I stopped weighing myself and the plateau stopped mattering as much

My prescriber was completely unbothered by mine, which annoyed me at the time and turned out to be the correct response. She said bodies do this and asked me to come back in eight weeks.

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.

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.

Mine lasted nineteen weeks. I want to say that plainly because when I was in mine, every account I found described eight and I thought I was broken.

Something that reframed it: a flat stretch is weather, not a verdict. Somebody wrote that here two years ago and I have carried it around ever since.

Coming back six months later to close the loop, because I hate threads that stop. Mine lasted seventeen weeks and then quietly ended and I did not notice for a fortnight.

No advice, just company. Here if it helps.

What I say to anybody in one now is that you are still here, still on treatment, still doing the thing. That is the whole of what a flat stretch asks of you.

You have described the bit that nobody warns you about.

Mine ended the week I stopped keeping a spreadsheet about it, which is either a profound insight or a coincidence and I genuinely do not know which.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.