Why is your weight so “sticky”?

One possible reason is just that you are expecting results too quickly. It takes a caloric deficit of about 7700 Calories to lose one kg of fat. If you’re cutting 200 calories out of your daily diet, it will take over a month to rack up that deficit.

Another reason is that your base metabolic rate depends on your weight. The heavier you get, the more calories you burn just being alive. The more weight you lose, the fewer calories you burn as a baseline. What this means is that, if you decrease your calorie intake, you will start losing weight, but you will only continue to do so until you hit a weight where the BMR for that weight equals your reduced calorie intake.

For instance, suppose at your current weight you burn 2300 Calories per day. Now you decrease your calorie intake to 2100 Cal/day. You will then lose weight until you reach the point where you now burn 2100 Cal/day. So you might think “hey, I’m still cutting 200 calories a day, I should keep losing weight”, but actually your BMR has changed so this is no longer true, and you’d have to cut even more calories to lose even more weight. The same holds (in reverse) for gaining weight if you increase your calorie intake: at some point you hit a new equilibrium and you will stop gaining weight, unless you increase your calorie intake further.

Also, exercise annoyingly doesn’t help that much for weight loss. Our bodies have the (from a modern point of view) frustrating tendency to burn less calories elsewhere if we use calories for exercise; your body likes to keep the total number of calories burnt within a pretty narrow range. Now, that doesn’t mean that exercise cannot make you lose weight, but you have to do quite a lot of it before it starts to have an effect (enough that the body can’t fully compensate by lowering other activities). So while exercise has lots of other health benefits and is probably the best thing you can do for your health, it’s not a very good way to lose weight. Changing your diet is much more effective.

Because it doesn’t matter what you’re eating, it matters how many calories you’re eating.

1000 calories of Chinese takeout and 1000 calories of yogurt, whole wheat toast, and granola are the same thing.

Your weight will fluctuate + or – 2lbs throughout the day as you eat/drink and go to the bathroom.

And really you need to be consistently below you calorie count or consistently above normal to gain or lose any noticeable amount of weight. One day of missing some calories won’t really change much.

You need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight, caloric maintenance to maintain weight, and caloric surplus to gain weight. I’m not sure what you’re switching to yogurt from, but unless that switch puts you in a calorie deficit, you will not lose weight.

Calculate your TDEE in an online calculator and log how many calories you consume a day. Yes, the calculators are not perfect but they’re a good enough approximation. Try eating in a 200-500 calorie deficit for a month and check how much you weight at the end of the month. Adjust accordingly based on results. When you lose weight, your TDEE obviously decreases.

Lastly, don’t eliminate foods entirely. Eat your favorites in moderation and make sure you’re enjoying what you eat. You can eat what you want as long as it is the right amount of calories and is nutritionally balanced. The online calculator should tell you what macronutrients you need and you should eat abt 350-500g of fruits + veggies a day to meet micronutrient requirements.

Good luck!

The heavier you are, the more calories your body consumes across the course of a normal day. It’s not a huge amount, but if you aren’t going really, really decadent, your weight tends to plateau at a certain point. Note that some people have metabolic disorders that restrict this effect, which has them gain weight more easily.

On the flipside, if your calorie intake dramatically falls versus normal, your body’s first reaction is generally to lower your metabolism and trim on anywhere it can to preserve your energy reserves. Eventually, your body starts to break down fat to make up the deficit, but the first reaction is to pump the brakes so the deficit goes away. This is why diet + exercise works better than diet alone, and why “crash” diets aren’t as effective as long-term changes to your daily eating habits.

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