Can anyone please tell me how on Earth this could be?

[Diditopknot]

I’m on the Cambridge diet, just one bar a day.
Iost 2lbs week one..brilliant!
Week 2 weigh day is today , but I did a sneaky weigh in yesterday as my clothes are feeling a bit looser and I have stuck to it, great, another 3lbs gone. That was last night. Ate nothing, had a bath went to bed…
Tonight I weighed myself.
6lbs ON.

Today I have eaten x1 weetabix with almond milk at breakfast, 5.30 this morning.
12.30 I had x1 Cambridge bar. Just got in from work so hopped on the scales… 6lbs ON. ON.
How the fuck can I have eaten so little and witching 24 hours put on 6lbs???

I think I’ve got IBS as I’ve been to the loo twice today.
Had 2 cups of black decaf coffee and 1 litre of water.

I’m perimeno, cannot move any weight even though I stick to less than 800 calories a day,

Gutted, absolutely gutted.

Naaa! I work 50 hours a week, crap knackered back so no, nothing like that.

People in interment camps with hardly any food did not all stay the same weight. They became very thin.

Yeah, I had anorexia as a teen. If you don't eat enough to maintain, you will lose eventually...

Do you do any cardio either? Or literally no exercise at all?

Getting your heart rate up will really help. Even with back problems there's loads you can do. Spinning, for example. Or riding a bike to/from work.

Agree with PPs, ditch the Cambridge Diet and look at some proper alternatives. this sort of weight loss is doomed to failure in the long term.

Just for a start the stress you are feeling about this will flood your system with cortisol which plays havoc with your body's natural functions anyway. I'm not surprised you are getting gut aches.

There is no quick fix, you need to accept this, but to think that it is impossible because of your hormones is wrong, but you must eat proper food in the right balance if you want to be healthy.

I recommend Dr Chatterjee's Lose Weight Feel Great. He explains why stupid fad diets like the Cambridge won't work and puts you on the right track. He is very keen on restricted eating like 16:8, it is much better for you and much more sustainable.

Someone who lost 6 stone here.

Its not how much you eat its what you eat. Switch to good fats, nuts avocado etc. Take out refined sugar. Only drink water. No juice, no fruit juices and definitely no fizzy. Eat like a king for breakfast, a Prince for lunch and a pauper for dinner. Exercise for 30-1 hour a day. Cardio not yoga or anything. You'll lose weight and you'll lose it healthily. You'll feel amazing too. Don't diet, switch your lifestyle.

You need to weigh yourself first in the mornin but you eat or drink

And do it every day for 4 weeks and taken an average to get your through weight

Your weight fluctuates being on how much you drank or are the previous day

Maybe your way of eating isn’t working for you? Have you tried a lower carb diet? It’s the only way I lose weight. I know it’s more challenging when veggie/vegan but it is possible.

5:2 diet seems to work well for lots of people

As it's more a way of life than diet

It's literal water

I have a dietician and she gets really cross about the fad diets. She says when people are excited theyve lost 4lb one week then 4lb the next, it's not real weight, it's water their losing.

You've probably got a bit of fluid retention

Dear God there is no such thing as “starvation mode!”

There is. But it has different names.

I'm recovering from anorexia and this is what my dietician said about starvation mode. Apparently, if you don't feed your body enough, anything you put into it it stores, because it doesn't know when the next meal is coming in. Unless you starve yourself to the point that it starts eating the reserves

But who wants to starve?

OP I really hear you on the “nothing works”

But this must be water weight. If you carry on you will back to losing I’m sure.

You should only weigh first thing in the morning only. Ignore short term blips (eg you'll put on a few pounds before periods).

Most importantly, don't eat stupidly low amounts, you'll fuck your metabolism up and your body will start conserving every calorie desperately - then when you eat more you'll put weight on super-fast and it'll be worse than ever.

Instead, change your diet. Cut out processed foods like bread and pasta, focus on whole foods instead, and go a few hundred calories under maintenance needs.

Make sure you do at least three weights sessions a week or you'll lose muscle tone instead of fat. If you do exercise you'll have more energy in those 50 hours at work too.

Weights are important in the longterm. Or not necessarily weights, but some sort of strength training. Cardio burns calories, but losing muscle mass is a bad idea when you're already meno / peri with a slow metabolism (if you can't eat more than 1000 calories a day). If you starve and don't get enough protein and are also fairly sedentary, you will lose muscle mass. Aside from your weight loss in the future, it just isn't a good idea to neglect your strength when you're meno / peri.

Check out team Rh fitness. They encourage you to walk 15000 steps a day, so you are hitting that goal already.
I was about your weight, but I am 5’5 and they put me on 1700 cals. I am also peri- menopause.
They also encourage daily weighing and then the app averages your weight over the week, so it smoothies out all the highs and lows from water retention due to high salt meal, TOTM etc.
I used to be really demoralised at WW weighing myself once a week and ending up in the same position you are describing now.
Now I just look at the weekly averages.
I have lost nearly 3 stone, and am still losing weight, and I am still on 1700 cals a day (BMI now 22.5). It is easy to stick too as I don’t feel like I am starving myself. I would have given up a long time ago if I had tried to stick to 800 cals a day
Good luck

God, how can you survive on so little food?! Aren't you insanely tired and grumpy eating like that? I'm perimenopausal and lost loads of weight doing intermittent fasting (16/8). I eat really big portions of food that keep me feeling satisfied for hours.

Ravenous.
By 3pm, I am absolutely starving hungry.

I’m not particularly grumpy no,
I’m tired because my day starts at 5am every day and I do a mix of 5 days working then one night shift a week.

I’m not about to begin lifting weights I’m afraid.

My plan is once I start to work a normal 38 hours a week (new job) to swim twice a week and walk 3 nights a week.

Menopause is almost upon me, things are going to get much worse, I need some long bone exercises to strengthen bones, cardio to increase heart rate and reduced calories to encourage weight loss.

I’m really really not bothered about what I look like, I’m 51, I just need a healthy BMI.
I’d LIKE to be able to wear nice clothes instead of the size 18 sacks that are currently available to me.

I’ll keep going to use up the (very expensive) Cambridge are I have left. That will take me to my new job and plans.

Thanks everyone, and to those who “get where I’m coming from” a specially big thank you to you all.

The best way to do it is to weigh yourself everyday at the same time, morning after bathroom etc and then find the average for the week. As long as your average weight for the week goes down every week that's more accurate than day to day

Don't blame your metabolism. The most recent study on this suggests that metabolism doesn't really change across our lifespans (Herman Pontzer et al. Daily energy expenditure through the human life course. Science, 2021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abe5017). Don't get me wrong, being menopausal and knackered doesn't help, but a caloric deficit will work no matter what your menopausal status.

Try an average weight app. It gets rid of all these false highs and lows so it's not quite so depressing

Why are you weighing in the evening? Never do that.

Also to those peddling this myth starvation mode is not a thing.

Like others I'd suggest only weighing first thing and not obsessing about today's number but is the average over the last 7+ days going downwards. Your weight can vary by a couple of pounds so you can be unlucky and get a high reading sometimes. The actual number doesn't matter as much as the trend. If you can get comfortable with that, you won't fall off the wagon when you have a few days in a row which seem too high to be true

Clearly something isn't right if op gains weight by eating anything over 1000 calories. I think she can blame her metabolism! It is not strictly to do with age though. It is, as I've been going on about a lot on here, (sorry about that), to do with muscle wastage, which does increase as we age and especially when women are peri / meno. Hence why it is so important to eat enough, particularly protein and to focus on strength training if possible.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2016/5/18/11685254/metabolism-definition-booster-weight-loss

There's a bit about it here which probably explains it better than I do.

Basically, crash diets can be bad for your metabolism because you lose muscle muscle you lose a lot of weight quickly. Strength training can help your metabolism. It is because muscle takes more energy to sustain it than fat does. So if you lose a load of muscle which happens when you lose a lot of weight, your metabolism will be slower. Op is a lifelong dieter as well, so I can absolutely see that her metabolism could be against her

You're a size 18 and you gain weight on 1000 calories a day? You're either lying to yourself about how much you eat or there is something medically wrong with you.

Have you had any blood tests?

You lose muscle when you lose weight quickly*

Stupid phone

Had 2 cups of black decaf coffee and 1 litre of water. = 2.5kg easily

litre of water is 1 kilo, those must have been some huge coffee cups!

Just to say OP, my mum very much post menopause and overweight for much of her older adult life lost a lot of weight last year and is keeping it off. So please don't feel like it's impossible due to hormones or age. Slower results are better and will last while quicker ones are less likely to, so keep on doing what feels right to you and you will get to where you want to be. Good luck