The Perception of Weight Loss Stalling
Photo: The Frustration of Dieting, or “I Overshot my Calories!” [My Titles]
In my last article, I covered a few reasons why your weight loss maybe stalling, and a first step to figure out why can be an energy audit. Some major culprits are inaccurate food recall (happens to all of us); tracking or logging consistently inaccurately due to errors in food databases and even on the food labeling itself; as well as getting a little lax sticking to your numbers.
There are more similar areas to retrace our steps in the auditing process. However, in this article, I’d like to get more into our perception of weight loss stalling. It helps to understand this whole process.
First, let’s remember that weight loss is not necessarily synonymous with fat loss, and fat loss is what we want and what we’re aiming for. If you hop on the scale, go to the bathroom, and return to the scale, you’ll have lost some body weight, but that change is not a change in body tissue.
If you’ve never tracked your bodyweight throughout a single day, give it a try once, and you’ll see wild fluctuations. You’ll easily know that those are transient changes and, again, don’t reflect any difference in body tissue accretion or removal.
Even if you did one of those stupid social media 10,000 calorie food challenges, where someone tries to eat that amount in a single day, your body could not metabolize all that energy into body tissue immediately. It would take at least two or three days. Even then, you would not metabolize it all into your body tissues. Some of the energy will not get absorbed, and some will be dissipated as heat through all that digestion, and some of that energy will be used for your own body processes.
Going the other way, imagine you were to eat nothing for one day but two cans of regular tomato soup (one of my favs), which are less than 11 ounces and about 225 calories per can. I would bet that the next day your scale weight would jump up, even though you’d only be consuming around 600 calories, which would also put you into a steep energy deficit, meaning you’d definitely be tapping into fat stores. (You’d also start chewing up muscle protein.)
You’d likely see a jump in body weight due to the high sodium content of each can, which is about 1,200 milligrams, putting the total at 2,400 mgs with two cans, which is higher than the highest guidelines and recommendations for sodium consumption by the American Heart Association (which is 1,500 – 2,300 mgs a day—ideally aiming for under 1,500).1 Sodium attracts water, and you’d hold on to that excess water for the next day or two (or three) until your body has cleared it all out of your system.
Sodium and salt consumption is one thing that can mask our fat loss, both visually and on the scale. As we hold onto water, it fills up the space between the muscles and skin. Bodybuilders call this look “spilled over”. So you might be maintaining a consistent and significant energy deficit, but if some of your foods are a little too salty, and you’re hanging on to extra water, or even if you eat something salty every couple of days, it’s an easy way to mask any appearance of progress in fat loss.
In the other direction, you can reduce your sodium intake the next day and see a sizeable drop on the scale. Again, you’ve just dropped some extra water.
Think about it. If you exist on 2,000 calories a day, that equals a little more than half a pound of adipose (3,500 calories is about one pound of adipose), so the best case scenario is that you’d only lose a half pound in a single day without eating, but as I covered, when we restrict food and energy to this degree, the energy difference is also coming from body proteins.
Another issue related to body water and fluid retention is cortisol, affectionately referred to as the stress hormone. Actually, cortisol is a homeostatic hormone that pops up under times of stress. Among the things it does is it helps to activate energy systems, priming us for fighting or fleeing.
Unfortunately, cortisol also increases body water, and double unfortunately, a period of energy restriction is a stressful period for the body. At first, it’s not an issue, but the longer your deficit goes, the more your body will start ramping up the cortisol. Again, this is temporary and relatively transient. A large meal as well as a couple of days at maintenance energy will bring these levels down as your body senses that the stress of energy restriction has lifted. Again, though, you could be chipping away at the adipose, but if your stress is up, either from the diet or other things in life, chances are that your body water’s up too, masking any progress you’re probably making.
There’s another phenomenon that bodybuilders and physique athletes have observed, and which also can account for hiding and masking fat loss: the Whoosh Effect. This effect also deals with body water content and fluid retention. I once came across some mechanistic description of the physical process of adipose oxidation—not the chemistry or physiological mechanisms really, but the physical movement.2
The researcher explaining this said that a lipid molecule is first removed from the adipocyte—the fat cell—which is a little vacuole, a little sack. Once the lipid is removed, the little sack remains, but now it’s empty. At that point, water fills in that space. For some reason, the water will sit there for some period before it’s expelled. The water might remain for a few days; it could be a couple of weeks. Upon expulsion, the fat cell will shrink to its default and unused size, so long as there’s not any surplus energy that needs to be stored there. If this happens with a multitude of cells at once, we get a whoosh—a sudden and large drop in body weight and maybe even a noticeable visual change in the mirror.
I’m not sure how true any of this physical process is, but it jives with the Whoosh Effect in many anecdotes of weight loss, on the order of a couple of pounds, seemingly from one day to the next. Bodybuilders, physique athletes, and their coaches often hypothesize that when a sizeable energy deficit has been maintained consistently for a few weeks and no change in bodyweight or scale weight has been observed, and there are no other likely reasons to explain a stall—remember these folks are experts at tracking energy and hitting their targets, and they’re well aware of sodium, fiber, the weight of food, and how it all affects body water— when this drop occurs, it’s the body expelling the water from some of these recently vacated adipocytes.
Unfortunately, weight loss is not a linear process or progression, even when we’re doing everything right, which is why we need to be patient and give the process time. I’ve heard many natural competitive professional bodybuilders and their coaches say that we’ve got to trust the process. We have to give it a few weeks. At the minimum, these experts at body manipulation will say that we must do things consistently for three to four weeks before we make any changes to our system. Otherwise, we risk interrupting a process that is occurring perfectly well, albeit one that we just can’t see in the way that we want at a given moment.
I’ve done a few diets (cuts, as we like to call them) over the past five years now, and I’ve experienced this whoosh every single time. Sometimes, it happens sooner, earlier in the cut; sometimes, it happens later. Sometimes, it occurs once, but there have been cuts where it has occurred several times. And I eat pretty uniformly during these periods, and I’m aware of all the things that we’ve discussed.
So, if you’re in the middle of your own cut, and you feel like what your doing’s not working, if you’ve given it a solid month of consistency, and you’re sure there’s been no change in your physique—like body measurements, visual appearance (take pics), and scale weight—it might be time to do an energy audit.
Understanding how, when, where, and why some of these bodyweight fluctuations occur helps us maintain our motivation and efforts and really does alleviate some of the stress of it all. Dieting/cutting can get inside our heads. We can get a bit peeved if we feel like we’re putting in solid efforts, but our results aren’t matching. Seeing a little progress and success makes all the difference.
If we know what to expect and that this is all part of the process, we know that there are always hills and valleys, peaks and slopes, and we’ll never know which one we’re in until we’re well past it.
IF you haven’t given yourself much time of consistency—at least three or four weeks—you’re probably on the right track, even if you can’t see it.
Stay the course for a hot minute, and you might surprise yourself.
I can’t seem to find the original source or an analogue, but I’ll continue scouring the webs for a reputable source and not random people opining about it (a little irony and self-deprecation there).