How To Break Through a Plateau
Today let’s talk about plateaus. In particular, how do you know if you truly hit a plateau and if so, how do you break through it so you can continue to see progress.
Before we can discuss these matters in more detail, let’s take some time to define what a plateau is.
Plateau can be defined as a state of little to no change following a period of activity or progress.
Hitting a plateau is often the first thing people think of when they haven’t seen progress in either the scale if they are trying to lose weight or perhaps progress in the gym with their performance.
It’s great people are trying to problem solve like this when it comes to measuring their progress. But often we make a biased assumption that we’ve hit a plateau and need to make an adjustment before looking at the whole picture. Jumping the gun and making an unnecessary adjustment to your program or calories can impact the results in the long run. Therefore, it is crucial to take a step back and objectively analyze the entire situation.
That leads us into the first part of today’s discussion and that’s how do we know if we’ve truly hit a plateau.
A common scenario when one is in a weight loss phase is where progress is seen on a week to week and maybe even a day-to-day basis and after 3-4 weeks you see a good 2-3 weeks where the scale hasn’t moved.
It’s at that point a lot of individuals assume they have hit a plateau.
And perhaps they did.
But we can’t come to this conclusion strictly on this timeline alone. There are several other avenues we need to visit before we can come to an unbiased conclusion.
First and foremost, we need to assess your accuracy. Whether you are tracking your macros or following a meal plan, how accurate and adherent have you been? This is where you have to be honest with yourself and your coach. This part of the analysis isn’t meant to point blame or make you feel guilty. But more so to problem solve so you can rectify the issue and move forward. So don’t be afraid to be honest with what’s going on and if you are working with a coach making you feel guilty for being a human being and not being perfect, a word to the wise… find a new coach.
With assessing your accuracy, you need to assess your lifestyle. This is definitely the most important step in analyzing if you’ve truly hit a plateau or not and it will require some work.
So, what do I mean by assessing your lifestyle?
Like anything, there’s a tradeoff. If you are overly rigid with your diet, you are going to lose some of your flexibility, which may yield some loss of your sanity and enjoyment in life. However, progress will occur a little bit closer to your expectations. It’s up to you to find that balance for yourself based on your lifestyle and your goals.
For example, if you aren’t that social and eating 100% of your meals from your own kitchen is easy for you, clearly you are going to see an increase in your accuracy, which reduces the amount of scale weight fluctuations and optimizes the rate at which you want to yield results.
However, if you are a social butterfly and need to go out once a week, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, you need to understand that just because the nutrition facts for a meal at a restaurant are available online, doesn’t mean those are the actual calories you are consuming. Therefore, your accuracy will go down, which can cause a stall in your progress.
Once you understand this balance between accuracy and flexibility, it may be necessary to try to increase your accuracy if you haven’t seen any progress in a few weeks. The reason we want to do this is because quite often just cleaning up our accuracy can get things moving again and if this happens, we clearly haven’t truly hit a plateau. Instead, just needed to tidy up our accuracy a little bit.
So how can we tidy up our accuracy?
Well, we already mentioned the implications of eating out. So, reducing or even temporarily eliminating how much we are eating out for a short period of time can make a huge difference with tightening things up.
There are several other ways we can increase our accuracy if eating out isn’t an issue that we will quickly touch on.
The first one is to stop eyeballing portion sizes. We want to try to avoid eyeballing portion sizes as often as possible. Even the most experienced trackers can’t accurately eyeball their portion sizes. Yes, eyeballing gets you into the ballpark, but most people underestimate how much they are actually eating.
Next is tracking alcohol. This is often done incorrectly and can be very detrimental to your progress. Now I would argue that consuming alcohol on a regular basis isn’t conducive of a healthy lifestyle. But for the rare occasion that you do want to enjoy a beverage here and there, it’s best to track the alcohol accurately than not at all.
When tracking alcohol, you don’t want to go off the macros listed on the label, you have to account for the calories as well and track those as carbs or fat. This allows you to account for the calories in alcohol.So, if the calories of a drink is 100 calories, you would allocate this to your carbs by dividing 100 by 4, which of 25g of carbs. If you allocate this to fat, you will divide 100 by 9, which is 11g of fat.
Moving on, we actually don’t want to measure our food by volume. We actually want to ensure we are measuring our food by weight. What I mean by this is that we want to focus on weighing out our food versus using measuring cups. Cups and measuring spoons are far less accurate than using a digital food scale.
For example, half a cup of oatmeal shows 40g on the label, but when you weigh it out, it’s closer to 52g. That’s a difference of 75 calories. If we are doing that constantly with multiple different types of foods, you can see how those calories will quickly add up.
Next you want to consider the food labels you are using to track your macros. If you are relying on your macro tracking app, are you using non verified entries?
Now even though MFP and MM+ have large food libraries, doesn’t mean we should just use the first thing we search for. Anyone can add their own entry to a food database and often those entries are incorrect. Always choose the entry with a verified green check to make sure you’re using the most accurate one.
The next one you really need to be honest with yourself here and that’s are you having extra bites, licks or tastes? I understand that there will be moments where you take some extra licks and tastes, especially if you are making your kiddos birthday cake for example. But we have to be mindful of extra bites, licks and tastes, especially if it’s happening more often than not. The lick of peanut butter off the spoon here and there can lead to hundreds of extra calories over the day. All calories count, even if you don’t count them.
Making subtle adjustments like this can go a long way with getting things moving again so you aren’t making an unnecessary adjustment to your program.
Now, if your accuracy is fine and you still aren’t seeing progress, is it at this point an adjustment to your program is needed?
Not quite yet.
There are still a few things that we want to analyze before coming to the conclusion that you’ve reached a plateau.
After analyzing our accuracy and making the appropriate adjustments, it’s time to analyze our consistency. We mainly want to consider the consistency of our meal timing, food choices, water intake and protein distribution.
If one day you are having 5 meals a day, the next day only 2 meals a day and the next day 7 meals a day, this lack of consistent meal timing can affect the timeline of your digestion, bowel movements, and can hinder an accurate representation of what the scale reports. This can lead one to believe they have hit a plateau when in actuality it may be a digestive issue which can be rectified from more consistent meal timing.
When it comes to our food choices, it’s important to understand that we have to consider much more than just our macronutrient targets. We want to take into consideration our micronutrients and fiber intake as well. Not consuming enough fiber or in reverse too much fiber can cause digestive issues, which again will impact the results of the scale.
You can see a trend here I am sure, where the same implications will arise from inconsistencies in our water intake and even protein distributions with each meal.
After we are done analyzing our consistency and have made the appropriate adjustments, we now want to take a look at our stress and sleep management. These are easily the two most underrated yet extremely important considerations before we jump the gun on making an unnecessary adjustment.
Before we look into improvements we can make, let’s quickly touch on why stress and sleep management are SO important.
When our brain detects a stressor, our fight or flight response kicks in, where your brain forces resources needed for survival. For instance, if we experience a stressful moment, our brain sends a signal to stop regular metabolic processes (like digestion) and instead focus efforts on finding a way to reduce or eliminate that stressor. This is fine for momentary stressors such as lifting weights or having to slam on our breaks in traffic because our body has time to relax, normalize and basically get back to its scheduled programming.
The issue arises when we are in a chronic state of stress, where our body never gets a break from the need to be in this survival mode to combat the constant stressors. Over enough time this definitely has some negative implications, where other hormones are trying to adapt to get the body back to a relaxed state. We start to see negative adaptations to our thyroid, mood, muscle growth, gut health, recovery, sleep etc.
When it comes to being constantly sleep deprived, we too see some concerning changes. We can start to see memory issues, mood changes, increased risk of diabetes, weight gain and heart disease.
So hopefully this paints a picture just how important stress and sleep management truly are.
Before we consider making an adjustment to your program, managing sleep and stress needs to be prioritized.
Getting to the root of these issues is of course independent to the athlete and their situation. But implementing healthy habits to mitigate stress and increase sleep quality needs to be a priority.
It may take some time for sure, but it’s worth putting in that effort before making an unnecessary adjustment.
Analyzing, adjusting and then managing all of these different variables can take some time to implement. It’s not as simple as coming to the conclusion that you’ve hit a plateau because you haven’t seen progress in a few weeks. There are so many other complicated variables that need to be considered
Which leads me into the last consideration.
And that’s “is a calorie cut realistic?”
If you still aren’t seeing progress after looking at all these variables and making the appropriate adjustments, then yes it may be time to make an adjustment by either reducing your calories or adding in more cardio. Often this is all that is needed to break through that plateau and continue on with your fat loss phase.
A lot of people are under the assumption that your calories are fixed for the entire journey. However, your calories are never fixed. Your metabolism is always adapting to your energy balance
For example, say you need to lose 20lbs in 20 weeks. If we start off this dieting period where you consume only 1200 calories, yes you might lose a good amount of weight right away but eventually you are going to plateau. Maybe you lose 5lbs in the first 5 weeks, but you notice you are plateauing because you haven't seen the scale move in 3 weeks. After careful consideration, we decide it's time to cut your calories to break the plateau. These calorie cuts can range from 300-500 calories in order for it to be significant enough to get things moving. That means we need to drop your calories down to 700-900 calories and we still have 12 weeks left in our 20-week period
What happens if we hit another plateau before the 12 weeks is up? And honestly, we can actually survive mentally and physically off 700-900 calories a day? It's not sustainable but if you start off your cut at 1200 calories, you won't lose your 20lb goal because eventually your body DOES adapt and plateau.
This is why it's so important to start off the dieting phase on as many calories as possible so we can prolong the dieting phase and make reasonable calorie cuts during the time period
But before you make this adjustment, you need to decide if it is realistic. I don’t want your calories getting so low like the example I just gave.
You can answer this question by asking yourself how long have you been dieting for? Is the thought of adjusting your calories down even further daunting? I’m definitely not trying to discourage anyone from continuing on with their weight loss phase, but it’s important to recognize the signs that a diet break might be needed. And if you’ve been dieting for longer than 6 months and you cringe at the thought of adjusting your calories down, then it might be time to consider a diet break.
Dieting is very hard on your nervous system, so if you aren’t seeing results, it’s because your nervous system is stressed and NEEDS a break. If you don’t give yourself this necessary break, you likely will not see the continued progress you are looking for. It doesn’t matter how hard you push yourself, or how low your calories are. So, bring your calories back up to your maintenance levels and take a good amount of time off, depending on your situation. You may only need a week or two. And remember that this will help regulate your hormones and speed up your metabolism so you can activate the fat loss stage later on and keep going.
Be sure to check out episode 53 to learn how you can implement a diet break.
Hope this was helpful!
Coach Krysten