Why you stopped losing weight
"I'm doing everything the same and the scale stopped. What happened?" Something did happen, and it is almost never the thing people fear. Here is what to check, in the order of how often it turns out to be the answer.
First: is it a plateau at all?
A plateau is three or four weeks without a change in the trend — not five days. The scale moves by a kilogram or two from water, salt, glycogen and gut contents, and a week of "no change" is usually a week of noise around a trend that is still falling. If it has been less than three weeks, read why the scale jumps first and come back if it is still flat.
Most often: the deficit has disappeared
"Everything the same" is the clue. A deficit is the gap between what you eat and what you use, and both sides of that gap drift over months:
- You use less than you did. A smaller body needs less energy. In the resting-energy equation the app uses, every kilogram lost takes about ten kilocalories a day off resting expenditure, and the ordinary day and exercise scale with weight too. After ten kilograms, the intake that was a solid deficit is closer to maintenance — with no change in behaviour at all.
- Intake creeps upward. Portions grow back a little, a snack stops being logged, the weekend loosens. Measured against expenditure — with the doubly labelled water method, not with diaries — people's intake is consistently higher than what they report, and the gap tends to grow the longer a diet goes on. This is not lying; it is how memory and portion perception work.
Put the two together and the deficit that was 500 kilocalories a day in week one can be near zero by month four, with the person doing, to the best of their knowledge, exactly the same thing.
Second: the target was never recalculated
This is the same cause seen from the app's side. A calorie target computed once from the starting weight and never revised builds in the plateau: it stays right while you stay the same weight, and drifts toward maintenance as you lose. The app's own first calculator had exactly this bug, and it was fixed by re-issuing the target from the current trend weight. Whatever tool you use, the target has to move with you.
Rarely: something else
Metabolic adaptation — expenditure dropping below what the new weight predicts — is real, variable between people and usually small in the better studies; the review of it does not support a figure large enough to explain a plateau on its own, though it can add to one. Some medications affect weight; some conditions do. If you have done the two checks above honestly for a month and the trend is truly flat, that is the point to talk to a doctor — not before, and not with the assumption that your metabolism is "broken", which is not what the data show.
What to do
- Recalculate the target from your current weight — the calculator on the next page, or the app if you are in it.
- Track one week more carefully than usual: weigh rather than estimate, log the drinks and the tastes while cooking.
- Then decide. If intake was where you thought and the new target is what you were already eating, lower it modestly; if intake was higher, you have found the plateau.
In the app
The app re-issues the daily target from the current trend weight, not from the starting weight, and shows you when a re-issue changed it. That is precisely the plateau its first version used to create, and the reason it no longer does.