“let us bust the myth of physical activity and obesity. You cannot outrun a bad diet”

[jeff47]

47. Plateaus are a huge problem.

My hubby got better and I went back to farming this spring, the weight did not change. I purposely made my planting schedule very rigorous. Nothing, not a pound did I lose.

Plateaus are a huge problem. People seem to lose weight for a while, and then it just stops at some particular size. For me, it's 254lbs. I can get to that easily. I can not get under that without a hell of a lot of pain.

It seems my body has a plateau where it really does not want to get under that. Reading around on the Internet about plateaus, I've found it's pretty common, and a big reason why "diets" fail - you hit a plateau and just give up. Sure, you can run up the stairs without breathing hard, but you just can't lose any more weight.

What the stuff I read claimed is you've basically got two options: Either you have to starve yourself, or you have to just keep going with what you have been doing for a long time. After many months, you'll start losing weight again.

The former solution requires continuing to cut calories going forward, because your body will keep trying to get back to that plateau. So 2000 calorie diet becomes 1700 becomes 1500 and so on.

The latter means you will be "overweight" longer, but a lot of other health indicators will still be going up. But it's hard to stay on that plan since we can't see our blood glucose level or cholesterol level, so we don't see any improvement until a long time has passed. That makes it very easy to "fall off the wagon" while waiting to break through your plateau.

Personally, I'm waiting and trying to encourage myself by noticing things that used to be hard to do are now easy to do, and reminding myself that the number on the scale is just a poor proxy for the numbers on blood tests.