... to tell you that diets don't work for everyone

[Wroxie]

Today is my 9 month anniversary of tracking every bite of food that's gone into my mouth, with the exception noted below:

My birthday (one day in which I had, as I remember, pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, no lunch, and fish and chips + a couple of donuts for dinner).

And that's it. I don't drink alcohol. No takeaways. No restaurants. Nothing that I didn't weigh, portion, and track faithfully. Even when I bake or make something from a recipe, every ingredient is weighed and the calories per serving calculated. I skip breakfast during the week and have normal, healthy food and smallish portions for lunch and dinner.

I eat, on average, 1,100 calories per day. I have a desk job but I walk for 30 minutes to an hour nearly every day.

Before this, my diet was pretty bad - takeaways 3-4 times per week, pastries for breakfast, sandwich with crisps and chocolate at lunch, biscuits whenever I felt like it- probably more than 2,500 calories most days (I'm 5'3" so that is A LOT).

And now, nine months later, I have gone from 13 stone to 12.3 stone. That's a grand total of ten pounds lost on an extremely restricted diet- and it was all within the first two months.

Please don't give me diet advice - no, I'm not in 'starvation mode' (because that's a complete myth). No, I don't need to 'cut carbs'. Seriously, I do not want your advice. What I want is to point out that, the next time you're tempted to say something asinine like 'it's just about calories in vs calories out' or to dismiss or vilify or judge someone based on their weight, to realise that the human body is not a two-stroke lawnmower engine and weight, food, activity, hormones, age, genes, and a million other factors are at play. Losing weight isn't simple and even with all the willpower in the world - which I have demonstrated - it isn't always possible.

I'm not giving up. I have gotten used to eating this way and I actually feel like my blood sugar is more regulated (no 'sinking feeling' a few hours after eating a big lunch, for example) and I know that as I get older, it will be better to, at the very least, not get any fatter. That, at least, I can probably do. But nothing short of eating less than 1000 calories per day or surgery or medication are going to get me to a 'normal' BMI.

Just in case there's anyone thinking I'm talking out my arse haha

Yay, I've burnt 1498 @Looneytune253! We're almost 'burn' twins but my 10k run accounts for about half of that...

Lol I did do a workout this morning but a quiet day so far

@justanotherneighinparadise

For those who low carb, do you carb cycle?

I have been keto for many years.

If I am having a particularly annoying pre-menstrual episode (tired etc) I will have some lower GI carbs like sweet potato

I also will have some pure glucose if I am about to do an arduous hill climbing bike ride - I can do it just on fat, but there is no doubt at high levels of VO2 requirements, glucose makes it easier

I also have noticed that there is some extra craving for carbs seasonally. When we are just into Autumn, I want some apple pie or similar. Must be an evolutionary thing, remember harvest festival?

I think Darwin did actually mention Mr Kipling in his 'On the Origin of Species'

More sensibly, it would tally that the body fancied putting on a 'fat blanket' as the weather started to be cooler, and all the fruits and berries, miraculously just happen to be ready then... Evolution is beautiful in its dovetailing. Shame we've got a shop on every corner selling bread and chocolate. No wonder so many of us wear fat blankets all year round.

I find that if I plateau for a while a carby meal and then back onto low carb sparks of weight loss - usually every 8-10 weeks seems to be my cycle

@Eckhart fat is amazing though. If you look up the function of the Omentum, it does all sorts. Even has an immune function. I don't need quite as much of it as I had, though.

@Pahrump

Yes, there is a theory that your body can retain water for a while whilst losing fat so you appear to plateau. The carbs spark a water loss somehow.

Is anyone into gut health?

I know it is an emerging field, but I'm totally down with it and try to pay attention to it. I have some supplements that claim to increase the gut bacteria but I'm not convinced that anything happens other than destruction by the stomach acid!!

Back to the OP, there is some evidence that poor gut health stops people losing weight in general.

[quote namochangoro]**@Pahrump

Yes, there is a theory that your body can retain water for a while whilst losing fat so you appear to plateau. The carbs spark a water loss somehow. [/quote]
Yes, im sure I've read about something called the "whoosh" along the lines of your body fills your empty fat cells with water in anticipation of being able to fill them with fat again, and then realises its not going to happen so releases the water and you drop a few pounds overnight.

Interesting! I’m going to do some more research. Thank you 👌

Back to the OP, there is some evidence that poor gut health stops people losing weight in general.

I've heard that. And that diet can affect it. It makes sense that an optimum diet would promote a good gut biome which is, in turn, conducive to good health. Conditions like insulin resistance can make weight loss more difficult and they might be exasperated by an imbalance in the gut biome, maybe. I suppose the biome affects food absorption etc I've heard, though it can even affect conditions like depression. There are more bacteria in the body than our own cells! Which flabbergasted me!

and then realises its not going to happen so releases the water and you drop a few pounds overnight

Sounds messy. Plastic sheets..?

@Looneytune253

Just in case there's anyone thinking I'm talking out my arse haha

I seriously doubt the fitbit accuracy. According to it i burn between 2-3 thousands calories a day(less at the weekend). I eat way under that but the weight loss is minimal. Like I said I'm back on the wagon(should probably walk instead ) and i lost 6 kgs in 3 months. I can put that on in a few weeks .

I doubt anything that calculates calories burned using averages of body stats. If hormones are put into the equation, the amounts burned vary enormously. Look at type 1 diabetics. Untreated, they can eat a million calories a day and still waste away. I realise that that's an extreme, but if we all accept that, hormonally, we all have very different responses and triggers (which we must, in the same way we all have different faces), then that just isn't represented in these 'calories burned' figures we get from Fitbits and the like.

They work for some, because some are like 'the average' person. But there are so many variables. It's really not unusual to walk round town and see lots of average people but quite a lot of not-average ones too (you know, very tall/short, exceptionally large nose, super squeaky voice etc), and we also see those sort of variables in people's weight. We often don't know what we're eating, we don't know how our bodies process it (as individuals), we don't know accurately how many kcals we're burning, we don't know what we're burning when we burn those kcals, we don't know what else our bodies might be storing (water/extra lymph/more or less muscle/a secret growth our body hasn't told us about yet), and we don't know when any/some/all of these variables change. Yet we think that if the fitbit says we burned 3500kcals, we should be a lb of fat lighter.

The right diet is the diet that nourishes you and keeps you at the appropriate weight. You have to experiment to find the right diet for you and your lifestyle The 'instructions' and tallies of steps and kcal and minutes of exercise, the 'eatwell' plate, it isn't working, for so many of us. We have to find our own way.

Conditions like insulin resistance can make weight loss more difficult and they might be exasperated by an imbalance in the gut biome, maybe. I suppose the biome affects food absorption etc I've heard, though it can even affect conditions like depression.

just read the clever guts diet

its really interesting book and plenty of useful information - particularly about seaweed capsules and the trails they did with them at different levels and a placebo

there was also mention of not having a good gut health and affecting weight, generally we all have very different gut healths and it does affect many many areas of our lives

I'm really interested in the idea about gut bacteria. I guess it's a new type of science but would love to know more (without paying for an expensive test!)

@Lurkingforawhile

I'm really interested in the idea about gut bacteria. I guess it's a new type of science but would love to know more (without paying for an expensive test!)

There’s a great podcast on bbc sounds called “The Second Genome” by James Gallagher on this topic. Really interesting listen.

This sounds like maintenance calories. (For activity level). I maintain weight at 1200 when not exercising much.

Do you count sugar in tea, sauces , milk in tea/coffee etc?

No diets don't work on their own unless you are consuming very high calories to begin with. It's diet and bloody hard work exercising.

Might be worth investing in an online coach.

@Eckhart by enlarge I think you are correct. But what FitBit and other trackers like it give you is a baseline of stats which you can work with. So if you suspects it overestimates or underestimates in something you can tweak things to account for your suspicion. So the data helps as it can highlight things you can try tweaking and then you can track your tweaks one by one to ascertain the most successful. And surprisingly I find it really rewarding. I never thought I'd be bothered but I like knowing my running and walking does make a difference and choosing this food over that food or this portion over that portion makes a difference. Me and DH have the most nerdy conversations about it.

My DH's also does heart rate which I would be interested in from a MAF point of view but I also get white coat syndrome which causes my heart to race and blood reassure go up so I think I'd be a nightmare with it. But he loves to tell me how good his estimated VO2 max is! I'm quite happy with my basic version, though.

Oh, yeah, I do that with my heart rate monitor, namochangoro. It doesn't realise my heart is younger than it's meant to be so I just have to 'interpret' it through my filter of knowledge. The problem is that people are not being given the knowledge, so they end up like OP. I've read a lot and clearly so have you, but the guidelines we're given to supposedly keep us healthy aren't adequate, so people follow the guidelines and then don't understand how to 'tweak'. I can see why people think 'diets don't work'. It's so oversimplified.

You don't need to tag me - I've got about 15 emails with your name on! An Eckhart will work. I'm right here, it's a good thread.

Sorry, Eckhart, I've turned tags off. I forget some people might not have.

Oh! I hadn't considered that I could do that! You're an education