Hey everyone! I need a little help here. I've been on my diet for 5 weeks now. Been doing high protein, low carb, and zero candy, sweets, ect. During the first 3 weeks I lost 9 pounds. But these last 2 weeks have been a pain in the butt! Go up a pound...lose a pound. Go up 3 pounds...lose 2 pounds. So these last 2 weeks I haven't lost anything! Super frustrating and trying to keep my motivation up I have a long way to go. I want to lose 120 pounds total. So I don't understand how after the first 9 pounds it just comes to a stop.

How many calories are you eating? if your eating too little your body might slow its metabolism.

One thing that many people deal with in weight loss is that weight loss is not linear. That is, you may lose a pound, gain two pounds, lose three, gain two, etc. It doesn't happen in a nice neat line, unfortunately. The good news is that just because your weight loss looks crazy sometimes doesn't mean you're not losing fat. The body's daily and even weekly weight can vary for a ton of reasons (rest, stress, sodium, water retention, exercise, lack of exercise, injury, food, etc.), so it's the overall trend you want to watch.

Two weeks of no movement (or very little movement) is normal for most people. For example, I've gone 20-something days with basically no loss and then lose like five pounds in a week and a half. Just because I couldn't see the loss on the scale at first didn't mean it wasn't happening.

So the key is to do the things you know cause weight loss (take in less energy than you use up, ultimately). If it's been more than four weeks with no movement, I'd examine your diet closely for things like eating more than you realized (try writing down everything you eat - sometimes snacks sneak in), eating back exercise calories (not recommended unless you're an athlete or something), etc.

Patience is huge with weight loss. Sometimes there are weeks where it feels like nothing is working and it's going too slow, but then if you pull back and look at the bigger trend, you can see your weight dropping. Maybe do an excel chart to see your weekly/monthly weight loss pattern. Sometimes it helps to visualize it.

We've all been there (and will be again, most likely). But the people who lose weight and keep it off are the ones who stick with it no matter what, even when they don't feel like it or are very frustrated. That doesn't mean you're perfect the whole time, but it does mean you're consistently eating at a deficit (whatever that looks like with your diet).

You can do this!

That might be due to not having a meal or two every week off your diet plan, you must have a cheat meal per week or maybe 2 for your body not to be used to a low-calorie diet so it starts decreasing its fat burning rate. If you're not sleeping well, this might be another reason too. Diets and workouts get destroyed by the lack of sleep! You might also consider checking some articles about how to increase your metabolic rate. Don't worry that's not a problem, just check those points and consider the first point as the most important one.
Good luck!