The scales didn’t move for a fortnight and I was certain I’d broken something.
Same eating window. Same food. Nothing changed. The number just sat there morning after morning while I stood on the same spot on the bathroom floor waiting for it to do something.
Then ten pounds went, and it went fast.
I’ve got NHS blood tests going back to April 2012, and I’m five stone down as of August 2026. So when the flat spells kept turning up I did what I always do. I pulled the whole weight record for 2024 and 2025 and went looking for the shape of it.
One bloke’s data, not a trial. But the shape was there. And it was the same shape every time.
The Morning I Checked the Battery
January 2024. I’d been weighing myself every morning since Boxing Day.
Same scales, same spot on the bathroom floor, same time, before anything. Which sounds obsessive and probably was.
The twenty-ninth of January, I was 17 stone dead. Two hundred and thirty-eight pounds.
The thirtieth of January, 16 stone 8. Two hundred and thirty-two.
Six pounds. Overnight.
I checked the battery. I checked whether the scales had shifted onto the tile edge. Weighed again. Still 232.
That reading is logged as WMTWL-EVID-0183, and it turned out to be the biggest single-day drop of the whole of 2024.
Here’s the bit I got wrong. I decided it was a fluke. A one-off. Bad scales, water, something.
What I should have asked was what the fortnight before it looked like. I didn’t, because at that point I wasn’t reading the record. I was just filling it in.
Ninety Days of Nothing, and the Part I’ve Never Really Talked About
March 2024. Ninety days in. 15 stone 5, or two hundred and fifteen pounds. Two stone five off from Boxing Day.
I felt unstoppable. Genuinely. Ordered smaller shirts.
June 2024. A hundred and eighty days in. 15 stone 7.
Two pounds heavier than I’d been three months earlier.
That one is logged as WMTWL-MOM-256, and I’ll be honest, it nearly finished me. Ninety days of doing the same thing and the number had gone the wrong way. I sat on the edge of the bath and worked out how many hours I’d put into it.
That is the point where “intermittent fasting but not losing weight” stops being a search and starts being a proper crisis of faith. If you’ve typed “not losing weight on intermittent fasting” into your phone at eleven o’clock at night, I’ve been there. Mine was closer to “why am I not losing weight on 16 8 fasting”, but it’s the same three in the morning question underneath it.
I didn’t quit. But it was closer than I’ve ever let on.
The Same Shape, Over and Over
Then across 2024 and into 2025, the same thing kept happening at specific numbers.
WMTWL-EVID-0167. Two hundred and four pounds. That’s 14 stone 8. Weeks of it.
Then a drop. Then 14 stone dead, a hundred and ninety-six. Weeks of that.
Then a drop. Then 13 stone 7, a hundred and eighty-nine.
Same shape every time. Two to four weeks where the number did nothing, then ten to twenty pounds gone in a short run.
I need to be careful here, because that analysis was done looking backwards, on the thirtieth of October 2025. So I can give you the numbers I sat at and I can give you roughly how long each spell ran. I can’t pin every one of them to an exact week, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
What I can tell you is what the moving weeks had in common. Every one of them had an extended fast in it. Not the flat weeks. The moving weeks.
Whether the fast caused that or just happened to land there, I honestly don’t know. One person, no control group, about four other things changing at the same time.
And here’s a thing I completely missed for the best part of a year. Across the twenty-two months from Boxing Day 2023 to October 2025, I lost fifty-nine pounds. Work that out per day and it’s under a tenth of a pound.
Less than a pound a week. That’s the whole transformation.
It never once felt like that day to day, because it never arrived like that.
What a Four-Week Average Did to the Whole Picture
There wasn’t a moment. I want to be straight about that, because everybody wants there to be one.
It came out of a spreadsheet. Sat there with two years of daily weights, sorting columns, adding a four-week rolling average because I’d got bored of looking at the daily one.
And the flat spells just went. Not smoothed over. Gone. On the four-week view they weren’t there at all.
That was the click, if there was one. Everything lies to you in the moment. The scale on a Tuesday morning is telling you about your Monday, not about your year.
There’s an analogy for this I’ve pinched off the diabetes world, and it fits better than anything I could come up with.
Watching your blood sugar like a day trader, reacting to every tick, every reading, every minor fluctuation, is exhausting and misleading. Watch it like a long-term investor instead. Single readings are noise. The trend over weeks and months is the signal. A good investor doesn’t panic at a bad Tuesday. They look at the annual return.
Same numbers. Completely different question.
There’s a biologist called Aubrey de Grey who works on ageing, and he made a point I keep coming back to. When people go into a deficit, the insulin resistance picture can improve fairly quickly, well before body weight changes much, because visceral fat seems to be the first thing the body reaches for.
Which may suggest something worth sitting with. The thing that shifts first might not be the thing you’ve chosen to measure.
I can’t tell you that’s what was happening in my flat weeks. I wasn’t taking bloods fortnightly. But it’s the most sensible explanation I’ve come across for why the number can sit still while something is clearly going on.
What I’d Do Differently
The change I’d make on day one. I’d have started a four-week rolling average from the very first entry. Took me nearly two years to add a column. Not my finest hour.
I’d have weighed daily and only ever looked weekly. Daily data, weekly reading. That’s the whole thing.
If you’re already tracking. If you’ve got a run of daily weights and you’re going spare over a flat fortnight, average them over four weeks before you conclude anything. In my case that was the difference between panic and information. If the four-week direction is still wrong after a couple of months, that’s the point where I’d want a GP looking at it rather than a spreadsheet.
If you’re not tracking anything yet. This is the one I’d want to hear if I were starting.
If you’ve been eating well for a month and the scales have done nothing, that isn’t automatically a sign it isn’t working. It might just be the shape it takes. Have a look at the mirror and a tape measure alongside it, because those two sometimes move when the scale doesn’t. Some people photograph themselves monthly and swear by it. Never suited me, but I can see exactly why it works, because the change becomes obvious in a way a number never quite manages.
Not a diagnosis. Just a thing to be curious about before you decide you’ve failed.
Honest ending on this one. Knowing the shape didn’t change what I ate or how I fasted. Not one bit. What it changed was that I stopped panicking on the flat weeks, and I stopped thinking those weeks had been wasted.
That’s the whole return on the insight. It was worth more than I’d have guessed.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- The flat spells were the shape, not the stop: across 2024 and 2025 my record ran two to four weeks flat, then ten to twenty pounds in a short run, over and over
- The daily number answers the wrong question: a Tuesday morning reading tells you about your Monday, not about your year
- A four-week rolling average made the flat spells vanish: same data, same period, and on that view they weren’t there at all
- The whole thing averaged under a pound a week: fifty-nine pounds across twenty-two months, which never once felt like that day to day
- Measure more than one thing: in my case the mirror and a tape measure sometimes moved when the scale didn’t
Ready to Look at Your Own Numbers This Way?
If you’ve got a run of daily weights and no way of seeing past the noise, the tracker does the averaging for you. Daily entries in, four-week view out. That’s the one change I’d go back and make on day one.
💪 Want ongoing support? Join Rhythm Club for £30/month (includes FREE app access, community, and weekly accountability calls)
⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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