General Bootcamp/Low Carb Chat

[BIWI]

We're starting the next challenge (Lose Half a Stone Before Christmas) on Monday, but not every one will want to take part in that - so I thought it would be a good idea to have a general, non-challenge-specific thread for other chat.

So post your questions, thoughts, meals and anything else here!

Here's my advice @Notafanofchristmas you're not going to like it but it comes from my experience as a weight loss coach. First, the positives:

1. Eating no processed food or sugar, and only drinking green or soursop tea are both ideal.
2. A 72-hour fast every so often is fantastic for maintaining your health and lowering your risk of age-related disease and cancer. The 48-hour fast once a month is of limited benefit since you're already doing a 24-hour fast every day for OMAD.
3. Carbs kept to under 20 g is great but you can go a little higher than this, maybe even twice as much and still lose weight once you get your food intake right.

Now for the negatives:

1. OMAD is terrible for weight loss. It might work initially but, in women, it will stop working after 2-3 months. If you're really wedded to OMAD then try alternating eating at lunch time one day and dinner time the next day so that your daily fasts are of differing length. It would also be worth eating two or even three meals on one day every week. Check out Dr Mindy Pelz on YouTube for some great advice on fasting.
2. Your calories are far too low. Assuming you're a typical height then nobody should be consuming less than 1,400 calories per day. You're slowing your metabolism, preventing your body from healing and replacing tissue, and sabotaging your weight loss. You're probably also desperately undereating protein which you need more of, not less of, as you get older. The usual target of 1g per kilogram body weight is a minimum, not a maximum.

My advice is eat more calories per day, eat more protein every day, and eat more healthy fat every day. Stop doing OMAD entirely. I would initially switch to 16:9 or 2MAD and increase your calories to 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day. The calorie increase is the most important thing but do make sure you're getting enough protein. When your body has had a few weeks to heal you will start to see weight loss again. If you want to reintroduce fasting at this point then I would suggest rolling 48 or 72-hour fasts with a two or three meal day every Sunday.

It’s still high fat low carb. The main bulk of my diet is meat, that fattier cuts, and green veg cooked in coconut oil, and grass fed butter.

I only mentioned calories as I worked them out once because I was sick to death of people telling me I wasn’t losing weight as I was starving myself. I’m more concerned with getting the good fat in and lowering carbs.

I am no stranger to low carb. I lost ten stone a decade ago (and kept it all off) doing it and I’ve not eaten bread in the years after, just rice and potatoes which I cut out 6 months ago.

I’ve just added the celery and carrot juice as I have a degenerative eye disease which I found out about last year and will do anything to help that - some research shows it may help. When you have the fear of blindness hanging over you, you will try anything. The cayenne in olive oil was to help with BP and a clotting disorder I have - both of which it certainly has helped with.

The flax and greek yogurt, I have inherited dodgy genes for a range of cancers from both parents one of them died from colon cancer at 40, the other at 60, I am currently being further investigated by genetics. There’s a lot of research showing that eating greek yogurt reduces risk of polyps and the flax really helps with stomach issues.

I don’t eat any sugars due to my high cancer risk. I can’t tolerate dairy apart from greek yogurt and I am allergic to egg, which is just fabulous along with being coeliac!

I took advice from my consultants who have been really helpful and very open minded (apart from the dietician who does my coeliac bloods who is obsessed with bread and cereal and adding processed meats, weirdly!)

And thank you for all this too! Who said I wouldn’t like it? I was asking for advice.

I do vary my eating times every day. I do a couple of times a week eating twice a day.

I love the 72 hour fasts (I’m weird!), so will keep doing those.

Generally people find it difficult to believe that they can lose weight by eating more. Good luck to you, I'm sure you can achieve your weight loss goals.

As ever, thank you for your advice and wisdom @StuntNun - and I hope it's helpful @Notafanofchristmas - it's very much appreciated.

Hello lovely LCHF people, I've not been very active on these threads but I have been KOKOing like a trouper (if that's the right word, certainly like a thing that's really very LC indeed).

NSV highlight for me, I was called in to my GP surgery for a 'health check'. My initial reaction was trepidation, (increasingly old and frail DH often gets called in my them and it's always another complication of one sort or another)

Headline results BMI 23, bp 120/70, with full results to come in the new year, full credit given to this LCHF way of eating. And I feel really good on it, too. There have been quite a few meals out which have found easy to navigate, mostly loads of greens and good quality meat. Coffee instead of puddings.

Thank you, season's greetings and happy new year xx

Lovely to hear from you! And great news about the health check

Well done, @FinallyHere , that's brilliant. Just posting to hold myself accountable. Had a lovely Christmas, didn't do too badly LC wise apart from bread, then total binge yesterday after a horrendous drive down the M1. Biscuits, chocolates, stollen, crisps, more bread. So hyped up on sugar I didn't sleep. There are sugary goodies lying around everywhere, so I'll be stashing them all in the out of bounds cupboard. No scales til Monday, I'm too afraid...

Thank you @OldandTired66

Hope the scales deal kindly with you.

Well I’m in sunny Florida now. Weighed myself before I left to see what the Christmas damage was and was amazed to see I’d only put on a pound, despite a lot of food on the naughty list, and Prosecco. A nice surprise about coming here was that Keto seems to be a massive thing - there’s a huge selection of no carb breads, wraps, pittas etc in the supermarkets. And it seems standard in pizza shops to offer a cauliflower crust. Think I will load my suitcase up with bread etc when I come back! Eating out a bit so not being too strict but hopefully the damage won’t be too great.