Having trouble losing weight?
Unless you are a lucky minority, most people who have attempted weight loss have faced the horrid weight loss plateau. This refers to a stop in weight loss for an extended length of time despite no change in observed behaviour (e.g. diet and physical activity).
Anyone who has gone through this will understand how frustrating and discouraging it can be.
Your personal trainer thinks you’re lying,
your friends think that you have messed up your metabolism and
you feel frustrated that the scale is not changing.
Lucky science can provide some explanations that hopefully can help us make smarter decisions to handle this. This blog will investigate the big culprits for weight-loss plateaus.
You Are Unknowingly Eating More Than What You Think
Before diving into the tips, it’s worth mentioning this point—even though it isn’t directly related to how dieting might slow down your metabolism. In many cases, a weight-loss plateau is simply an underestimation of the total amount of food eaten per week.
There are several ways that this can happen. Not accounting for snacks and being unaware of food eaten during ‘less stringent days’ (the weekends) are potential reasons.
Even people who are confident they’re sticking to their planned intake can still end up underestimating how much they’re actually eating.
In one of the largest diet studies ever conducted, the 600 participants consumed an extra 200 calories twelve months after starting versus at the beginning.
This isn’t surprising, as dieting often stimulates appetite—a finding consistently observed in most studies. The increase in hunger that occurs when someone begins dieting can gradually lead to unintentional increases in food intake over time.
This may cause a weight loss plateau without being aware of a change in food intake.
1) Your Body Is Using Less Energy Than What It Did Before
In those people certain that they aren’t eating more than expected, there are other likely reasons.
Their body is likely using less energy than it did when they first started dieting. The new amount of energy that the body is using now matches the total amount consumed which explains why weight loss has stopped.
This still doesn’t explain how someone uses less energy than they did before dieting.
The term ‘metabolic damage’ is commonly used to try to explain this phenomenon. This refers to some sort of permanent damage to the metabolism that results in less overall energy used per day.
Although some practitioners determine this from anecdotal evidence. The available science does not support that this is a likely route for most people.
Studies looking at recovering anorexic patients have found no permanent damage in metabolism once body fat and muscle were proportionally gained.
That said, while metabolic damage may not be real, metabolic adaptation is a genuine phenomenon worth understanding. It refers to a reduction in total daily energy expenditure that goes beyond what can be explained by changes in body mass alone.
2) Eat Less, Move Less?
The biggest culprit for less energy used per day is actually decreases in non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).
NEAT refers to the energy used from activity that isn’t ‘purposeful’. This might include conscious and subconscious activities such as fidgeting, walking and standing.
In some people dieting, their motivation to do ‘everyday-activities’ goes down. This could be conscious activities such as driving to the shops instead of taking the five-minute walk.
It can also include activities that you have little to no control of. Overall, you may move less during the day when usually it’s hard to keep still pre-dieting.
All this leads to a decrease in energy used throughout the day. This response seems to change from person to person and is more clear in larger weight loss attempts (~10kgs).
This is part of why for those looking to lose a significant amount of weight, it could be worthwhile considering diet breaks.
3) Weight-Loss Isn’t All Fat
It is rare to lose a substantial amount of weight without some of that coming from muscle. The reality is that for most people trying to lose body fat, they will likely also lose some muscle. This is because when dieting the body will also use muscle for energy which causes muscle loss.
Muscle is metabolically active tissue. This means that to maintain muscle, your body uses energy. Technically fat requires energy to be maintained as well, but it is a lower amount.
As an estimation, muscle burns around 12kcal/kg/day, while fat burns around 4kcal/kg/day. When you look at it in that context, it isn’t a massive difference, but it certainly makes a difference.
When someone loses weight, they now reduce the amount of muscle. This thereby reduces the amount of energy needed to maintain it. As a result, the body uses less overall energy and can balance out the ‘energy in, energy out’ equation.
The Big Picture
Weight-loss plateaus are complex. It is very rare that all this is a cause of just one factor.
Instead, there are multiple factors that are not limited to those just discussed that contribute to the weight-loss plateau.
