Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 68: Have I hit a weight loss plateau?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Hello, hello and welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And the title for this is a little bit click-baity. Have I hit a weight loss plateau? The drama, the tension, or indeed not the drama and tension really, because the answer is no. So my weight had been static there for about five or six days. which is the first time in this weight loss process, right? So, so far this year I've dropped from 86.5 all the way down to 70, 7.8, my very, lowest, but over the last few days it had been hanging about a little bit more. I'd come back from my stag, dropped a little bit back from my stag, and then it kind of just sat quite steadily. Now, there's a couple of reasons this would have likely happened in practical terms. One, my steps were a little bit lower, very naughty of me, but I'll be completely transparent as I wanted to do on this kind of lost journey. Obviously my stag was over a long weekend but that meant the Monday. I was hoping, hoping, to do a half day. However, what happened was the kind of like, people have been talking about this online I think, kind of queue issues reared their ugly head. Thankfully we only an hour and 50 minutes to get through passport control but when we got to the other side all the flights that landed and were looking to depart couldn't disembark their passengers because the system was completely down in airport so yeah there was no movement basically so we were in the airport for about three and a half hours something like that longer than we're to then of course you get onto the plane and you know the story so anyway it was a long day and I did not get a chance to sort of get my Monday in and as normal even just a few hours which meant I was playing kind of catch up on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and had to do some very long days so my step count suffered I still managed to hit kind of 8,000 steps across those days but I normally hit 13,000 so my steps were down a little bit and also I I would normally go to basketball sort of two to three times a week. I went once because I just couldn't get the time away. I just needed to work and catch up. So sometimes that's real life, right? That's the practicalities. You know, I can look myself in the eye and say, I got up early to go for a bit of a walk. I went for a walk in the evening afterwards as well and ended up walking for 45, 50 minutes to really get my steps up because we were a bit low, but I couldn't really do anything more. My day was long enough. I was up at half five and I was working till eight. You know, there's limits, right? I'm committed to that, but I'm not going to stress myself out over a few days had to be bit lower, then as of the weekend it's picked up, right? That's just real life. But the point is this is that I can kind of look at it and say, well, a bit less basketball, steps a bit lower, that would have a little bit of an impact. Even so, my scale weight had been pretty sticky and it stayed steady for, as I say, think about five days there. And then as of this morning, it dropped about 0.7 or 0.8 kilos. And we've got two sets of scales, but the sets I'm using here have got like their extra decimal point in this one, but basically down 0.7, 0.8 kilos from the day before, which of course, is great and you know. fantastic, it's dropped down a bit. But the point is this, is that I didn't react to it. And I think this is the bit that people can kind of learn from a little bit, is that it just didn't change anything. Like I didn't stress myself out that I'd seen this low 77.8 and my weight was hanging around 79s for a few days, like I just didn't stress about it. What's been really interesting and weirdly enough is it's also this week that I've noticed the most visual changes. Like I was really noticing it in my arms for example, so I trained earlier today and saw myself in the mirror and noticed a bit of a difference. was also doing lots of filming today as well. So Thursday's kind of my main day that, know, the other four days a week I do a lot, a lot of client work. Thursday's the sort of day that I take a bit of time to do the podcasting and the... ⁓ filming side of obviously coaching as well, which is an important part of it. So that's kind of what I've been doing and I've really noticed that it's quite obvious and it's interesting how that works, right? My weight's not really moved, but I would say even over the last five days, I noticed a bit of a tangible difference in terms of how I look visually. So this is again it. You cannot read too much into what the scales are saying. as it happened to drop .7 or .8 kilos overnight. I didn't do anything special yesterday. Just did the same damn stuff I was doing the day before, right? It really did nothing special. That's a reality. So I think being a bit savvy about that can be very, very important as well is that sometimes people get in a panic that they've hit a weight loss plateau and their weight stays the same for five days. When I was doing a photo shoot previously, I had about two weeks where my weight did not drop. Now, I'm gonna contextualize that for most people, that's fairly unusual, but I was right at the back end, right at the back end of the diet and I was very, very lean. And at that stage, it's incredibly common for weight just to not play ball. And actually into the second week, at one point, crept up a little bit and I was like high on earth, because I was smashing my steps, very active, doing all the right things. But of course, when I was taking my progress photos, very obvious visual changes, even in that 14 days, because I was at the kind of tail end of it, you see visual changes quicker, my goodness, I could see a difference, right? And I could see it even in my clothes were kind of like getting looser and looser and looser, and they were already fairly loose. So again, frustrating, and then overnight I dropped, I think it was like 1.4 kilos, and is my most, I guess it's the best example of like no idea to this day why overnight it all just dropped off like that, but it did. Maybe I had a really good sleep. and that kind of stress of dieting my body kind of diminished because obviously I was getting really, really quite lean. Maybe that had a bit of an impact, who knows? But it all just went, my weight just plummeted down. I couldn't believe I was stepping scales. I genuinely thought, was like, these scales are snookered. I need to go and get a new battery for them. They're obviously dying, but they weren't. They were just fine. That was just what happened. So I think this is a really, really important thing to kind of touch on is weight loss plateaus are often as not false plateaus rather than real ones. And if you are hitting an actual weight loss plateau, a lot of the time it's not because you need to drop your calories lower, it's because your tracking accuracy has slipped, maybe you can realize, was on holiday 10 days ago and actually my weight spiked a lot and it feels like I've plateaued and it feels like I've been stuck at the 77s for two, three weeks and it's like, yeah, but actually you went on holiday, your weight spiked a bit after that, that's why. These things are more often a factor than actual weight loss plateau. So I just wanted to kind of touch base on that a little bit as And almost yeah, just acknowledge that I'm not perfect either. I'm very, very consistent. And this is the first like these three days of the first days that I have missed my step target quote unquote considerably for three days on the bounce. There are certain days of the week that are lower for me, but I always hit that average. Now last week I didn't hit my average, I was under it. I ended up in about 11,000 steps. So was about 2,000 per day under, which is 14,000 over the week is decent enough. That's a fair gap, right? That I kind of dropped down. But it just is one of these things where consistency really matters. but we also can't be perfectionists all the time. Now, there is a balance, you know, if that happened again this week, I'd be calling myself out and saying, hey, you're just getting slack on that, but it's a good example of like sometimes things come up and sometimes that has a little bit of an impact on weight loss, but we can be analytical about it rather than reactive about it as well. So if that was helpful, then drop a little review for the show as well, feel free to do that. But otherwise, if you are looking for a little bit more support and you need a bit of a hand in terms of moving moving on to the next stage of weight loss or honestly just getting your weight loss going, then you can book a call with me in the show notes. There is a link for one-to-one coaching and you can find out more about that. Or if you just want to ping me a little message, there'll also be a link to my WhatsApp number in the show notes too and you can just ping me a message there. Otherwise, have a great day and speak to you soon.