nick_newbie said:

Nine weeks flat after five months of steady loss, same dose, same routine, and I cannot tell whether to wait or change something.

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 204 lbs for 6 weeks. Tried everything — calorie cycling, increased exercise, more water. Nothing worked.

What finally broke the plateau: increasing protein to 150g/day. Lost 5 lbs in the next 2 weeks. Plateaus are temporary — they always break if you stay consistent.

Dr.NutriCornell said:

Plateau breaking story with a stall: I stalled at 204 lbs for 6 weeks.

Dr.NutriCornell has the substance of this right. The condition it depends on is worth stating. Genuine plateaus happen too, and the mechanism is metabolic adaptation plus a smaller body. A body 20kg lighter needs meaningfully fewer calories at rest and less to move, so the deficit that produced the first phase is arithmetically smaller now. The options are the honest ones — increase the deficit slightly, increase activity, or accept the new plateau — and escalating the dose is only one of them.

nick_newbie said:

Nine weeks flat after five months of steady loss, same dose, same routine, and I cannot tell whether to wait or change something.

Second this.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.