Face gains thread — September 2026

nick_newbie said:

Nine weeks flat after five months of steady loss, same dose, same routine, and I cannot tell whether to wait or change something.

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 195 lbs for 6 weeks. Tried everything — calorie cycling, increased exercise, more water. Nothing worked.

What finally broke the plateau: increasing protein to 150g/day. Lost 9 lbs in the next 2 weeks. Plateaus are temporary — they always break if you stay consistent.

KevinCompounds said:

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 195 lbs for 6 weeks.

That is correct as far as it goes, and here is where it stops going. Genuine plateaus happen too, and the mechanism is metabolic adaptation plus a smaller body. A body 20kg lighter needs meaningfully fewer calories at rest and less to move, so the deficit that produced the first phase is arithmetically smaller now. The options are the honest ones — increase the deficit slightly, increase activity, or accept the new plateau — and escalating the dose is only one of them.

nick_newbie said:

Nine weeks flat after five months of steady loss, same dose, same routine, and I cannot tell whether to wait or change something.

Can confirm. Same sequence, different timescale.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. There is a difference between no evidence and evidence of no effect, and this subject is one where the two get swapped freely in both directions.