Non-scale things that changed during a flat six months

Started 24 January 2026 · 18 replies · 143 hearts · read 2.4k times

GrizelKirkcaldy, UK · 24 January 2026

6 months ago

A question rather than an update: Non-scale things that changed during a flat six months

Long one, sorry. I have been chewing on this for a fortnight.

The thing that has surprised me most about this stage is how much of it is about other people rather than about me.

I have been reading this circle for months and everybody else's account of this stage sounds much tidier than mine, which is either reassuring or the wrong conclusion entirely.

My honest position is that I do not know whether to change something or wait, and I have been going round that question for three weeks without getting anywhere.

The figure in the title is not rhetorical: six months is what my own notes actually say, counted back through them this evening rather than estimated.

Not looking for a plan. Just company, and whatever anybody found at the same stage.

NkechiAbuja, NG

Plateau weeks are the ones where this community is most useful, in my experience. There is nothing to celebrate and nothing to fix, and the only thing that helps is company.

NyreeChristchurch, NZ

I nearly stopped during mine, and the only reason I did not was that I had promised to come to a circle call on the Thursday and did not want to arrive having quit on the Tuesday.

8me too 6

MimiHong Kong

Nyree, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The second flat stretch was much easier than the first, purely because I had already survived one and knew the shape of it.

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK

Adding a note rather than an answer: the guides cover the practical side of this stage well, and the thing this thread is doing that the guides cannot is keeping somebody company.

NylaNairobi, KE

Something I had to unlearn: a plateau is not evidence that I did something wrong. I spent six weeks auditing my own behaviour for a mistake that was not there.

9me too 1

RuaridhFort William, UK

Picking up Ada’s point rather than starting a new one.

I found that keeping a two-line diary through a plateau was the only way to see that anything at all was happening. From inside the week it looked like nothing.

OttilieCheshire, UK

What helped was giving the flat stretch a job. I used mine to sort out sleep, which had been quietly terrible for a year and had nothing to do with any of this.

NikolaiSofia, BG

Mine broke without me changing anything. I had changed four things by then, obviously, so I have no idea which of them did it, and I suspect none of them did.

IlyaAlmaty, KZ

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

BrennaEnniskillen, NI

#10

I want to add the unglamorous version: mine was boring rather than distressing. Weeks of nothing, mild irritation, and then it moved. Not every plateau is a crisis.

TinukeManchester, UK

#11

Coming back to what Ilya wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

My flat stretch coincided with a genuinely difficult period at work, and I now think the two were related in ways I will never be able to separate out.

TallisEly, UK

#12

If you are in one, the thing I would ask is whether you are still doing the things that were helping before it started. I quietly stopped several of mine and only noticed in hindsight.

4me too 4

ObiLagos, NG

#13

I stopped weighing anything during mine, entirely, for three months. It was the single kindest decision I made that year and my prescriber was fine with it.

DelphiThessaloniki, GR

#14

What Tinuke described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

The bit that was hardest to say out loud was that I felt cheated. Not sad, not discouraged. Cheated. It helped enormously to name it accurately.

BertrandToulouse, FR

#15

I asked at my review whether a long flat stretch meant something was wrong and was told, gently, that bodies are not linear and the assumption that they should be is the odd bit.

FionnualaDundalk, IE

#16

Reading Delphi, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Reading back through this circle's older threads was what got me through mine. Dozens of people, all convinced theirs was the permanent one, all still here.

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK

#17

Adding a marker so the thread does not lose it: when the same practical thing gets named twice by two people who have never met, that is usually the sentence a newcomer needs, and it is rarely the one at the top.

TacitaRome, IT

#18

Mine went on so long that I forgot it was a plateau and just got on with things, and I think that is genuinely how most of them end — not with a change, but with you stopping watching.