Week 34 flat spot after steady loss — anyone else?

Similar wall around week 31. Waist kept shrinking while scale sat still for a month. Then dropped 3 lb in 10 days.

The 2539-person trial ran to week 72, so week 34 is right in the messy middle. I would not read too much into an 8-week pause.

Your glucose shift from 104 to 96 is the part I’d track. My scale stalls often, but fasting glucose moved first.

What did your measurements do during the flat stretch? My waist lagged by like 3 weeks behind the scale.

Week 28 here. Not a full stall, but loss went from 1.1 lb/week to 0.3. I started weighing food again and it broke after 12 days.

Kept a daily log going for 60 weeks — sleep, food, training, the usual stuff. The pattern was never linear. Three flats: weeks 18-22, 33-39, and 51-55.

The middle one dragged the longest. What helped was comparing 4-week averages instead of weekly numbers.

The 72-week study design is a useful frame because it normalizes a long runway, but individual charts still look like stair steps.

If waist and glucose are still drifting down, the scale may just be catching up later.

I’m in the 33-39 flat camp too. Mine broke around week 41, but only after sleep improved. Could be coincidence.

Sleep is huge for me. Poor sleep weeks = scale goes nowhere, even when I’m eating the same.

Did you change training volume? I added two lifting days around week 30 and the scale froze for 6 weeks. Measurements moved though.

The trial arms were 5, 10, 15 mg, but the average curves hide individual stair-steps. I wish more people psoted 4-week rolling averages.

Week 36 here. The 4-week average idea is smart.

Week 31 here, and mine went flat for nine weeks — 197.6 down to 196.1 — then dropped 4.2 lbs in twelve days for no reason I could point to.

The only thing that changed was sleep: I'd been running on 5.5 hours after a shift change, got back to about 7, and the whoosh landed roughly ten days later. Could be total coincidence.

What saved my sanity was ditching daily scale numbers for a 14-day average plus the tape, because the average kept creeping down while every individual morning looked identical. 34 weeks and 19 lbs is about 0.55 lb/week overall, which is honestly normal this far in.

If your waist is still shrinking, I'd let the scale be the last thing you trust.

The 72-week arms are averages, not a script — nobody loses 0.9 a week for 72 straight weeks.

Friday through Sunday was my entire problem and I didn't see it for months. Weekdays I was solidly in a deficit, then Friday night through Sunday I was basically at maintenance plus a bit — pizza, a couple beers, whatever.

Averaged out, that wiped out most of my weekday deficit and explained why my loss slid from 0.8 lb/week to 0.2. I didn't cut anything out; I just started logging Saturday and Sunday like normal days and stopped treating the weekend as a separate food economy.

Two things followed: the Sunday water spike stopped lingering until Wednesday, and the weekly average started moving again. Monday weigh-ins are useless for me, so my official one moved to Thursday. Worth a look at your Fri-Sun before you blame the flat spot itself.

Adding 3k steps at lunch did more for my flat spot than anything I changed in the kitchen. I was at about 4k a day, now 7-8k, no other changes, and the tape moved half an inch in three weeks while the scale just sat there.

Not dramatic, but it killed the nothing-is-happening feeling, which was the part making me want to quit.

Eight weeks at 0.26 lb/week isn't really a flat spot, it's the new math.

Twenty pounds down means your maintenance needs dropped roughly 100-150 cal/day, so the exact habits that bought you 0.9 a week now buy you about 0.3. Mine did the same around week 30, then hovered for a month. Nothing broke. Your waist and glucose are still moving, which the scale can't see.

The one that got me was portion drift, and I didn't notice because I stopped using the food scale around month four. When I pulled it back out, my "tablespoon" of olive oil was closer to 2.5, my oats were running 20g heavy, and the handful of nuts at night was an easy 250 calories.

That's a 300 cal/day gap, which is almost exactly a 0.5 lb/week pace erased without feeling like I'd changed anything. I also started tracking a 14-day rolling average of my morning weight instead of single days, and the flat patches look way less flat that way.

Worth weighing your normal breakfast once this week and seeing if it matches what you think it is.

Weeks 28 through 37 are a dead flat line on my chart, and in hindsight it was mostly sleep and sodium. I was in a horrible stretch at work, sleeping maybe 5.5 hours, up at 5:15, workouts gone, eating whatever was in front of me at 8pm. Scale sat at 181-183 for nine weeks.

Then it went the wrong way: 1.8 lb up in ten days after a conference with two Thai takeout dinners and almost no walking. Very dramatic for someone who had been "stalled." What actually broke it was four days off, 8 hours of sleep, dropping the salty restaurant food, and by day five I was 2 lb below where the freeze started.

Ended up 4.2 lb down over the next three weeks.

I genuinely don't know how much was fat and how much was water and inflammation, but the nine-week flat broke without me overhauling what I ate overall. If I had to bet, the sleep debt did more damage than the calories.

Compare your sleep hours the last two months to your first twenty weeks and see if anything jumps out.

Clothes have been way more honest than the scale through this stretch. I've been flat within 1.5 lb for nine weeks, but two pairs of jeans went from snug to needing a belt, and my 34s now sit at my hips instead of digging into my gut.

I lift twice a week, so some of that is muscle and some is just fat leaving while water moves in. The blunt numbers: 2.5 inches off my navel, 1.5 off my hips, basically zero scale change. What's your waist done in these last eight weeks specifically?

If it's still shrinking, the fat scale is doing more than it looks like. If it's frozen too, that's a different conversation.