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The plateau

Everyone says trust the process and I want to scream

Started 13 August 2025 · 20 replies · 176 hearts · read 2.8k times

NedChesterfield, UK · 13 August 2025
11 months ago

Everyone says trust the process and I want to scream Writing it down partly to work out what I actually think.

I do not know if this belongs in this circle. Move me if not.

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.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

I will report back either way, because other people's follow-ups have helped me more than their questions.

59

AleksLjubljana, SI
#1

Somebody here described the plateau as the part where you find out whether you are doing this for a number or for a life, and that landed harder than I wanted it to.

4

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#2

Stepping in to say that nobody here is behind. There is no schedule this community keeps and nobody is measuring anybody against one.

18

PersisBristol, UK
#3

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.

7

NkechiAbuja, NG
#4

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.

9me too 2

Bell ANorwich, UK
#5

The practical thing I did was set a date twelve weeks out to review it properly, and then deliberately stop thinking about it until that date. It gave me the fortnight back.

9me too 1

NylaNairobi, KE
#6

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

11

NadirCasablanca, MA
#7

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.

6

BramSheffield, UK
#8

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

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.

8

RenataKraków, PL
#9

I am eight weeks into one now and reading this thread because I need to hear that other people got through theirs. That is all. No question attached.

10

NyreeChristchurch, NZ
#10

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

The most useful thing anybody said to me during mine was that maintaining is not nothing. It sounds obvious and it did not feel obvious at the time.

7

IzzyWatford, UK
#11

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.

9

NazneenDhaka, BD
#12

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

7

BronLincoln, UK
#13

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.

7me too 2

GwythFishguard, UK
#14

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.

6

TinukeManchester, UK
#15

Every plateau thread here has somebody saying theirs lasted longer than they thought possible and then ended. I did not believe them. They were right.

10

PetuaKampala, UG
#16

Honest experience: mine did not break. It became the level I stayed at, and after about four months I stopped calling it a plateau and started calling it where I live.

8me too 6

TacitaRome, IT
#17

Tinuke has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

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.

11

OssieWolverhampton, UK
#18

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.

9

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#19

I am going to close the loop on this one rather than let it drift. Where the person who opened a thread comes back with an update, that is the post I would least want a later reader to miss.

11me too 8

PerduMontpellier, FR
#20

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.

9