Week 16 Progress Report: Plateaus Aren’t Really Flat

Here are today’s numbers:

Starting Weight:	257.2
Original Target*:	273.8
Adjusted Target:	255.4
Actual Weight:	256.4
Loss/Gain:	– 0.8
Total Loss:	46.2
% of Goal:	33.3%
Avg. Loss/Wk.:	– 2.9
*Original target calculated from a starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.

This last week is hard to describe. There wasn’t a day since Tuesday that I went over-budget; yet on Wednesday, my weight shot up a discouraging 2.6 pounds, wrecking my effort to achieve the May challenge goal of 3% loss.

I’m almost certain that much of the fluctuation depends on how much sleep I’ve gotten when I weigh in, as well as the vagaries of estimating some portions and the calories I’ve consumed. For instance, yesterday I got up at 3:30 am to pick my cousin up from DFW International Airport, so I weighed in shortly thereafter. After taking him to Gainesville, a 1½-hour trip with a 45-minute stop at Cracker Barrel for a 500-calorie breakfast, having consumed my normal travel mug full of coffee (with a little extra at Cracker Barrel), I weighed again for the heck of it when I got back home. The scale told me I had neither lost nor gained anything. I should have expected at least a fractional difference because I was wearing street clothes rather than pajamas. Weird.

(How do you get a 500-calorie breakfast at Cracker Barrel, where carbs and fat abound? Simple: A side of two eggs — I prefer “over medium” — and a side of their Loaded Hashbrown Casserole. A lot of their breakfast entrees are under 550 calories, so long as you don’t get “All the Fixin’s.”)

If you go to New Mexico, you’ll see that plateaus aren’t literally flat any more than Kansas is literally flat. Like Kansas, plateaus generally have so few large plants or trees that you can see for miles, the eye blurring the gentle contours of the land. In fact, the flattest land I’ve seen is the Platte River valley in Nebraska as I-80 west of Grand Island runs parallel to it almost to the Nebraska-Colorado border. But if the slope as you move away from the mountains is so gradual you don’t notice, it’s still downhill.

Weight-loss plateaus are like that — at least, they are for me. The larger fact that I’ve lost 46 pounds in almost 4 months hides the subtler fact that there have been many days where my weight went up, that I finished one week almost a pound heavier than I started. There have been days outside of “diet holidays” where my self-control couldn’t stand up against the presence of a beloved food. If you look at my Ticker Factory graph, which is based on daily weights, you can see the upward bumps in an otherwise downward trend.

The point is, the trend is still downward.

Trust the process. Remember, we work with averages and estimates; the food you eat is under no compulsion to be exactly the number of calories you log. But whatever else your body does during plateau periods, it can’t pull fuel out of nowhere. Eat fewer calories than you burn and you’ll lose weight. It’s that simple, if not always that easy. And as your calorie budget shrinks, you change your food choices and eating patterns to fit within the tighter restrictions and/or you get more active to create more room in the budget.

(I’ll admit that exercising in order to eat more is a tail-wagging-the-dog way to think of it. However, many of the dishes we deem “comfort food” I believe were developed when more adults did physically demanding work and children burned calories by playing outdoors.)

So okay, it’ll probably be another week before I hit the 255 mark. The June challenge is to lose 10 lbs. by 6/30, which for me means ≤ 246.4 lbs., so I have to lose an average 2.5 lbs./week to hit that target. It’s a stretch; over the last month, I averaged ~1.9 lbs./week, which is just over the rate at which I’d planned to lose in the first place. But it’s not impossible, either. At any rate, I expect to be below 250 by then, which would check off my first major goal.

Even the largest plateau comes to an end sometime.