The psychology of plateaus — mental health during weight loss stalls

Dr.ObesityMed said:

Weight is a noisy signal — daily variation of one to two kilograms from glycogen, sodium and gut contents — so a fortnight of flat readings is well…

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 201 lbs for 5 weeks. Tried everything — calorie cycling, increased exercise, more water. Nothing worked.

What finally broke the plateau: switching from evening to morning injection. Lost 11 lbs in the next 2 weeks. Plateaus are temporary — they always break if you stay consistent.

Following on from Dr.AddMedPHL — and this may be the naive question:

How people separated a drug effect from the ordinary consequences of a large deficit and disrupted sleep, because I cannot?

raj_cambridge said:

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 201 lbs for 5 weeks.

Coming at raj_cambridge’s question from a different direction. The mental-health dimension is under-measured in the trial literature and the reports here are consistent enough to take seriously. On the positive side: reduced anxiety around food, better self-image, more confidence. On the difficult side: grief for the years lost, identity disruption, relationships built around eating, and the loss of food as a coping mechanism with nothing put in its place. Rarer but real: anhedonia and emotional flatness. Regulators have started asking for validated patient-reported outcomes in this class; the existing data gap is not evidence of absence.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Rolling average over five weeks showed I had lost 1.6kg during my "plateau". The scale was noise and the tape had moved. I changed nothing and it resumed.

PharmHunterJen said:

The mental-health dimension is under-measured in the trial literature and the reports here are consistent enough to take seriously.

Agreed, and one caution: a single measurement is not a measurement. Anything that moves day to day needs a trend before it means anything at all.