Week 36 stall: labs still improving, anyone else?

Plateaus are normal. I stalled weeks 29-35 then lost 6 lbs over the next month. Labs kept moving.

Your A1c drop is bigger than mine. My labs went 5.9 to 5.5 between baseline and the 24-week draw, but the weight loss side was slower going.

Did you change anything during the stall, like protein or steps? My scale froze when I stopped lifting.

Eight weeks is long enough to look for non-scale wins. Waist? Sleep? Resting HR?

NCT04184622 ran to week 72, so 36 weeks is only halfway in trial terms. That helps me not panic.

I was in a similar spot around week 32. Weight stayed 201-203 for six weeks, but fasting glucose went from 104 to 92 and triglycerides from 180 to 121.

My clinician was less worried about the plateau and more interested in the metabolic markers. What finally broke it for me was a two-week focus on sleep and hitting 130g protein, not a dose change. Not saying that works for everyone, just what I noticed.

Sleep is underrated. My stall lined up with a terrible work month.

Sleep and protein come up constantly in these threads and they do seem to genuinely matter. The part people forget is that a prescribed dose change can feel like a restart — everything comes back with a jolt, and the side effects can get rough along with it.

What were your triglycerides? Mine dropped fast before weight moved much.

My A1c bareyl moved, but I'm not diabetic. Weight is the main marker for me.

The trial design point is interesting. The 72-week window matters because lots of people quit at 12 weeks and call it a stall.

The typical pattern: 41 weeks of tracking, 51 lbs down, but the last 10 took 14 weeks. Labs tend to flip first — LDL 156 to 118 around week 20, weight follows later.

And the part people forget when they're staring at a morning number: a 4-week average beats daily weigh-ins, since sleep and sodium alone can swing it. If glucose is down and waist is down, the scale can hide progress.

Thanks for hte 4-week average idea. I've been weighing daily and driving myself nuts.

I ditched the daily weigh-ins around month 8 and started measuring my waist every two weeks instead. During my longest flat stretch the scale sat on the same number for about nine weeks while my waist dropped 2.5 inches and my shirts got looser in the shoulders.

I also take one photo in the same t-shirt on the 1st of each month, and lining those up killed most of the "nothing is happening" feeling. Are you tracking anything besides the number on the scale right now?

For me the culprit was sleep, and I only caught it because of a dumb two-month stretch where I was getting 5.5 hours a night thanks to a work deadline. Scale didn't budge for about 11 weeks.

Then I went on a long weekend trip, slept 9 hours both nights, ate way more than usual, walked a ton, and came home up 2 lbs of water that vanished in four days and took a real 3 lbs with it over the next week and a half.

I'm not saying go on vacation, but when I started actually protecting 7+ hours, things started moving again around week 38. Stress and short sleep can mask a lot of progress, and my labs were doing the same thing yours are while the scale played dead.

Your glucose and LDL doing that at week 36 is the real headline. The scale is just late to the party.

My version of this is jeans math. I went from a tight 16 to a 12 over a stretch where my weight honestly didn't move much, and I only noticed because I grabbed the wrong pair out of the closet and they zipped.

Now I keep one pair of "goal jeans" and try them on every two weeks instead of weighing daily. Sizes change slower and weirder than the scale, but they're way less noisy. What are your clothes telling you lately?

Six weeks into a stall around week 30, I did something I'd been avoiding: I logged my weekends honestly for 14 days. Weekdays I was tight, like 1,600 calories, protein and everything.

Weekends were "not tracked" which translated to Friday dinner out, a couple drinks, Saturday brunch, Sunday takeout. When I actually added it up my Fri-Sun averaged 3,100 a day.

My real weekly average was closer to 2,200, not the 1,700 I'd been patting myself on the back about, and that's roughly a wash against what I was burning. The reversal was what fixed it though: I didn't cut food overall.

I ate a slightly bigger dinner on weekdays and added an afternoon snack, and I capped weekends at one restaurant meal with no alcohol Friday.

Weekly average only came down maybe 200 calories a day, but the scale moved 5 lbs in three weeks after sitting still for three months. Monday mornings I was also four pounds heavier than Friday mornings every single week from restaurant sodium, which made the stall look worse than it was.

Worth two weeks of honest weekend logging before you assume anything else.

I was at 4k steps a day and basically called that active. Added 25 minutes walking after dinner six nights a week, plus one 45 minute loop on Saturdays, changed nothing about food.

Weeks one through three the scale didn't move at all, which nearly made me quit, then it dropped 6 lbs over the next four weeks and kept going. I think the first few weeks the new activity just masked it with inflammation and water.

If you're already walking a lot, ignore me, but if your step count is low that's the cheapest lever I've found.

What's your protein sitting at these days? I only ask because mine quietly slid from about 120g to 80g during my longest stall and I didn't notice until I logged it for a week. Bumping it back up at breakfast changed how the rest of my day went, snacks got easier to skip.