Busting Plateaus - Strategies for Breaking Through Fat Loss Plateaus
Embarking on a weight loss journey can be an empowering and transformative experience - even an enjoyable one, with the right approach…that is, until a dreaded plateau hits.
The frustration of feeling like you’re working hard, ‘doing everything right’ and seeing nothing for it, can be enough to plummet your motivation and push you to abandon your weight loss efforts.
It’s time to stop letting plateaus derail your long-term goals. In this comprehensive guide, we'll delve into the frustration and negative impacts of weight loss plateaus, explore why they happen, and discuss effective strategies for overcoming or avoiding them altogether.
Defining Weight Loss Plateaus
First up, we need to define what a plateau actually is. It’s NOT one week of slow or minimal progress.
When working with clients, we define a plateau as when average weight has not come down for 2 weeks or more. Average weight is important - I recommend weighing at least 3 times per week, and taking an average, as well as noting your lowest weight. Also important that your plateau should not be otherwise explained by:
- illness
- medication
- hormones (commonly menstrual cycle related weight fluctuations)
- low adherence - e.g. eating more and/or moving less than previous weeks, on average
It’s also important to note that we are specifically talking about weight loss plateaus in this post. Weight loss, by definition, requires a calorie deficit, whereby you are consuming fewer calories than you are using. If your goal is fat loss, and you’re not bothered about weight itself, then some of this post may be less applicable to you. Fat loss, unlike weight loss, does NOT require a calorie deficit, and it’s possible to lose fat and build muscle simultaneously. This is the topic I’ll be covering in next week’s newsletter, so make sure you’re signed up to receive it here!
So, now we’ve defined a weight loss plateau, let’s explore…
What causes plateaus?
To effectively overcome plateaus, it's essential to understand why they occur in the first place. Several factors can contribute to hitting a plateau - let’s delve into each one:
Metabolic Adaptation
Weight loss is underpinned by the fundamental principle that it requires you to be consuming fewer calories than you are expending (or ‘burning’) in order to occur.
Your body is incredibly adaptive and efficient at conserving energy - so the longer you’re in a calorie deficit, and the more extreme that deficit, the more likely you are to experience the effects of metabolic adaptation. In simple terms, your metabolism temporarily slows, making it harder to continue losing fat at the same rate.
One of the ways your body does this is by subconsciously decreasing your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) - down-regulating your physical activity. You may fidget less or spend more time sitting or lying down, which decreases calorie expenditure.
Adaptive thermogenesis can also play a role. This is a process whereby more energy is released as heat (or movement, such as NEAT) when more energy is consumed. Some people have higher levels of adaptive thermogenesis than others, meaning when they eat more, they’re less prone to weight gain. This can also work the opposite way when in a calorie deficit, meaning some people’s rate of thermogenesis may decrease to a larger extent than others when trying to lose weight, causing them to hit a plateau sooner.
Another part of metabolic adaptation is the thermic effect of food (TEF). When we eat, we actually burn calories digesting and absorbing the food - equating to around 10% of daily energy expenditure. When you’re eating less, you’re digesting and absorbing less, which can have a small impact on how many calories you’re burning.
Exercise Efficiency:
Just as your metabolism adapts to reduced energy intake, your body also adapts to become more efficient when exercising.
Consider the example of an ultramarathon runner: their metabolism must adapt to the extreme volume of training they undergo to prevent excessive weight loss and maintain energy balance. Similarly, imagine an advanced weightlifter lifting the same weights as a beginner—they wouldn’t need to expend as much energy because their muscles have become more efficient at the movement patterns.
What does this mean in relation to weight loss plateaus? Well, when you perform the same workouts repeatedly without progression, your body becomes accustomed to the demands placed upon it. Over time, this adaptation leads to a decrease in the number of calories burned during exercise compared to when you first started, meaning that even if you’re doing the same as you were back when the scale was moving down, you may be burning fewer calories now, which could contribute to reaching a plateau.
Effect of Bodyweight:
Another factor to consider is the effect of body weight on calorie expenditure both at rest and during exercise. A larger person burns more calories at rest; conversely, a smaller person burns fewer calories at rest. If you’ve lost a significant amount of weight, your resting metabolism is going to be lower, just because you’re smaller. This can, in part, be offset by increasing your muscle mass, since muscle is more metabolically active than fat. Therefore, improving body composition can increase metabolism by a small amount.
Reduced body weight can have a more significant impact on calories burned during exercise. It takes less energy to move less mass - so for example, if you've lost 10 kilograms, you'll burn fewer calories during a 60-minute walk compared to when you were carrying an additional 10 kilograms of body weight.
Stress and Sleep:
Factors such as stress and inadequate sleep can disrupt hormone levels, including cortisol, a stress hormone, and leptin and grehlin, appetite hormones, which may hinder your ability to lose weight. Whilst hormone disruption doesn’t affect the energy balance equation and cause weight gain out of thin air, it can make it harder to achieve a calorie deficit by…
Increasing appetite and cravings
Increasing fatigue and decreasing NEAT
Making it harder to stick to a training routine and push hard during training sessions
Whilst hormonal disruption is beyond the scope of this blog post, the bottom line is that poor sleep and unmanaged stress lead to a cascade of physiological processes that make weight loss - and staying healthy - more challenging!
Decreasing Adherence:
The longer you’re pushing for weight loss, the more likely it is that you start slipping with some of your habits and practices.
When you first started, you were probably weighing everything (not eyeballing portions), and saying no to bites of your partner’s food. You would go weeks sticking to your plan, rather than having a day or two every week where you’re over your targets. You were hitting all your workouts hard, and maybe you were even getting more steps in! Decreasing adherence can mean you’re not consistently in a deficit, so your weight loss stalls.
So you’ve hit a plateau - what next?
If you HAVE hit a plateau, using the definition above, you’ve got two main choices:
Option 1) Address the root cause of the plateau
Option 2) Take a diet break and do a strategic reverse diet
Typically, I would recommend trying option 1, then resorting to option 2 if you’ve exhausted option 1 strategies.
Here’s how to go about option 1, step-by-step…
Step 1
Address stress, sleep, and any lifestyle changes. If any of these areas have changed since you started your calorie deficit, you may have introduced a variable that is putting you out of a deficit. Can you improve your sleep, manage your stress, or any other lifestyle factors that are impacting you? Start here, because these factors have the greatest knock-on effect on the next steps.
Step 2
Address adherence. It may sound obvious. It may even sound harsh! But you need to be 100% honest with yourself, and your coach, if you have one. Off days here and there are normal, and consistency IS more important than perfection for long term results, and a healthy relationship with food and exercise…but if you’re hitting a plateau, and you REALLY want to push past it, you NEED to address adherence. Then you need to ask yourself - is the juice worth the squeeze? Will the sacrifices to flexibility be worth it for you? This is a decision only you can make.
Step 3
Address your training. Are you implementing progressive overload (increasing the difficulty of your workouts)? This applies to strength training, cardio, and hybrid training. If you’ve hit a plateau and your workouts haven’t progressed much since you started, now is a good time to start challenging yourself more in that area!
Step 4
Re-assess calorie requirements - if you have experienced a degree of metabolic adaptation, and your bodyweight has come down, do you need to reduce calorie intake, or increase calorie expenditure, to keep yourself in a deficit? Is it realistic, and is it healthy to do so?
This option is the final option because it’s all-too-common to jump the gun with dropping calories, only to see it backfire when adherence was already low, and the previous calorie target wasn’t being met anyway!
Step 5
If you’ve covered all of the above, given it 2-3 weeks, and you’re still not seeing any change, it’s probably time to switch over to a maintenance phase, or a diet break. Use this period to increase your calorie intake - reverse dieting - to put you in a better position to come back to continue your weight loss at a later stage.
Can you avoid plateaus altogether?
There’s no guaranteed way to avoid a weight loss plateau, but you can absolutely minimise your chances of hitting a plateau by implementing diet breaks - as outlined in the graphic below. You can learn all about diet breaks, what they are, and how/when to use them, here.
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