The accepted wisdom on this forum is that if you keep your calories up to a reasonable level, you can lose weight while preventing your body from going into starvation mode. I'm willing to believe that works for people with 20 or 30 or even 40 pounds to lose. They can probably trick their bodies into losing the weight without thinking they are staving, because they can lose all the weight they need to lose in a reasonable period of time. However, I'm wondering if this advice applies to us in the TDC.

It seems to me that most of us in the TDC experience a significant weight loss slowdown or stall somewhere around the vicinity of 80 to 100 pounds off. For some people this point is sooner (60 or 75 pounds) and for some people this point is later (125 or 150 pounds), but around 80 to 100 pounds seems to be about average. At some point, most (not all) of our bodies seem to decide they have lost enough weight and they are going to make us really work for every single additional pound that comes off, if they are going to let go of any additional pounds at all. From what I have read, the same thing often happens to people who have weight loss surgery -- they lose really fast for the first 100 pounds, but then have to really work at it to lose more weight.

What I am wondering is if this could be happening because there is a limit to how long we can trick our bodies into losing weight without causing them to think that they are starving and therefore should hold on to every last pound. People with only moderate amounts of weight to lose may not encounter this point, but those of us with over 100 pounds to lose often seem to do so.

If this is what is happening, rather than continuing to battle with our bodies, does it make sense for us to accept this fact and decide to simply maintain our weight loss for a while (six months or a year), until our bodies feel better nourished and decide they are not starving, and then try to lose more weight again? Or, is it best to just continue with what we are doing and accept the fact that our weight loss is likely to be extremely slow from here on out? Any thoughts on this from other TDC members who have lost a significant amount of weight?