I Lol'ed when I read this! That is a fantastic idea! Sometimes, with the way I have reacted to fried foods, I almost wonder if i AM actually allergic. (is that possible?) So, I avoid those... I have to start thinking the same about other "bad" foods!

Thats possible...theres 2 foods Ive developed allergies to over the years. What reaction do you get from fried foods?

lol....Ive given this excuse thing tons of thought....

If I say Im dieting.......people will end up scoffing or giving the "just one wont hurt"...I dont want to deal with this cause some people just dont know when to back off......

If I say it gives me gas or the trotts....theyll tell me they have gas-x or pepto bismol......theres always that 1 in the crowd whos the fix all with a pharmacy in her purse....

If it just really looks gross or they have bad cooking or loaded with butter..oils etc.........no contest....just allergic!!! ((lucky I dont eat lots of what people will serve anyway...plus I can just tell them I dont eat what they do...meat..the list goes on etc.....they cant argue with that))

Something I want I have to say no to...scare them......allergic...pepto bismol cant fix that!!! lol

Im just gonna be Bubble Girl.....

I always wondered about your original question as well. Why do some people have plateaus, and some don't? It certainly is thought provoking.

I never have had a plateau. In all the years of "dieting", all the years of yo-yo-ing, I never had a stall that was not self induced. One thing about me though, I have a tendency to gain weight really fast. For many years I hovered between 190 to 240ish (yo-yoing), but each time I would lose weight I always gained it back really fast. I often wonder if that is the reason I never plateau. I wonder if people who gain weight very slowly throughout the years stall more often than people who can put on 100 pounds in a year?

I can share my experience. I went from around 155 to 234 in less than a year and I had NO stalls getting down to this weight. I've been stuck here for quite a while, but mostly by my own doing.

To whoever said that we are all different is a cop-out answer, that sounds pretty contradictory because ALL of the answers we have just posted talk about how different are bodies truly are, and how our bodies react differently to weight loss.

I get what I called "fried food tummy". I wake up in the middle of the night with this awful nauseous feeling in my stomach and I know I am not going to actually be sick, but I just feel like I want to die. It doesn't happen every time I eat fried food - but I do know that is what it is from. It also used to happen after I ate a Uno's pepperoni, personal deep dish pizza.


Lol! It is sort of funny to think about taking medication just to eat... well... crap. I used to get heartburn EVERY day. Since I have been eating better, I almost never get it.

Lori: I think you could be onto something cause that makes sense. Wonder if theres a connection??? Id be really interested to see who gained what in what span of time & what troubles theyve had with plateaus ...if any... based on that....

Me....gained 158lbs in 2 yrs...no trouble with plateaus...((yet)).....

Some things have done that to me...Ive gotten a sour stomach only worse...that goes all the way up to right under the lower rib cage ((that little space)). Like someone socked you there... maybe its similar or the same??


Freespirit: Now thats making me think that LoriBell might have found a connection...interested to see if theres a continued pattern with everyone. Then maybe when people come to a stall...we might have to start asking them how fast they gained it to connect dots....

I never stall unless I completely go off plan and binge. And even if I binge a lot and gain 3-5 pounds, it comes off in less than a week. I think I have an unusually fast metabolism, which I believe comes from from years of severe binge eating. My food plan is the opposite of my binge pattern (discrete meals, no snacks, little sugar/flour, eat carbs from veggies) and it seems to be working. Well...it works when I work it. Battling my eating disorder is a daily struggle and lately the disorder has been getting the upper hand.

motivated chickie: Youre done so good & have come so far....stay tough!!!

I have a friend who is stalling, she eats clean and works out. And all of these posts about stalling freak me out!!! I'm massively affraid this will happen to me!!! I guess I'm racing.

As for why... I assume that if one is really doing things right, that a stall is ones bodies way of communicating. That is my best guess. Perhaps its time for it to take a break, or the plan is no longer effective.

I also wonder if ethnic make-up has anything to do with it. (not race.... think evolution and fat storing to survive) IDK.

I have my master's degree in psychology and I've put a lot more time and effort into studying weight loss than I ever have psychology (as much as I love the field).

I still feel like I only understand the tip of the iceberg. "Everyone's different," may be an almost meaningless answer, but the more complete answer would take years to explain/understand.

So I guess before answering, I'd ask "How much do you want to know, and how well do you want to know it?"

You can find college classes and even entire degrees based upon answering these questions. So where to begin?

It's not a stupid question, but neither is "everyone is different" a stupid answer. It boils down to whether you want an answer that's three words long, or thirty billion?

You could fill libraries with just the books that have already been written on the subject. And some of the answers are generally agreed upon by the experts, and some of the answers are still being debated.

Just the birth control issue alone - "everyone knows that birth control causes weight gain." The truth is not so simple. Birth control helped me tremendously in losing weight. I have PMDD (think PMS on steroids). Hubby calls me "werewolf" because of the severe mood swings and insane hunger, especially the cravings for red meat (I could take or leave meat most of the month, especially red meat). He jokes that he has to throw me a bag of burgers and it's not safe to come into the apartment until he hears munching.

Birth control tamed the werewolf. Most of my life, I spent three weeks a month trying to undo the damage of one week's binging. On birth control, the mood swings and hunger issues are greatly reduced.

There are many factors that account for the different experiences people have in all sorts of health issues. Weight loss is not the only one in which people can differ drastically. For example many drugs can have oppositional effects. Which is why antidepressants can actually worsen depression. Drugs that effect brain chemistry are especially prone to this (and many weight loss drugs fall under this category). A drug that can make one person sleepy, can keep- another person awake. A drug that can cause appetite increase in one person, can cause appetite decrease in another, can affect sex drive either way....

Any appreciable understanding the "whys" behind the differences would take so long, that "everyone's different" is often the most practical answer unless you want to spend months, years, or even decades of study in arriving at the answers.

Doesn't mean it's not worthy of study, but you don't have to understand the differences to get started (luckily, or we'd all be doomed). For most people, I think weight loss boils down to an experiment of one - you try stuff and it seems to work, you keep doing it. If it doesn't seem to be working, you try new stuff until you find the stuff that seems to be working. If it stops working, you try other stuff...

It is unfortunate that we don't understand the science of weight loss well enough to give people some sort of diagnostic test that can tell us what will work and how it will work, but we're not at that level of understanding. Maybe at some point we will be.

It's taken me 4 decades to beging to understand my own body/weight loss. Ironically, it took so long in part, because I didn't think I was any different than anyone else. I didn't try to find a system that worked for me, as much as I repeatedly tried diets that had worked for other people. I never tried low-carb, because I thought it was unhealthy for everyone, so I never even considered trying it until I had two doctor's recommendations to do so. It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that a diet I considered unhealthy all of my life, may be the only diet that I find doable. Talk about ironic.

I suspect there is more variation in how people retain process waste and water than there is in how people burn fat.

When people lose inches but not weight, they HAVE to be retaining water or waste--there's nowhere else for the weight to be. When weight "wooshes" down, it must be a shift in waste or water--it can't be that your body burned three pounds of fat over night.

Basically, your body does NOT have much of a grace period to satisfy a calorie deficit: if your blood sugar drops and your cells need more energy than they are getting, your body has to get it from somewhere and it has to do so right then--it can't wait an hour, let alone a day. Now, it may not burn fat--it may put you to sleep instead, or lower your core temp, or stop your digestion, but it has to do something.

That's not to say that fat can't be burned quickly: we know that metabolic processes are often feedback loops, so a body might be making up a calorie deficit by lowering body temp but then some tipping point is reached and it switches to burning fat. But wild swings, IMHO, are more likely to be be water/waste related.

I have had plateaus at the same weights repeatedly my entire life. I'm at one now, 142. Once I bust through I will glide fairly rapidly down to my next plateau. There are a few weights that tend to be hard plateaus (VERY hard to bust) and a few that tend to be soft (weight loss slows but usually an extra couple weeks busts it) but they are ALWAYS at the same weights. 142 is probably historically where I have spent the majority of my life since age 13. If I leave here I tend to either go to 135 or 156 with some short stops along the way at a few other points.

I sometimes wonder if it has to do with how much muscle is under the weight. Also i think it depends on how much you weigh currently... alot of people who are 300 lbs, will lose ALOT faster than someone say 200 lbs. Once you start getting closer i think to a manageable weight for your body, i think thats when it slows down...

I stalled right when I got to a "normal" bmi, at 160, for about a month. I just kept going, but it seemed like nothing was working! I actually got some advice here and increased my calories a bit, and took a week off from P90X/Insanity/track intervals and just did yoga and dance. I was even eating chips and chocolate, lol. At the end of that week, I weighed myself, and I was at 158.6! I haven't stalled at all since, and I've been losing faster lately for some reason. I'm willing to bet I'll hit another plateau at 143, and another at 135, because I've been there before!

I do have a tendency to stall, but I don't gain weight super fast either. It took me about 3 years of eating horribly, not exercising consistently, and sleeping way more than i needed to/binge drinking all the time to gain the last 30 pounds I packed on. I've known others that can gain that much in a matter of two months. Maybe there is something to that theory!