GLP-1 Maintenance: Plateau vs. Maintenance & 4 Ways to Keep the Weight Off

So first of all, let's talk about the difference between a plateau and a maintenance, because sometimes I feel like these words get interchanged and they're not the same thing.

So a plateau actually describes kind of just a pattern in your weight.

So it means that your weight has been reliably stable for a while or changing exceptionally slowly over a period of time.

But a plateau doesn't really always tell us exactly why this is happening.

And it doesn't always mean that you're actually at your goal, which can be confusing because some people go through prolonged plateaus and they're not where they want to be, but they feel like they're very stuck.

But your weight can actually pause quite a bit during active treatment.

Mostly it's because of things like fluid shifts or digestion, sometimes patterns of sleep or stress, activity, or just your body kind of starts fighting back a little bit as we continue to lose weight.

This is a very natural thing that happens.

It's a survival instinct that we have in our bodies.

There does come a point where you need to look at your number and see whether or not you're satisfied with being there or if we need to make some adjustments to try to press through the plateau.

Maintenance is very different.

Maintenance is a planned thing.

It's a shift in your overarching goal between wanting to lose more weight and actually just planning to maintain what you've lost, not only in the weight or on the scale, but in the actual health benefits as well.

With a plateau in maintenance, the scale can be stable in both situations, but your intention is different in maintenance.

So in maintenance, maintaining your progress is your overarching goal.

Obviously during a plateau, most people have a goal to continue to lose weight.

So to me, that is really the main difference is that maintenance is something that we plan.

The other thing that's confusing to people is that during maintenance, you can actually have lots of weight fluctuations.

I don't ever really recommend just having one weight that you're comfortable in during maintenance because I think a lot of people it causes unnecessary panic.

So what I do recommend is having a range of weights that you feel comfortable in during the maintenance phase and just use that as just a general guideline on how maintenance therapy is going.

So There's other things we need to take into consideration like hunger, how's your food noise in general, other health markers that you can do with labs, and just overall how you're feeling.

Because once you get to the maintenance phase, I mean, this is life.

We still have to live it.

We want you to feel good.

However, if the scale has stalled, especially for a prolonged period of time, and this was not in your plans, meaning you are not to your goals yet, whether or not that be on the scale or your health markers, that is something that you need to talk to your care team about because you shouldn't just accept that just because the scale is stalled that there's no more progress to be made there's lots of different things that we can do to help you let's talk about stopping the medication because so many times i hear people who've entered into the maintenance phase and they think okay it's time to get off the glp-1 But studies actually show that many people regain a substantial amount of weight if they just stop a GLP-1 cold turkey.