Why Do Weight Loss Plateaus Happen? A Recent Study Found The Answer

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If you thought parent-teacher meetings were bad, you never had a weight loss plateau. You do everything right — eating properly and exercising at least a few times a week — but the weight just won’t budge anymore. Losing weight becomes about as horrible as it’s possible to imagine.

So if you have been losing weight steadily but then plateaued for about four weeks or more, a recent study found the reason for it. And the explanation is pretty simple because there are only two possibilities:

• As soon as you start dieting (read: apply calorie deficit), your basal metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, thermic effect of exercise, and non-exercise activity thermogenesis all go down and you start burning fewer calories in total. It’s known as metabolic adaptation a.k.a your body adapts to weight loss and defends against additional loss of weight unless further decreases in calorie intake are applied.
• Your dietary adherence sucks mud. Consciously or unconsciously you start eating more than you realize and this erases the calorie deficit needed for weight loss to occur.

And so the study by Thomas et al aimed to find out which of those two plays a bigger role in reaching an early weight loss plateau: