Plateau plus a dose increase that did nothing

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.

Romy, I have been where you are and I would rather say so than stay quiet.

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.

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.

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.

You have described the bit that nobody warns you about.

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.

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

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.

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.

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

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.

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

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.