1: “I Lost 30 Pounds And Now I’m STUCK - What Do I Do?” | ASK DR. ANNA

Hit a wall with your weight loss? You're not alone. In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna explains why weight loss plateaus happen — even after real progress — and what you can do to start moving again.

You'll also learn why losing weight after 50 is different, and why the number on the scale isn't the only thing that matters. Think stronger muscles, better lab results, and feeling more energy in your body.

Listen in to learn:

• Why a smaller body needs less food — and what to do about it
• How your hormones and brain change during weight loss
• Why keeping weight off is actually a win worth celebrating
• How movement is often the missing piece when progress stalls
• The three types of exercise your body needs: cardio, strength, and mobility
• Easy ways to add more steps, lifting, and stretching to your day
• How to eat in a way that protects your muscle and keeps you on track
• What a healthy weight really looks like beyond the scale
• How to make small, smart adjustments when things stop working

Drop your questions in the comment section so that Dr. Anna can make more videos like this answering your specific weight loss questions!

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Transcript

The Plateau Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Now, a viewer just asked me, Dr. Anna, I lost 30 pounds and now I'm stuck. What do I do? Now, this is such a common question that I just had to make a video about it. So if you're listening to this and let's say you've lost some pounds, maybe it's 30, 20, 50. And then since then the scale hasn't moved at all and it's been months, and you might be starting to panic, wondering, did you break your body? Is your metabolism just off? Or did it stop working for you? Maybe you're worried, is this as good as it's gonna get? And you may have had the thought cross your mind if you should just give up entirely with weight loss. Now, that feeling of doing everything right but getting nowhere is honestly crushing because I see this pattern all the time, both in my clinical practice with patients and also with my online clients. These things that we call plateaus, unfortunately, they're extremely common, but they're also one of the best opportunities to stop and ask yourself, what can I change up about my weight loss approach? So the biggest problem that we need to tackle is if you don't understand what's actually going on here, you'll either quit or keep doing the same thing, expecting different results, which if you've never heard before, is what some people say the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Honest Ground Rules And Caveats

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Hey, I'm Dr. Anna. Welcome to my series here where I'm going to be answering real questions that I get from viewers like yourself. Now, these are going to be honest conversations about weight loss, real life. They're not necessarily perfectly curated answers that commercials are telling us all the time if they're trying to sell us a supplement or a fitness app. So know that, yeah, I am a medical doctor and I'm coming to share with you some information here. But none of this is medical advice. It's really just my personal take as a doctor. Now I have to warn you, I am gonna share with you my actual opinions on stuff. But seriously, it's important to just keep in mind that your personal situation, it's unique. I always encourage you to talk to your own doctor about any personal health concerns you have. But I hope with these videos, it just gives you something to think through that may or may not work for you. And hopefully it does work for

Metabolism Recalibrates After Weight Loss

SPEAKER_00 2:16

you. Okay, so we're talking about plateaus. Now, the first thing that happens when you feel stuck or you start to plateau, know this. Your body is not the same as it was before you lost any of the weight. So let's say, in the example of the question I got here, 30 pounds ago for this person. So I'll tell you the story of kind of how this came up. So I had a patient and she lost 30 pounds roughly. And at the time she was eating about 1,500 calories. So what happened for her? She did start losing weight. And then after several months, she was maintaining her weight. She wasn't regaining weight, but she couldn't lose any more. And she was still in this ballpark of about 1,5 to 1,800 calories a day, roughly. You know, every day's a little bit different, but this is pretty much where she was at. And she kept tracking. And she asked me, you know, Dr. Anna, what happened? Why is this not working anymore? It used to be working so well. And that she really didn't want to keep tracking her calories forever, which I understand, and I'm not a huge fan of people tracking calories for the rest of their lives just for the sake of weight loss. So I told her, likely she was at this point where her metabolism adjusted. Her body was smaller, she lost some fat, she lost some pounds, but overall her body sort of adjusted to that and now needed less energy, meaning fewer calories, to function the same way. So this calorie deficit that she had created for herself absolutely worked in the beginning of her weight loss journey, and that's why she lost 30 pounds. But once it no longer became a deficit because her body kind of recalibrated its metabolism, well, she lost the benefit, right? So what's the deal here? Did her body break down? No, not at all. This is actually kind of normal, and this is what happens to most people. So you need to sort of reassess where you are right now. And the idea and the takeaway for this first part is that if you just keep doing the same things, expecting different results at a certain point, you're gonna get stuck and you're gonna find yourself in this situation. You could think of it like it's not that what you're doing stopped working. It's just you're now at a different place than you were when you first started your weight loss journey. And so after weight loss, you need to understand some significant changes in the body happen.

Hormones, Signals, And Epigenetics

SPEAKER_00 4:41

What are these changes? So hormones get affected. How hungry you feel or how full you feel, these are all things affected by hormones. And our body can adjust how much or how little it produces of these things. Other things that are being triggered and fired off are signals in our brain, chemical signals. Sometimes we call these neurotransmitters. That's the scientific term. But there's even like some changes that are, this is hard to explain if you've never studied science. We have the genes in our cells that sort of lay the foundation of the way our body functions and the way we look. But then there are other things that can happen to our genes to affect how they work. We call these changes that affect the genes epigenetic changes or epigenetics, is this the study of this. There are significant changes that occur throughout our lifetime in response to lots of different stuff, including what we're eating, how many calories we're eating, that can make epigenetic changes. So this gets affected too. And all of these things really are going to make further weight loss very tough, if not impossible, with the identical same approach forever. But here's the good news with all of this. I'd argue that if this is happening to you, if you are stuck or you're at a weight loss plateau, this is actually a positive opportunity. So weight loss, as we know, is not just about what we're eating or how many calories. Yes, we need to hit that calorie deficit to get the process going and to keep it going, but there are other ways we can affect the equation. So this is where how you move really comes into play. So I want to tell you a story

Why Movement Is The Missing Lever

SPEAKER_00 6:21

to highlight this point. I have a member of my online community. She came to me and she said, I really want to do your program, Dr. Anna, but I'm a little bit hesitant because I've literally tried every diet program out there. I've always lost weight on everything I've done and I've always regained it, and then some. So she would always regain back more weight than she lost. So obviously, she was super frustrated. So she started the program and she started getting into the rhythm of things. And she shared with me a few months in, or actually, it was probably a month and a half in, that she wasn't really seeing the dramatic results she wanted to, but she knew that the things that she was doing were helping her because she was still getting benefit, but just not a lot of weight loss. So digging into the process with her, I said, tell me what you're doing. And it came out that she was not exercising at all. But actually, she told me she's never exercised in her life. Now, when I hear this, I often think, okay, this is a huge opportunity to make a change, but I also get it. When I asked her to tell me more about that, she said she was super intimidated. She wanted to stay as far away from a gym as humanly possible. But then she did say, well, in fact, my gym has this promotion. You can get a single free trainer session, but I know they're just gonna sell me the package, and I really don't want to be sold a package. And I said to her, What's the harm in trying the free session? You might get surprised. So she decided to go for it. And what I have to say is her experience is not rare. She ended up actually really enjoying it. She enjoyed going to the gym and working with this trainer, and he gave her these exercises that she could do both at home and if she wanted to go back into the gym. So this really opened up an entire new world for her. Because if you're sitting there thinking, oh gosh, like that's my situation. I've done really well on diets and I'm really regimented and I can do all the calorie tracking and everything like that, but I'm not exercising

Exercise Buckets And Strategy

SPEAKER_00 8:22

at all. I have to tell you, this is your golden opportunity. Now is the time to start. Now, if you are exercising already and you're listening to this saying, well, Dr. Anna, I also am at a weight plateau, but I I'm not a brand new beginner here. I exercise, I do my classes, etc. It's your opportunity then to ask yourself, well, which bucket of exercise are you doing? And maybe which ones are we not doing? So we have to think of exercise in different buckets. And we're not going to get into the details in this episode about all the types of exercise, but we can think of it as we have our cardio exercise, which absolutely includes walking, but things that also get our heart rate up higher. Then we have things like strength training, anything that's stimulating our muscles, contracting our muscles, lifting weights falls into this category, but there are lots of different activities that fall into this category. And then we have our sort of balance or stretching types of exercise that are less about burning calories and they're more just about giving your body stability and mobility, which are all really important things. So those are our different buckets. So you can start asking yourself, hmm, maybe I'm doing one bucket, but I'm not doing the other ones. Or maybe I'm doing mostly one bucket and I'm rarely doing the other ones. So if you're doing all of them, amazing. Are you just doing one? These are all ways you can take the opportunity to start drilling down into your own personal situation. And of course, there's a million plus ways to improve movement and exercise. And the sky's really at the limit. So plateaus are what I'd argue your body's way of saying it's time to add something new to the equation here. And movement is often that missing piece for folks. But you might be wondering at this point, Dr.

Rethinking Healthy Weight And Goals

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Ada, is it really just about diet and exercise? Because I feel like that's kind of obvious here. Does that really explain everything? I'd argue it actually doesn't. There's one more thing we really need to consider here. If you're dealing with a plateau, your weight won't budge. So sometimes a plateau is your body's way of asking you to shift not just what you're eating or what you're doing, but also shift your focus. So here's what I mean. Maybe it's time to sort of redefine what a healthy weight actually means for you. So as we get older, our health can become more complex. When we're, for example, 12, it's easy for us to just show up at gym class and run the mile, even if we're not playing active sports, because our body is just so ready to move. We have so much energy to burn when we're young. But then things can change and evolve. People get injuries, they get diagnoses, maybe you're dealing with medications, different conditions you're managing, different aches and pains, right? So the equation gets more complex. The weight that looked good on our bodies when we were 20 years old, 30 years old, maybe that's not realistic once we're 55, 65, 75 years old. Many things have changed in our life and thus in our health. And so we need to think about this from a different angle. Now, what we talk about in my Healthy After 50 Academy are the numerous health benefits that weight loss brings that really have nothing to do with just the number on the scale. What are we talking about? We're talking about better blood sugar, having less pain, maybe it's in the knees, in the hips, in the back, in the neck, having more energy, just feeling a little bit more engaged in your activities. Also improved sleep, sometimes even reduced medication needs. So some people can lower their doses with medications when they lose weight or even get off some meds. It is honestly phenomenal how much of a benefit weight loss has on our bodies, beyond just the number on the scale. So we need to think about what are we chasing with our weight loss goals. Now, I always like to remind people of this because I spent so many years living in Italy, and that's where I did medical school. In older cultures, so the Mediterranean region being a hub of this, but it is absolutely true in many old cultures, lots of Asian cultures, South American cultures, African cultures, health is not really just about aesthetics.

Beyond BMI: Function Over Aesthetics

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Because to be honest, different aspects of our looks come in and out of vogue over history. There were times in history when being very plump was more fashionable. And there were times when being very frail and skinny were fashionable. And now it seems like we're getting a resurgence of people being muscular, which I'd argue is the best approach because it's actually healthy. So it's about the function of our body, the vitality we have, being able to sort of live your life the way that you want to on your terms. That should be what we're chasing with our weight loss goals. And I have a lot of clients that I work with, and they sort of get to this point once they start losing weight and they start noticing the other health benefits, they redefine what their goal weight is based off of how they feel, how their labs are looking, how their blood pressure is, how they're moving their body, how they feel in their joints. I mean, there's just so many other things that kind of come to the surface, which is why weight loss is a journey, because you start to discover things about yourself. So consider that maybe you are at a weight where your health markers are good, you're feeling really strong, and you can do what you want to do. Just because that doesn't fit the BMI perfectly doesn't necessarily matter. And I'll give you a little hint: the BMI scale does not take into account the weight from which kind of a tissue we're talking about. So whether it's weight from muscle, from bones, from organs, or from fat, BMI doesn't consider those things. So you have to know what your body is capable of and where you're at. If you're hanging on to a lot of extra fat tissue, that is absolutely a factor. But if you are somebody that also has a huge amount of muscle mass, then you're not necessarily going to get as low of a BMI as somebody who has way less muscle. That's just kind of how that works. So sometimes the goal isn't just a smaller number, it is having a healthier, more functional version of you, whatever weight that is. Okay. So really don't forget that point. It is so fundamental. And I am spending so much time in my clinical practice talking to my patients about these kinds of things because we have to kind of ignore what the media tells us that we're supposed to look like and how we're supposed to feel about our bodies. And we need to know what actually is working for us. So, recap for a

Recap, Ideas, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 14:56

second here. Plateaus are super normal. And if you've been following through this episode, you're going to recognize that they're not just normal, they're kind of inevitable with weight loss, but they're also opportunities. So your body has adapted, you've lost weight. That means your metabolism may be adjusted to the new weight you are, and it's time to change something up. So, especially movement and thinking about which types of movement we're doing and what are we not doing. This is really the most underutilized tool I see amongst folks, especially older folks. Consider movement as a tool in your toolbox if you're not already. And again, this can be some really fun stuff. It can be picking up a new hobby, pickleball, swimming, a dance class, outdoor activities. I mean, there the sky is the limit. If you are somebody like the client that I talked about earlier who had never exercised in her life and she didn't want to touch a gym with a 10-foot pole, and then she ended up liking it once she tried it, that's okay. You can find the things that are working for

Questions, Community, And What’s Next

SPEAKER_00 15:57

you. Now, I want to be answering more of your questions. So just a quick reminder here for these to keep working, I want to know what you guys want to know. Drop your questions in the comment section so that I can make more videos like this answering your specific weight loss questions. And after teaching weight loss online to over 40,000 people, I have started to figure out really what works to be successful. And so I want you to keep watching my series up here where I'm jumping into other topics and I'm answering other questions that you guys have asked me. You're going to enjoy those other videos. Make sure to jump over there and I'll see you inside.