Trial curves fall fast early and flatten later. A stretch where the scale barely moves can be a real stall, or it can be the stage where the average curve slows down too. This tells you which one your numbers look like.
Use the same unit for both weights — pounds or kilos, it does not matter. Week 1 is your first injection or first dose.
Percent of starting body weight lost in each block, read off the published mean curve for the medication selected above. The right-hand column is what that works out to per week.
Source: trial data and methods.
There is no published "average plateau length." The trials report group means at fixed clinic visits. Nobody published how long individual participants sat flat, so any site quoting a typical stall length in weeks is making it up. What the data does give you is the pace of the average curve at your stage, which is the comparison above.
A mean curve is smoother than any real person. Averaging hundreds of people turns a set of staircases into a slope. Individual weight moves in steps: nothing for three weeks, then two pounds in four days. The group line never shows that, so it sets an expectation no individual scale actually meets.
Ordinary fluctuation can hide a month of progress. Water, sodium, glycogen, constipation and menstrual-cycle phase each move the scale by a pound or more in either direction. A genuine loss of two pounds over four weeks can vanish inside that noise, which is why the trial protocols weigh at set visits rather than daily.
Slower later is the design, not a failure. For every drug in the table above, the first block is the steepest and the last is the flattest. By the second half of a trial the average curve is moving at a small fraction of its early pace. If you are comparing month six against month one, you are comparing two different stages of the same curve.
Dose stage matters more than calendar week. Trial curves are labelled by the maintenance dose, but participants spent the first weeks titrating up to it. If you are at week 10 on a starter dose, you are not yet on the dose the curve is named after.
What is worth raising with your prescriber: no movement at all across eight to twelve weeks while you are on a stable maintenance dose, or weight going back up. That is a conversation with the person who wrote your prescription. Do not change or stop a dose based on a calculator, this one included.
I have been stuck for three weeks. Is that normal? Three weeks is short enough that ordinary fluctuation alone can account for it, especially after week 16 where the average curve is moving less than half a percent of body weight per month for most of these drugs. Run your own numbers above rather than guessing.
Does eating more protein restart it? Protein does not make the scale move on its own. What it does is change what you lose: adequate protein plus resistance work is the lever with actual evidence behind it for holding muscle while fat comes off. The calorie and protein calculator gives you the number.
Should I ask to move up a dose? That is a prescriber's call, and higher is not automatically better — the side-effect curve rises with it too. Bring your logged weights to the appointment instead of a feeling that it stopped working. Side effects by dose is worth reading first.
How do I stop guessing about this? Log the weekly number. A stall only exists relative to a record. The weekly tracker keeps your line next to the trial line, in your browser, and tells you where the gap is each week.
One short email a week: the trial-average number for the week you are on, what counts as a normal stall, and what does not.
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