The plateau that isn't.
Most stalls on the scale are not real plateaus. They are noise that looks like one. Knowing the difference tells you what to do next.
Week one, down. Week two, down. Week three, up 0.6. Suddenly you start questioning everything. The dose, the plan, whether any of this is working. More progress dies in that moment than anywhere else on the journey.
The scale leaves a lot out. Day-to-day weight swings 1 to 2 percent for reasons that have nothing to do with fat. Salt after a restaurant week. Water your muscles hold onto after training. Travel. Where you are in a cycle. A late dinner that is, quite literally, still in transit. None of it is regain. All of it looks like regain on a Tuesday morning.
The three-week rule
Before you call anything a plateau, it has to pass three tests. First, the trend line has been flat for at least three weeks. Single weigh-ins don't count. Second, your tracking was honest for those weeks. A stall during an untracked stretch is a data problem, not a metabolism problem. Third, nothing else changed. No dose adjustment, no new medication, no unusually hard block of training.
Most "plateaus" fail the first test. They're ten days old. Ten days of flat is your body doing bookkeeping.
The ordered checklist
If it passes all three tests, change things in this order. One change at a time, one week each. Start with protein. Are you actually hitting your floor, weighed and logged, not guessed? Next, the quiet calories. Oils, dressings, bites while cooking. They creep up exactly because the medication made you stop noticing food. Then steps. When appetite falls, everyday movement falls with it, often by thousands of steps a day without you deciding anything. The intake target itself moves last, and only if the first three check out.
The order runs from most likely to least likely, and from cheapest to most expensive. Cutting intake first is the classic mistake. It costs muscle, and muscle is what keeps the result.
What a person watching adds
Every Cofactor plan tracks the trend, not the weigh-in. So when a client writes "up 0.8, feeling like I'm slipping," the reply can be specific: that's water and salt after a travel week, and here is the one thing to do about it. This conversation is where a person in your corner earns their keep. The worst decisions on this journey get made alone, at the scale, before coffee.