Week 18 stall but trigs down, labs or scale?

Your trigs dropping 180 to 132 while weight stalls is the part I'd focus on. Mine did the same around week 10. Scale was flat but waist moved.

A1c can lag if you started from normal-ish range. Fasting glucose 102 to 96 sounds like the liver is still arguing.

What are you eating on stall weeks? I noticed my protein dropped when appetite came back and that changed everything for me.

NCT04184622 was 2539 people over 72 weeks, but it doesn't say your personal week 16 labs will match. Trial averages hide a lot.

Worth keeping labs and the scale in separate columns. Triglycerides fall hard, HDL creeps up, weight sits there for a month. Annoying but not nothing.

My TSH shifted around my stall, though who knows if related.

The week 12-ish fade gets talked about a lot, but there's a real conflation happening between appetite suppression and actual fat loss. If fasting glucose and trigs are still trending down, there may be metabolic work going on even when the scale is quiet.

Weekly averages, not daily weights — that's the only way the noise doesn't wreck your head. A 3-week flat stretch is usually water and constipation, then 4 lbs falls off after a rough weekend. Not glamorous.

The 72-week trial design is a better frame than a 3-week window, honestly.

Constipation is real. Ten straight days of a flat stretch on the scale — fiber was what broke it.

HDL 38 to 41? That's the win. What was your trig/HDL ratio?

A1c lags. Waist and fasting insulin tell me more.

I'd be careful calling it a true stall until 4-6 weeks with consistent intake. I did a food log for two weeks and found I was eating about 300 more calories than I thought once the appetite came back. The med didn't stop working, my tracking got loose. Once I tightened protein and steps, the scale started again.

The 5/10/15 mg arms in the trial don't tell us much about individual titration timing either.

The trial enrolle d2539 people, so there's no way one person's week 16 is going to look like the average. Keep the lab trend. That's the data I'd want.

Week 14 to week 20 I sat on the same number — 214.6, 214.8, 214.2 — and nearly quit. What actually moved was sleep and timing, not anything I ate. I had a stretch of night shifts averaging 5 hours, and my waist tape froze and even crept up half an inch; back to 7+ hours and it started dropping again.

My other accidental experiment was comparing a post-takeout Monday weigh-in to a lean Friday morning and driving myself nuts, so now I do one weekly weigh-in, same day, same conditions, and I fully expect 3-4 week flat stretches. Monthly waist at the navel, monthly photo in the same jeans.

If I were adding one number to your list, it'd be waist over fasting insulin — it's free, it doesn't swing on one bad night of sleep, and it caught the fat loss my scale completely missed during weeks 15-19.

Food volume stayed the same through that whole stretch, which is why I trusted the tape more than the scale. Also worth saying: 23 lb in 18 weeks with better trigs and HDL is a real trend, not a plateau, even if week 18 feels like one.

My scale hides thee pounds behind one salty takeout weekend, so I stopped asking it for weekly verdicts.

Started lifting twice a week and the scale went up 2 lb for a month while my belt went in a notch.

I'd add hunger to the list of things worth watching. My flat stretches were the weeks I white-knuckled 1,300 calories on bad sleep; when I got protein to roughly 120g and fiber to 30g, I ate more and still lost.

If you're not starving and clothes fit looser, that's real progress — the number usually catches up all at once.

Waist tape bat the scale for me right around that same point. I measure at the navel, first thing in the morning, same shorts, once a week — went from 41 to 37.5 inches across a stretch where the scale sat flat for 4 straight weeks.

At week 18 a 3-week plateau is pretty normal once things settle in; the early drop carries a lot of inflammation and water that quietly stalls out. What surprised me was resting heart rate falling about 8 bpm during the flat stretch, which I did not expect at all.

So now I keep the tape, a monthly photo in the same mirror light, and I only look at the scale as a Sunday average. Glucose 102 to 96 and trigs 180 to 132 is a real win no matter what the scale is doing.

I'd put sleep above fasting insulin for a while, honestly. I sleep 5.5 hours and the scale sits; 7.5 and it slides down 1-2 lb over the week with nothing else changed. I logged 6 weeks of it and the pattern was embarrassingly plain: under 6 hours flat, over 7 moving. Boring answer, but it's what my own numbers showed.

Disagree with going fully scale-blind, for wat it's worth. I did blinders for 6 weeks and came back up 4 lb because I stopped watching portions and started grazing at night.

I weigh daily but only act on the 7-day average, so no single day can wreck my head. Different strokes though — if the daily number spikes your stress, the tape is a fine substitute.