Here’s when your weight loss will plateau, according to science

Whether you’re shedding pounds with the help of effective new medicines, slimming down after weight loss surgery or cutting calories and adding exercise, there will come a day when the numbers on the scale stop going down, and you hit the dreaded weight loss plateau.

Whether you’re shedding pounds with the help of effective new medicines, slimming down after weight loss surgery or cutting calories and adding exercise, there will come a day when the numbers on the scale stop going down, and you hit the dreaded weight loss plateau. In a recent study, Kevin Hall, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who specializes in measuring metabolism and weight change, looked at when weight loss typically stops depending on the method people were using to drop pounds. He broke down the plateau into mathematical models using data from high-quality clinical trials of different ways to lose weight to understand why people stop losing when they do. The study published Monday in the journal Obesity. What he found is that part of the reason that gastric bypass surgery and new weight loss drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound are so effective is because they double the time it takes to hit a plateau. People are able to lose weight for longer than by cutting calories alone. The body regulates weight by trying to maintain an equilibrium between the calories we eat and the calories we burn.  When we expend or cut calories, and start burning our stored energy, appetite kicks in to tell us to eat more.  Hall’s studies have shown that the more weight a person loses, the stronger appetite becomes until it counteracts, and sometimes completely undoes, all the hard work they’ve done to lose in the first place. This feedback mechanism was valuable for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but it doesn’t work so well for modern humans who have easy access to energy dense ultra-processed foods. To study the trajectory of weight loss using calorie restriction alone, Hall modeled the observed weight loss in the CALERIE study, which randomly assigned 238 adults to either two years of following a 25% calorie restriction diet or eating as they normally would. The study ran from 2007 to 2010 and was sponsored by the NIH. The adults in the group that cut calories lost on average about 16 pounds. The group that followed their normal diets gained about 2 pounds.