Hi, I lost weight for 3 months and then hit a plateau – I stayed there for 5 months. As I was only a kilogram away from my goal I decided to stop stressing and call it maintenance. I knew that as I was adhering to FDs, the issue was too many calories on the other days. As I have a very low TDEE (1400cal), it’s very easy for me to eat too much on a NFD.

If you hit a plateau and stay there for many weeks then it means the calories you are consuming over the week (FD+NFD combined) are what you need to maintain your current weight rather than reduce it – this isn’t necessarily true for short plateaus, but it is for those than go on for months rather than weeks. If you are staying under 500cal on your FDs then the issue is the NFDs. I’d suggest you go to the “how it works” tab at the top of this screen and recalculate your TDEE for your GOAL weight rather than current weight. Be very conservative with activity level as I find this calculator uses a multiplier that is overly generous. Then look at what you are eating on NFDs and see whether it fits within that TDEE.

The other factor may be the foods you are eating. Some people seem to have more sensitivity to certain foods and struggle to lose weight when they include them in their regular diet. You could try excluding certain foods and see if it makes a difference. If you have any foods that you struggle to limit to a small quantity, I’d probably start with those. Other foods that are common problems are alcohol, sugar, starchy carbs, salty foods.

I hope that after exploring this you find some things that help.

@pamollygram. By definition you now eat as many calories as you consume. Are all foods processed the same as each other. Do all people process the same foods the same. Absolutely not. Does your metabolic rate change in response to different foods (even if they have the same calorific content)? Yes!! So what are you currently eating? If I eat grain based processed foods I put weight on. I can however eat nuts like almonds and walnuts ad libitum with no consequences. So change things up.

Have you re-calculated your TDEE recently?

As we lose weight our bodies need less calories to sustain them and we also need less as we get older.

Try calculating your TDEE using your goal weight and selecting sedentary. Use that for non FDsThat should aid your weight loss to continue now it has started again.

It is possible that posting on here and reading the responses made you more mindful of what you were eating so without actually changing anything you were eating less and the weight started to shift.