Troubleshooting When Weight Loss Stalls
In my previous article, I gave a 10-point checklist to get started on losing body fat. In this one, I’ll review some strategies to help you figure out why your weight loss may have stopped.
I like to refer to periods of intentional body fat loss as “cuts” or “deficits” (that is, energy deficits), which I’ve adopted from the bodybuilding vernacular. The word “diet” is too entangled with other associations, meanings, and connotations. A “diet” has supplanted what is really a dietary pattern—a way to eat—which is especially what fad diets proselytize: Eat this! Not that! And so on.
Quick aside, which I’ve gotten into in other articles: You can really eat anything so long as you keep your overall energy in relative balance. Now, some foods will not add anything to your health, and some may actually chip away at it—like those high in saturated fats—but there’s a whole range of foods that are basically neutral—not adding or subtracting to your health in any meaningful way so long as that you’re not excessively consuming them. It’s the excess of energy, the overconsumption of calories, that is really the troublemaker.
So, if you’ve ever lost any amount of body weight, you’ve likely experienced a weight loss stall. There are a few possible culprits for why this occurs, but it’s a natural part of the weight loss process, unfortunately.
At first, everything goes smoothly and reliably. It’s kind of exciting, and it even feels easy—no problems with hunger, no excessive exercise, not any noticeable fatigue. We keep doing the same things, and then, for some reason, progress slows, and then it seems to stop altogether.
It’s frustrating. And if you don’t know any better, it’s a bit of a mind-job.
At this point, it’s a good time to friendly remind yourself that if you’re here, your cut is working.
Let’s imagine that we’re working together, and you got to this point much sooner than we would expect.
We’d start troubleshooting, starting with an energy audit.
This is where we go over the foods you’ve been eating and doublecheck their energy content, that is, their calories. We’d also doublecheck you’re tracking or logging the correct amounts. There are a few details that go into this process.
First, food recall is notoriously abysmal. Humans’ default state, to begin with, is to forget things. We only remember a fraction of the information we come across, and that’s the important info, things we care about and that are meaningful to us (usually), and even then, that retained info starts decaying quickly. Can you remember what you had for dinner three days ago? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a little easier if it was an outlier, like a restaurant you don’t often go to. If you tend to eat the same thing for dinner, then sure. If it’s not one of these two situations, it’s probably difficult to recall it. And if you can, I’m sure it’s not rolling off your tongue.
So, we’d first make sure that you’re logging/journaling food as you eat it. It’s easy to have a bite of something and have no memory of it. Even for myself, three days after eating something, I can wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly remember something I ate that I didn’t log, one or two hundred calories that I hadn’t accounted for. It’s a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not far off from reality. If you have a habit of having a chip or two here or there, those calories add up faster than you might think; the same even goes for lower calorie items like veggies, as well as low-calorie drinks, and sugar-free candies (which are not calorie-free), and even condiments, so we’d want to make sure we’re accurately tracking and logging. Again, it’s okay to have some of these higher calorie foods, but we’d want to make sure we’re accounting for them during a cut.
Part of the energy audit is also to confirm that we’re logging what we’re actually eating. For example, we might be eating one brand of bread but inadvertently logging it as another. Calorie differences exist even within the same brand. You might have been logging a lower calorie English muffin but have been eating a higher one. If this occurs with one or two food items, especially if we have more than one serving, it eats into our deficit pretty quickly.
Likewise, we don’t want to simply trust a food that appears in a database or on a tracking app without confirming it for ourselves. Food tracking apps now have scanning features, where you can scan the bar code on a food label and have it pop up. Still, confirm that the label on the package matches what’s in the app. Over the years of doing this myself, I still find errors and discrepancies. If I’m at maintenance and there’s not a huge difference, I don’t sweat it, but if I’m in a deficit and thinking progress is going slower than I’d anticipate, I don’t want to be thinking I’m consuming a certain amount of energy but really be consuming a few hundred more.
On this subject of labeling, it’s also important to remember that companies are allowed up to a 20% margin of error on their labeling1, which is generous. If you’re eating mostly processed foods, and you’re aiming for a 15-20% energy deficit, it’s possible you’re losing the deficit right there. At this point, I’d suggest working more whole foods into your meal plan, natural foods that aren’t prepackaged; that way, you don’t have to worry about this margin of error. You’ll weigh the food yourself, and so long as your scale is accurate, you’ll know exactly what you have.
Also, this might not even be an issue of labeling. It could simply be that a serving isn’t portioned out as the label indicates. For example, on the breads I eat, sometimes I’ll weigh them just to see how they match up with the label. A slice of bread is a serving, which is usually an ounce or 28 grams. Sometimes a single slice can be 1.5 times this serving size. If you’re just logging in a slice of bread as this one-ounce of a serving, that could be 40 or 50 calories going into the ether.
I’ve referenced Kevin Hall a few times in my articles. He’s an obesity researcher with the National Institutes of Health, coming from a background in physics, in which he holds a PhD., and he has one of the most brilliant and poetic lines about weight loss that’s important for all of us to remember during cuts and deficits. As people go further into a weight loss period, they experience “an exponential decay of dietary adherence.”2 That is, we stop monitoring things as we go along. It’s a slippery slope. It starts off with having a chip that we didn’t log. Then it’s a couple. Then it’s a dessert’s energy content that we “estimate”, which is about half of what it really is. Before long, we think we’re cutting when it’s long past us, a small dot in the rearview.
Hopefully, you’re seeing some trends here.
Even when we are being consistent, we might be being consistent in a direction of diminishing accuracy, with an ever-increasing error rate. Then, we might just start being inconsistent, which we don’t even remember.
If you’re at the point where your weight loss, cut, deficit is stalling, don’t get frustrated and quit. This is part of the process. If you’ve been at it for a couple of months, you’re right where you should be. However, if you’re only a few weeks in, unless you’ve been reckless and overly aggressive with your food reduction (that is, a greater than 30% energy reduction), you should still be cruising. At that point, let’s doublecheck your food monitoring with an energy audit:
Human memory is terrible, and food recall is worse, so be absolutely sure you’ve logged/tracked all foods you’ve eaten. Nothing has slipped past our lips without being accounted for.
Confirm that what you log is what you eat. It could be a simple error of logging an inaccurate version of something that we are eating, even if the brand’s the same. Food databases have plenty of errors, and they will often have many iterations of a single food listing. Be sure that you have the correct one by confirming the nutrition info on your food’s label matches what you’re tracking.
Remember that food companies can have up to a 20% margin of error in their labeling, so rely on whole foods that you can weigh yourself (with a digital scale—don’t use volumes); also check to see that the food is coming in or near the serving size that the label indicates, like my example of the bread.
Ask yourself if you are truly being consistent, or have you been getting a little lax with your food portions?
Imagine if each of these is a contributing factor. It’s easy not only to see where we can erase our energy deficit, but we might actually be eating in a small surplus on some days and still think we’re in a sizable deficit. Psychologically, we may feel like we’re restricting energy but actually in a small bulk. Yikes.
Again, you don’t have to do any of this for every single thing you eat for the rest of your life; we’re just running an energy audit for our cut to see if we can find some areas where calories are flying under our radars. We can also think of all this as recalibrating our navigation instruments, to make sure we are in reality heading towards where we think—or hope—we’re headed.
In the next article, I’ll get into some more reasons why our progress stalls on a cut and what else we can do about it.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guide-developing-and-using-data-bases-nutrition-labeling: From the table of contents, click on “How Compliance Works…”