If you’re in a well-planned fat loss phase (or calorie deficit) using a macros approach, it’s not a matter of IF you will plateau with your progress, but WHEN you will plateau.
But don’t fear a weight loss plateau. Your body has a ton of fail-safes that activate when it senses fuel stores are low (that’s a good thing)! In order to gently push past a plateau and continue seeing fat loss, we might check to make sure you’re mastering the basics before manipulating macro targets. Because, after all, we don’t fix things that aren’t broken. Most often, weight loss plateaus are caused by failing to consistently execute on the basics. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Before jumping to the conclusion that you’re in a plateau, it’s important that you are measuring progress correctly. This is because weight loss and fat loss are distinctly different.
Your scale weight is simply a measure of gravity on your body at one moment in time, it does not measure how much of that “weight” is muscle, fat, bone, water, etc. When you lose weight, it can come from muscle, water or fat – or a combination. If you are eating enough to support strength training and muscle building while in a deficit, the scale might not reflect the changes that are happening in your body, but your physique will.
Adding more muscle will make you appear leaner, more toned or defined because muscle takes up less space than body fat on your frame. That said, instead of relying on just scale weight changes, you should rely on a combination of progress pictures and tape measurements to evaluate your progress towards improved body composition (fat loss and lean muscle gain). If you do use the scale, best practice is to weigh yourself each day and then find your average scale weight across the week. By comparing your weekly weight averages over time, you’ll get a better sense of what is happening with your body composition.
If you’re confident that you’ve reached a plateau while measuring average scale weights, progress pictures and body measurements, then you can look to the 9 Tips to Get Past a Weight Loss Plateau list below.
Before adjusting macro targets, make sure you are doing the things on this list first.
If you can successfully say that you’re doing everything on the above list AND you’ve seen no changes in your average scale weight, body measurements or progress pictures for two consecutive weeks, then you could be in a plateau. If so, it’s time to adjust calories down slightly for another two weeks before reassessing progress.
But remember this; when you have goals for body composition change, you should opt for a slight calorie deficit and aim to be eating as much food as possible while seeing fat loss. This keeps hormones happy and metabolism healthy while still allowing you to reach your goals for fat loss and lean muscle gain. If and when you are making adjustments, slight adjustments are almost always better than drastic ones.