How to Start Your Weight Loss Journey: A Practical Guide (Part 3)
on November 09, 2026

How to Start Your Weight Loss Journey: A Practical Guide (Part 3)

A Few Weeks In: Where You Should Be

Welcome back to our 5 part mini series! If you've followed Part 1 and Part 2, you now have a calorie target, a protein target and a few weeks of weekly averages. Most people at this stage have watched the scale drop, stall, then drop again. That's normal.

This is also the point where most diets fall over. It's rarely because the plan stops working. It's because the scale goes quiet for a week or two, you get busy with life or work, motivation drops and people derail.

So in Part 3 we're tackling this: what to do when progress stalls, and how to handle restaurants, drinks and the silly season without undoing your week.

Why Progress Stalls

Most stalls have a boring explanation, and the boring explanation is good news because you can fix it. There are four usual suspects.

It's water, not fat. As we covered in Part 2, salt, carbs, hormones, a hard training week and poor sleep all move water around. Water can hide a week or two of fat loss, then disappear overnight. This is why we only judge weekly averages.

You're smaller now. A lighter body burns less energy, so the deficit that worked at the start shrinks as you lose weight. The 500 calorie gap you set at 90 kg might only be 300 by the time you hit 84 kg.

Your body pushes back a little. After weight loss, resting metabolism tends to drop 5–10% more than the weight loss alone would predict, though researchers still debate how big this effect really is. Hunger is the bigger factor. In one analysis, appetite rose by about three times as much as energy expenditure fell (Casanova et al., 2019). That extra hunger is real, and it's what quietly pushes portions up.

Tracking creep. This is the big one. In week one you weighed everything. By week six the chicken is eyeballed, the cooking oil isn't logged, and the weekend is a rough guess. People are famously bad at estimating what they eat. A well-known study found that people who believed they were "diet resistant" were simply eating more than they recorded (Lichtman et al., 1992).

Notice what isn't on the list: "starvation mode". Your body doesn't stop burning fat because you're in a deficit. It just makes the deficit a bit smaller and a bit harder to stick to.

The Plateau Checklist

Before you change anything, run through this list. Most "plateaus" don't make it past question three.

  1. Has your weekly average been flat for three weeks? Not three days, not one bad weigh-in. Three weekly averages in a row with no downward movement.
  2. Is your waist still shrinking? If your waist measurement or your clothes are still going down, fat loss is happening and the scale is just lagging. Keep going.
  3. Are you still weighing and logging everything? Oils, sauces, milk in coffee, the bites while cooking, and the weekends. If you're not sure, spend one week weighing everything like you did in week one.
  4. Are your steps the same as when you started? Check your phone's weekly average. When you're tired and hungry it's easy to move less without noticing.
  5. Has anything else changed? A new training program, a big week at work, poor sleep, or the time of the month can all hold water for a while.
  6. Do your weekends match your weekdays? Two loose days can cancel out five good ones. We'll deal with this below.

If you've ticked all six and the average still hasn't moved in three weeks, you've hit a genuine stall. Time to adjust.

How to Adjust When It's a Real Stall

The rule is simple: make one small change, then give it two to three weeks before you judge it.

  • Trim 100–200 calories. Take it from carbs or fats, not protein. Your protein target stays exactly where it is, because it's what protects your muscle and keeps hunger in check.
  • Or add 2,000 steps a day. Same effect, and for many people it's easier than eating less. If your steps have slipped since week one, start by getting them back.
  • Recalculate as you go. Every 5 kg or so, run the calorie calculator again with your new weight. Your maintenance has moved, so your target should too.

What not to do: don't slash calories to 1,200, add an hour of cardio a day, or cut out carbs completely. Big changes make you hungrier, flatten your training and are almost impossible to stick to. They're how a stall turns into a blowout.

Consider a diet break

If you've been dieting for a few months and you're tired, cranky and hungry all the time, the best move might be to stop dieting for a fortnight.

A diet break means eating at maintenance for one to two weeks, then going back into your deficit. In the Australian MATADOR study, men with obesity either dieted continuously for 16 weeks or alternated two weeks of dieting with two weeks at maintenance. The group taking breaks lost more fat (12.3 kg vs 8.0 kg), and their weight held steady during the breaks. Six months later, they had also kept more of it off (Byrne et al., 2018).

It was a small study in men only, and the break group took longer to get there (30 weeks vs 16). But it's a good reminder that a planned week at maintenance isn't quitting. It's a reset that makes the next block easier.

The key word is planned. Eat at your maintenance number, keep your protein up, keep training, and keep weighing in. Then get back to it.

Eating Out Without Undoing Your Week

You don't need to turn down dinners to lose weight. You need a game plan, and it's the same one you use at home: protein first, plenty of veg, and go easy on the extras.

  • Check the menu before you go. Big chains in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT have to show kilojoules on their menus (Obesity Evidence Hub). Divide by 4.2 for calories. For everywhere else, picking your meal at home beats deciding when you're starving and the table's ordering garlic bread.
  • Build the plate you'd build at home. Steak, fish, chicken or a protein-heavy salad, with veg or salad on the side instead of chips. Grilled beats fried, and sauces and dressings go on the side.
  • Watch the extras, not the main. The main meal is rarely the problem. It's the bread basket, the shared entrées, the side of chips "for the table", the dessert and the drinks.
  • Don't starve yourself all day. Saving a few hundred calories by keeping breakfast and lunch light and high in protein is fine. Skipping both and arriving ravenous is how one dinner becomes 2,000 calories.
  • Log your best guess. Find something similar in your tracking app and log it. A rough estimate keeps you honest. Skipping the log because it's "not accurate" doesn't.

And enjoy it. One restaurant meal won't undo a week. A meal out that turns into a weekend off might.

Alcohol, Weekends and the Silly Season

Alcohol

Christmas is around and the corner and you know what that means. Alcohol hits a diet twice- The drinks themselves carry energy, and they make the food around them much harder to manage.

  • One standard drink holds 10g of alcohol, which is 290 kJ (about 70 calories) before you count the mixer. Two full-strength beers or two glasses of wine is around three standard drinks. A can of soft drink with two shots of whisky comes to about 1,200 kJ, the same as a small meal (Alcohol. Think Again).
  • Drinking before or with a meal can push food intake up by as much as 30%, and the hangover cravings the next day are real (Alcohol. Think Again).
  • Australia's guideline for healthy adults is no more than 10 standard drinks a week and no more than 4 on any one day (NHMRC).

You don't have to go dry. Decide how many you'll have before you start, pick spirits with soda water or a diet mixer, or a light beer, and have a glass of water between drinks. Eat a proper protein-heavy meal first, and plan tomorrow's breakfast tonight so the hangover doesn't choose it for you. Energy labels are also on their way to cans and bottles, with brands given until about 2028 to add them (Cancer Council NSW).

Weekends

Remember the maths from Part 2: five days at a 500 calorie deficit can be wiped out by two loose days. The fix isn't to treat weekends like weekdays. It's to keep the structure and plan the fun.

Keep your usual breakfast and lunch, keep your protein up, get your steps in (a long weekend walk is perfect), and pick the one meal or event you're going to enjoy. One planned treat meal fits easily. A weekend of grazing doesn't.

The silly season

With Christmas parties around the corner, here's the honest advice: aim to maintain, not lose. Holding your weight steady through December is a genuine win.

  • Eat at your maintenance number for the busy weeks instead of fighting your deficit.
  • Pick your occasions. Christmas lunch with family, yes. Leftover office biscuits on a Tuesday, no.
  • Keep the habits that cost nothing: protein at every meal, your daily steps and your weigh-ins.
  • Get back to your plan the first normal day after. Not next Monday, and definitely not 1 January.

This Week

  • Run the plateau checklist against your last three weekly averages before you change a thing.
  • Measure your waist, and keep doing it every fortnight.
  • Spend one week weighing and logging everything again, oils, drinks and weekends included.
  • Check your average daily steps. Get back to your week-one number, or add 2,000.
  • If it's a genuine stall, make one small change and give it two to three weeks.
  • Before your next meal out, check the menu and decide how many drinks you'll have.
  • Write down the December events you actually want to enjoy, and plan to maintain through the rest.

Plateaus and parties are where most people give up. Get through them with a plan and you're already ahead of most.

In Part 4 we'll cover training, sleep and stress: how to hold onto your muscle while you lose fat, and why a bad night's sleep makes everything harder. See you then!

General information only, not medical advice. Check with your GP or a dietitian before making big changes to your diet, especially if you have an existing health condition.

Sources