When we talk about plateaus we are talking about lack of WEIGHT loss, but the goal is really FAT loss.  Unfortunately, weight and fat loss don't coincide, especially at the beginning of a diet when the body’s water balance is altered by the smaller amounts of food or new foods that you are eating.

During the first few weeks of losing weight, a rapid drop is normal. In part, this is because when you cut calories, the body gets needed energy initially by releasing its stores of glycogen, a type of carbohydrate found in the muscles and liver. Glycogen is partly made of water, so when glycogen is burned for energy, it releases water, resulting in weight loss that's mostly water. This effect is only temporary.

Everyone wants, and hopes for, fast weight-loss. Unscrupulous “experts” … in books and advertising ... promise dieters more weight-loss than is possible.  It is only possible for the human body to lose a certain limited average amount of fat per week. 

Also the sharp decrease in weight that often happens during the first week or two of dieting raises false and unrealistic expectations that this fast initial weight-loss rate will continue throughout the following weeks.

It’s an unfortunate fact that the bodies of most women max out at an average of about 2 pounds of fat loss a week, and even this only happens with very active dieting. 

Below are calculator chart examples demonstrating this fact. So if you have 20 pounds of real fat to get rid of,  it will probably take at least 10 weeks, and it often takes 20 or 30 weeks for even a very successful dieter to lose 20 pounds of fat.

After dieting for a while, a woman’s weight can go up and down by 3 pounds between one day and the next ... because of changes in hydration and water balance, ... and for some women, menstrual cycle hormones make water change weight even more than this.

This daily change in water weight makes it genuinely hard to see the comparatively small loss of an ongoing one or two pounds of fat loss per week. 

There are many of methods of dieting … including low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic, intermittent fasting (i.e. everything from fasting between meals to long-term fasting), whole foods, unprocessed foods, food exchanges, portion control etc. 
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During my lifetime, I’ve lost and regained a great deal of weight.  For the past 11+ years, I've maintained my body at or near my “normal” BMI range.

I’ve experimented with many different diets, lifestyles, ways-of-eating, and non-diets.  See ABOUT ME. 

After all these years, here’s the most important basic fact that I’ve learned about losing weight and keeping it off.

How to Lose weight:
Sustain a caloric DEFICIT.

How to Keep it off:
Sustain a caloric BALANCE.

Various diet “experts” exist who dispute this law of calorie balance.  I’ve spent a lot of time studying and experimenting with that issue, and it has become clear to me that manipulating micronutrients does NOT “open a rift in the space-time-insulin continuum to transport body fat into the fifth dimension”.

I find it helpful to deal with Reality.

There are lots of methods of dieting including low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, high-fat,  ketogenic, intermittent fasting, whole foods, unprocessed foods, food exchanges, etc. etc. etc.

However, cutting calories is the basis for every effective weight-loss diet because the only way to lose actual fat is to consistently get one’s calorie intake lower than one’s calorie expenditure. So in actuality, the bottom line for weight-loss is the average daily calorie number.

There are essentially 3 issues involved in all Diets,

The main food issue is: AMOUNT; and two sub-issues are: KIND and FREQUENCY.

•  AMOUNT -- of food eaten
  
•  KIND – fundamental nature (micronutrients) of food eaten