body's gonna fight us against weight loss, ineffective for weight maintenance, but. I think this is a really, really good question and I think it's a common kind of misunderstanding. Now, if I was to play devil's advocate as to why someone might be seeing a bit of a weight loss plateau or weight loss slowdown, the first one is to do with expectations. So they think that a weight loss plateau is something it isn't. So if, for example, I'm in week one or two of a diet and I drop a one kilo the first week, 0.9 kilos the second week, and then I start to drop 0.5 or 0.4 kilos, from there onwards, they think that they're reaching a weight loss plateau, which in reality what's happened is they've had some early wins that have now faded back to, I guess, normal, if you like, a normal rate of weight loss, and they think that therefore their weight loss is slowing down, where it's kind of the opposite that was true. The reason it was faster at the start was because they were brand new to it, and actually some of the weight lost wasn't just going to be fat mass, it was also going to be food in your digestive tract, it's going to be... a reduction in glycogen stores as well, water storage, all these kind of things. So there's going to be this initial drop. So that's one part of it, is people's expectations are skewed. They think because they've dropped two and a half kilos in the first two weeks that that's how it's going to sustain. Now, for most people, that kind of rate of weight loss is completely out with their reach, right? You know, I was speaking to someone the other day who's just under 70 kilos. and they were saying in their first couple of weeks of dieting, they dropped just over a kilo and they're saying how much it had slowed down. And I just sort of said to them, when we do the mass and the kind of a good number for this, because we all want to know what the numbers are, is between half a percent to 1 % of body weight per week is a good rate of weight loss. And you can want it and will it to be more than that, but for most people, it's not doable, not consistently and not as you get past that initial win kind of stage. So for example, I probably could sit slightly above that. I'm 80 kilos right now. I probably could push for about a kilo a week, which would be closer to 1.25 % of my body weight, but that's gonna be top end, and that's me in a pretty aggressive diet, right? I'm dropping my calories relatively low, and I'm already really active, right? So I'd need to be really active. For most people, if they're kind of more in the middle ground of gym a couple times a week, good amount of steps, but nothing too crazy. Trying to drop half a percent to one percent is far more attainable and far more sustainable over multiple weeks as well. So the first thing that we want to think about is assessing, okay, well how much are we actually expecting to drop if you're 80 kilos and you are dropping between 0.4 and 0.8 kilos week on week on week? That's actually a pretty good rate of progression and by the end of a month you'd see a big visual change. By the end of two months you could be as much as six kilos down. That's bloody good going for someone who's 80 kilos. So it's all about having an idea of the expectations. So that's one part of it. Now, if we're kind of imagining that we've kind of got this, we know it's not the food because they're eating it repetitively. It's definitely not that. And we also know that it's not going to be, it could be an expectation thing, but let's say that that's not the case and they are actually seeing a sort of slowdown in terms of weight loss. Now this could be. early on or it could be many many weeks. So could be in week one of your diet or sorry week three if you like, probably not week one, but week three of your diet or this could be week 13 or 23 or 33. So we're farther on into a diet at this point. We're not seeing the same progress we were before. In fact, it's very little movement on the scales. So the first thing we would look at here is how long has that happened for? Because if someone says to me, ⁓ it's been seven days now, I just say to them, honestly, that is not enough time for us to... assess whether it is actually a weight loss kind of plateau or slow down. I'm usually looking at about two weeks to three weeks when I'm coaching. I'll be honest, I probably lean more towards two weeks, especially if someone's still got a good amount of weight to lose. You know, if someone's not dropped weight in 10, 11, 12 days, and they're still quite, like relatively earlier, still got quite a lot of weight to lose, I'll be looking at that a bit earlier. For a client who's maybe at the back end of a diet, has maybe got a month left of dieting max, they're already really, really lean. We can already see a bit of of definition around their abs and they look really quite defined, et cetera. You tend to find that our bodies are a bit more resistant to the kind of weight drops in the latter end and also more prone to fluctuations as well. So you tend to find that if someone's right in the back end of a weight loss phase, they've maybe dropped a really good amount of weight, let's say. someone wants to drop 25 kilos and they've dropped 23, those last couple of kilos might be a bit more grinded to take off and also they might fluctuate a little bit more, even although visually they're seeing really clear changes each week, they might not see so much. So in that context, I would be looking at maybe kind of like close to the three week mark, two weeks or two and a half before we made any bigger adjustments. And we typically be looking more at the progress photos. But for someone earlier on, if you have got a good amount to lose, but you're maybe let's say for simplicity sake, at week 13 and you're like my weight has not dropped for 10, 11, 12 days at all. Like there's no drop at even when I'm looking at average weight it's barely moving. Unfortunately, little bit of a harsh truth, 90 % of the time it's not a calorie problem in the sense that your calorie target it's an adherence problem. What starts to happen for a lot of people is they go through this initial stage of rapid weight loss so they have a bit more of a drop. then it kind of becomes a bit more moderate and sensible and steady and they're just chipping away nicely. And then what happens is they're doing that for quite a while and they start to get a bit complacent and they start to be less adherent to their tracking. And it isn't to say that someone's then saying, ⁓ I'm going to smash a takeaway and pretend it doesn't count. Obviously, if you're doing that, well, you're not going to lose weight. And that's like, that part's obvious. But it's a lot of the minor things start to slip in. You maybe aren't weighing the fruit you have. You've... aren't tracking the veg you eat, right, or you're tracking it incredibly loosely and actually it still has some calories and still counts. You're not bothering to track the oil in your foods. You're having condiments and not accounting for it. You're going for a meal out and you're putting it in as 800 calories when you know that the portion of chips alone was probably closer to 500 or 450, you know, that's what a typical portion of chips can be, right? And sometimes people will put it down as a couple hundred calories worth of chips and it's like, that's, it's these things that start to slip in. You're going for a meal out. two glasses of wine, you have a bit of someone else's side, a little nibble, you have a little bit of someone else, like you maybe share a dessert, and then you also have a main, and as I say, the calories that are getting put in are 7,800, and it's like that's not happening. Like it's not realistic, that's not how many calories are actually in that when you're eating out. You're also then just nibbling things as you cook at home. You maybe miss the odd sweet or snack at work, for example. And what starts to happen is it's usually, a series of very minor inaccuracies creeping in that then starts to derail your weight loss. So before you were losing half a kilo a week, and maybe because of kind of a little bit of the fact that you're lighter, a bit of metabolic adaption, all these things that occur, maybe you would be dropping 0.4 kilos a week now anyway because you've just lost a good chunk of weight, you weigh less. ⁓ if you weigh 10 kilos less, you are expending less calories by doing the same amount of steps, the same daily tasks, because your body is lighter. So yeah, there's a little bit of compensation from our body. That might be sort of factoring into the plateau, but the rest of it, the rest of it is coming from your lack of adherence in essence, which sounds quite harsh, but there we are. And that's the reality is that a lot of the time it's like, the odd hundred calories here, the 30 calories there, the 40 calories there. The problem is, is that's maybe 100, 150, 200 a day over the course of a week. That's making the difference of you maybe dropping an extra 0.2 or 0.3 kilos. And in reality, like that slowed your weight loss down. So it's not gone, it's not stopped, but it's really gradual and it's frustratingly slow. That is often the jest of most weight loss plateaus. I think when people think about it, they expect that that can happen really early. And some people absolutely are a little bit more responsive to dieting than others in terms of metabolic adaption, where they will see that they actually do need to drop their calories a little bit farther and so on and so forth. But by and large, from what I see in coaching, actually it's usually an adherence issue and it's unless someone's lost a lot a lot of weight so if someone starts on 2500 calories but they drop 30 kilos then their calories might have to go down quite a bit farther for them to keep dropping weight why because well they've dropped 30 kilos and when i put a 30 kilo backpack on your back and said go walk around with that for a day you can imagine how exhausted you would be right it takes a lot more energy calories expended to just do life at that kind of weight. So when they're so much lighter, sure, weight loss plateaus absolutely exist in that sense because maybe at two and a half thousand calories they just simply aren't gonna drop any farther and they do need to drop lower. But if you've dropped five to 10 kilos, generally, generally the adaptions aren't that dramatic. They are there for sure and there'll be a little bit of a drop in metabolic rate because of that, but it's not as drastic as people make out. And actually, if I was to put my money on it for the amount of times I see this with someone who thinks I'm at a weight loss plateau I would say 85 to 90 percent of the time it's an extremely high proportion it's because of tracking inaccuracy more than anything so that's a little bit of a thought about kind of like weight loss plateaus and why you're probably not at one I certainly know for a little bit of context and this might be an interesting thing to kind of hear as I went from about 90 kilos down to just under 70 so I think the lowest I was was like 67 kilos so was very very very lean I don't think I'll be seeing that weight again but that was extremely lean for Fortitude the first one ever did I was having more muscle now so I wouldn't get that lean but the point is is I went from 90 down to that so about 22 odd kilos obviously it's 20 but I think it's actually slightly more than that by the time I was done but I dropped 20 kilos and I actually didn't change my calorie targets more than once. I actually only dropped it by 50 calories at one point ⁓ in terms of the kind of weekly average and it stayed the whole time for the better part of nine months. Now, you could make the argument that I'm quite active, so I probably had a little bit of a kind of more wiggle room than normal and all the rest of that and that is probably true, but that just shows you like I dropped 20 kilos on the same amount of calories. and I was still losing weight at a really steady pace. I averaged out about .5 to .6 kilos per week over that time. So I think it can be useful context that you often have to change your calories less than you think and you're very much less often at a weight loss plateau than you think you are, right? And if you are four, six, eight, 10, 12, 14 weeks in and you're seeing weight loss slow down, it's likely to be an adherence issue more than it is going to be an actual weight loss plateau. Again, the exception to that would be if you're saying to me, I've lost 25, 30 kilos, well I'd say yeah, well you weigh a lot less so probably do need a few less calories. That's probably quite logical, but certainly in the first instance, it's probably tracking accuracy that you need to lean into or you just need to give it more time because you're having a slower week because you're at a certain point in your cycle where your weight is spiked or you're going through a really stressful period at work so. you're finding there's a little bit more water retention and blah blah blah. These things can factor in for sure, but if you're panicking about being at weight loss plateau after four or five days of weight being stable, then that's not what weight loss plateau is at all. We would be looking at closer, that's to say minimum, probably 10, 11, 12 days before I'd be getting concerned about that. So it's often a much longer time horizon than you think it is. So hopefully that was helpful. in the context of weight loss plateaus. And it came up and I just wanted to talk a little bit about it. This idea that it could be the food that's causing it. The reality is, is if your calories are consistent, that's just not a non-issue. It doesn't happen. You don't suddenly stop losing weight because you've had porridge every day for 30 days. It doesn't work that way at all. So just as a bit of context around that, but also broadly about weight loss plateaus and what we might reasonably expect, how long we can kind of think, okay, if my weight hasn't dropped for... two weeks plus, yeah, you probably are having a little bit of a plateau, but it might not be because of your metabolism, et cetera, et cetera. It's likely to be that your adherence or maybe your tracking somewhere isn't as good as it should be. Now, you could make the argument, and this quick caveat, you could make the argument, if someone was losing really, really slowly beforehand, and then it slowed down a little bit farther, that would be different. So let's say someone's been dropping 0.2 kilos a week. for many, many, many, many, many weeks and they're eating quite high calories proportionate so they're doing quite like a slow and steady diet but really slow and steady. Yeah, maybe you could get to a point that gets so marginal that you might need to drop your calories farther but that's not as often the case. Like that's a fairly rare because most people get bored and don't actually stick it out that long anyway if they're going that slowly but it is worth mentioning too. So hopefully that was helpful on all things weight loss plateaus. I feel like there's always lots to talk around this subject because it's so emotive as well for people. gets so frustrating and actually a lot of the time just tightening up on your tracking means you kick on and make a ton more progress. If you are struggling a bit with weight loss right now and you are feeling frustrated by your lack of progress and you'd like to make... more progress in the next six weeks than you have in the last six months on your own, then it might be worth having a look in the show notes because the link to one-to-one coaching is there as well. So you can click on that link, you can follow up, and you will be able to book a call with me and I'll have a chat through. If I feel you're good fit for coaching, I will speak to you about how all that works. And if I don't think I can help you, then I will suggest kind of elsewhere to go or. kind of what direction is best for you. It's gonna be no pressure at all and you have absolutely nothing to lose because there is no pressure from my end anyway. I operate a little bit of a little wait list now anyway for one-to-one coaching but it means you can have like a no pressure chat through and get some context of what your next steps should be. So if you enjoyed the episode please leave a review otherwise I will speak to you in the next one.