I've got about 380 weigh-ins in a spreadsheet and the scale flatlined for 19 straight days around the four-month mark while my waist dropped almost 2 inches in that same window, then the scale caught up in about a week and a half. If I'd been enrolled in an 8-week study I'd have looked like a non-responder; at 12 weeks, a partial responder.
Same body, different endpoint window, which is why I don't think the small-n studies are automatically redundant — they might be pinning down when the signal actually shows up, and a tight 62-person window can do that faster than one big slow trial.
The other thing my own data keeps telling me is that my worst weeks were never the holidays, they were the ones where I slept under 6 hours three nights in a row. Sleep and stress moved my scale way more than one hevy dinner ever did.
So when I see a new listing I basically hunt for two things: is the primary measure weight only, or weight plus waist or body comp, and what's the assessment week.
Some of these look like they're answering 'does it work' and others 'when does it show,' which are genuinely different questions. And I'll admit the dumbest confounder in my whole dataset was the two weeks I switched from morning weigh-ins to after work — water and food alone gave me a 3-4 lb swing that took me forever to catch.