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The plateau

Fourteen weeks of nothing and I have run out of ways to be reasonable about it

Started 27 March 2025 · 8 replies · 383 hearts · read 6.6k times

MarkCoventry, UK · 27 March 2025
1.3 years ago

I have written and deleted this four times because every version sounds like self-pity, so this one is just going up as it is.

Fourteen weeks. Nothing has moved for about six of them. Not a bit slower — nothing. I have done everything I was told and quite a lot I was not told. I walk the long way to work. I have the protein. I write it all down. I have not had a single week I would call careless.

And what I am finding hardest is not the stalling. It is that I have used up all my patience being sensible in public. Everyone in my life is being encouraging. My wife points out that I got up off the floor from playing with our niece at Christmas without doing the thing with the chair, and she is right, and I know it is real, and I cannot make myself care this week. There is a stubborn, ugly bit of me that wants the obvious thing to happen and it is not happening and I am so tired of being gracious about it.

I do not want to be talked out of this. I have read the plateau guide twice. I know about water weight and about how bodies defend themselves and about non-scale change, and if one more person tells me to trust the process I am going to say something I will regret.

I suppose I want to say it somewhere it will not worry anybody. Six weeks of nothing and I am still turning up. That is all I have got.

128

PriyaReading, UK
#1

Mark. I am not going to tell you anything.

Six weeks of nothing and you are still turning up. That is a hard thing you are doing and it is costing you something, and I am sorry it is costing you something.

58me too 16

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#2

I want to hold the room where Priya just put it, for a bit, before anybody starts solving.

Mark, you said the thing that matters halfway down: you have run out of patience for being reasonable in public. That is not self-pity. That is the cost of doing this well in front of people who need you to be all right. Being the person who is coping gracefully is genuinely tiring and there is nowhere to put the ungracious half of it, so it goes here.

You do not have to be constructive in this thread. You do not have to end on a hopeful note. You are not obliged to be an example to anyone reading. If you want to come back on Thursday and say the same thing again in the same words, that is a perfectly good use of the circle.

And to everybody else — I know several of you have something helpful. Hold it a day. He has read the guide.

59me too 14

RayBarnsley, UK
#3

I complain and then I do it anyway, so I am qualified for exactly this thread.

The ugly bit that wants the obvious thing to happen is not a flaw in you, Mark. We were all sold the obvious thing. Every advert, every article, every well-meaning relative. Then you get here and the actual experience is six weeks of nothing while your niece gets picked up off the floor and it does not feel like the thing you were sold.

No advice. Just: the ugly bit is allowed in here.

47me too 12

AnnikaStockholm, SE
#4

Month four was mine and I am not going to compare, I am just going to say that I sat in the car outside my own house for twenty minutes one Tuesday because I could not face being encouraged again.

Nobody knew. I told this room about it eight months later. You are doing it in real time, which is braver.

39me too 13

GavinDundee, UK
#5

Big lad, bad knees, Dundee. Nothing to offer you except that I read your post twice and the bit about having used up all your patience being sensible in public went right through me like a draught.

I am on week nineteen of something very similar and I have been doing the gracious thing at work since April. My wife gets the other version, which is not fair on her.

See you Thursday.

34me too 15

FenEly, UK
#6

Flat land, flat weeks. I stopped weighing anything in February — not as a strategy, I just could not stand the Thursday morning routine of it — and the odd result was that the plateau stopped being an event that happened to me weekly and became a stretch of time I was living in.

Only sharing because you asked for nothing and I wanted to put something down beside you rather than in front of you.

41me too 10

MarkCoventry, UK
#7

Right. I did not expect that and I have had to go for a walk.

Ada telling everyone to hold their good advice for a day is the single most useful thing anybody has done for me in a fortnight. Nobody has fixed anything and I feel about forty per cent less alone with it, which I did not know was available.

Still nothing moving. Still here Thursday.

56me too 8

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#8

Coming back a week later to close the loop for anyone reading this cold.

Mark came on Thursday. He said roughly the same thing in the same words, as invited, and then somebody else said it too, and then the conversation went somewhere none of us planned. Nothing was solved. That was never on the agenda.

If you are in the middle of a long flat stretch: you do not owe this room a silver lining. The guide will still be there when you want it.

49me too 9

Facilitator note — Ada

Facilitator note — Ada. I have pinned this thread in the-plateau and I want to say why, since it contains no useful information whatsoever.

It is here because it is the most common experience in the circle and the least documented. Everything written about a plateau is written to get you out of one. Almost nothing is written for the Thursday in the middle of it, when you are doing everything right and are sick of your own patience.

What the room did here is the skill I would most like to spread: somebody put something heavy down, and instead of picking it up and handing it back improved, we let it sit there next to us. That is harder than advice and it is usually what the person came for.

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