I wanted to share a recent epiphany I had in dealing with a recent plateau. Sorry about the length of this, but details can sometimes help people in similar scenarios.
First, a little context, I'm doing OMAD to reach my goals, and went from sedentary to moderately or heavily active virtually overnight. The trigger point was my sailing past 300 lbs, which set off alarm bells that somehow the sleep apnea, joint pain, and other "little warnings" didn't. That was in June, four months ago.
For my main meal of the last four months I've used a hearty salad mix of quinoa and greens totaling about 1200 calories per day. On days where I'm specifically training resistance, there is also a workout supplement of about 400 calories. Unfortunately I'd gotten into the habit of "eyeballing" some of the most calorie-dense portions of the quinoa salad (fats and oils added for flavor and nutrient content), but given that it was working, felt that I had finally found a reasonable balance between weight loss and comfort level. This was saboteur #1.
For my gym time, I have a rigorous routine that focuses on incline walking for cardio for 1 hour intervals. There are also rotating strength and resistance routines on top of that cardio, but those haven't been affected. For the cardio, I use incline walking, a form of "slow cardio", and carefully monitor heart rate during the process. Heart rate is key to this routine - it can't go over X amount, it can't go under Y amount, aka a "zoning" routine.
Because heart rate is critical to this, I held the handrails while performing the incline walk. I'm sure there's a few people out there who will read that and immediately think, "Don't do that, it compromises the workout." I didn't know - I just liked that I was maxing out the incline, and apparently burning calories way above par (around 850 according to the display). Either way, I was losing weight quickly averaging 3-5 lbs per week (fast, but not alarmingly so given the intensity of the changes), and there's no reason to fix what, in my view, wasn't broken. Saboteur #2.
Then, at 250, I hit a plateau that was stuck in place for three weeks - bearing in mind that before this I was averaging significant losses. I expected this, but not until I was significantly lower weight. Despite OMAD and an active daily routine, I was stagnating - which is really fucking frustrating when you're following a routine that's designed to make it impossible to do anything but lose weight. Getting pissed about it wasn't changing the fact, so obviously, I needed to re-analyze the situation and the problem to continue making progress. I did so.
So, what's going on with the diet first. I rechecked everything. Turns out that my "eyeballing" the fat content of the salad was leaning way heavy, and I was probably eating several hundred calories more than I had originally plotted. I busted out the table spoons and figured out exactly what was going in, and was shocked by how much I was adding on a daily basis. I tricked myself and let a saboteur in. Now I don't eyeball anything, and the estimated caloric content of the daily meal was almost halved as a result (about 600 calories).
Secondly, I looked at the cardio routine, trying to figure out why my heart rate was going lower and lower (beyond what would be "health gains"). The hand rails. The god damn hand rails. I tried to do the same routine without holding the rails, and found I couldn't possibly keep up at maximum incline, I had to dial it back several points on that as well as the pace. Despite this, and despite the display reading less calories burned, I was exhausted and mildly sore at the end of that cardio, and my heart rate was contending with X (too high) instead of Y (too low) - that hadn't happened in a long time.
So, my handicapped cardio workout listed about 860 calories lost. Without the handicap, I burned about 560, despite the workout feeling more rigorous. I realized that that number, 560, was closer to the truth than I'd seen in a long time, and the machine can't distinguish between a proper routine and an improper one when calculating caloric losses. When it displayed 860, I was probably burning somewhere closer to 400. I took a small hit to my pride, as I'll admit, I liked maxing the machine out and seeing a better "score", but that wasn't helping the ultimate goal. What's irritating me now is that it took four months for me to figure this out, and only because a problem surfaced.
Between those two changes, I finally smashed the plateau. This really reinforced how important vigilance in measurements are, both on calorie intake and expenditure, and how easy it can be to cheat yourself.
TLDR: I had to seriously scrutinize my otherwise healthy diet and workout routine to break a plateau, finding the results obvious after re-analyzing everything. As often happens, I was cheating myself without realizing I was cheating, partly from false measurements, partly from pride.
