Weightloss stopped.

[PointlessUsername]

Hi all,

Mid febuary after a hospital appointment where i was weighed and realised how much i actually weighed. I decided to do a low fat diet eating around 1200 mark.

At first i lost lots like 4lbs a week which slowed a little as i expected but trouble is last 3-4 weeks i have just gone up and down a lb despite sticking to plan & excercising.

Not sure what to try next to kick start losing again. I dont look a lot different despite loosing 28lbs. I do have a thyroid condition but at good levels with thyroxine.

Any suggestions welcome.

What do you eat?
1200 cal of leeks and broccoli and 1200 cal of ultra-processed low fat food will have a different impact on body.

Think about it longterm and more than a diet to reach a specific weight, as a diet to change your gut bacteria, your metabolic processes, and so on.

And are you sure you log in every single morsel or sip ? It is so easy to go over 1200 even while being very conscious.
Use cronometer.com it is free and very accurate.

so my suggestion is limit what comes out of a factory plant and go heavy on real plants, so a lot of veggies. Cut the ultra-processed food and be careful with drinks. A latte will quickly up your calories.

It might also be harder because you have reached your ideal weight, which might not be the weight you want but the weight your body had for a long time.

Swap your breakfast for a green juice like this one then have a tomatoes, cucumber, onions, parsley and chickpeas salad for lunch and a mixed vegetable soup for dinner.

How much do you have to lose? If you were never very overweight to begin with then 4 lb loss a week is about twice what is a healthy range and this could just be your body adapting to the lower calories by slowing the loss.
If you are very heavy, 4 lb a week is quite normal but if you’re very heavy then 1200 cals is too low. Yes I know MFP recommends it but you do also realise that about 90% of those who lose weight on severely restricted eating plans regain all of it right? 1200 cals when you’re morbidly obese is far too low and you’re virtually guaranteed to fail.

Also, if dieting not means cutting cals to 1200 then if you fail and regain (like most do) then next time you need to go even lower and be even stricter. It’s a really viscous cycle.

The only way you can realistically do it is to change your eating habits to something you can genuinely do for life. It sounds like you’ve made good progress with the weight you have lost so far though.

LeGrandBleu what sort of a diet is that? You’ve recommended that she eats all vegetables and no protein. She will either become malnourished or fall of the wagon pretty damn quick on that. The smoothie is likely to have a few hundred calories, mainly from the banana, the salad maybe a few hundred more from the chickpeas and the veg soup would be very low too unless it contains potatoes or is eaten with bread. It’s basically a starvation plan and won’t help in the slightest.

Example of today

No breakfast as not hungery in the morning

Tea with skimmed milk 4 cups no sugar.

Lunch was a tin of Lentil soup amd two slices of wholemeal bread.

Dinner chicken, 1 cup of long grain rice and 1 cup of green beans.

Banana & an apple.

4 glasses of water.

Not sure why weightloss just stopped still have around 60lbs to go.

I might be a bit unbalanced on the carbs side.
Having 2 slices of bread, 1 cup of rice and 1 banana will make it hard for you to lose the weight.
So have the grains, preferably whole grains at one meal, either lunch or dinner and instead of the rice with chicken, have a fennel salad or some asparagus, or a rocket salat,....
I have quickly put your meal in cronometer so you can see and maybe you can do it to.
Now protein. You need a lot less than you think, 0.8 gr/kg until you are 65 years old and in the UK, even less 0.75 gr/kg so make this calculation
your weight in kg x 0.75 = the amount you need to eat.
www.nutrition.org.uk
www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food-and-ingredients/protein.html
Dietary protein recommendations are traditionally expressed on a daily basis. In the United States and Canada, the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein intake for men and women (aged ≥19 y) is 0.8 g protein/kg bodyweight (BW)/d.75 In the United Kingdom, the reference nutrient intake (RNI) is set at 0.75 g protein/kg BW/d. Recently, a number of expert groups have advocated for higher daily protein intakes of 1.0–1.2 g/kg BW/d in older adults, particularly to support the preservation of muscle mass and function.3

For me it means 44 gr of protein per day. Which I reach way too fast
Proteins are in everything, kale, cauliflower, green beans, you don't need that many. If you put a can of chickpeas in a tomato salad, your daily amount is covered.
Focus on increasing your fibre.a lot. You only had 17g . Double that. Swap your banana for raspberries, even frozen, think about colours and add vegetable variety. You don't reach your daily amounts of vitamins and minerals, that's where malnutrition is.

When you plateau, you need to make changes. Try to change your gut bacteria, not with a pill, but with prebiobitcs veggies, trying to eat them everyday. So leeks, especially the green part. (I roast the leek in the oven but you can make leek soup) , cabbage thinly sliced,.
Here you have a list of prebiotic rich food. www.monash.edu/medicine/ccs/gastroenterology/prebiotic/faq
Then add some probiotics, make your own sauerkraut or have some unsweetened kefir, miso, a kombucha, ....

So to make this essay short. Reduce your grains and massively increase your veggies. Good luck for the next 60 lbs!

LeGrandBleu you’re living on another planet if you think some chickpeas in a tomato salad gives you 44 g of protein. Nowhere close.

A can of chickpeas contains roughly 200 gr of chickpeas which give you almost 40 gr of protein (38 to be precise) . Photo attached.

So very very close. Tomatoes have almost 1 gr (0.9 gr to be precise) so you add 3 or 4 tomatoes and you have almost your daily amount. Considering everything has protein, by eating cauliflower, putting soy milk in your coffee, even raspberries you reach it very very easily.

I believe you need to review your beliefs Shedtheload . Protein deficiency is extremely hard to reach in a day. I struggle to not exceed them.

I am giving the OP suggestions she might want to think about and do her research. She has reached a plateau. When this happens, you need to shift some meals. She can try for a week and she goes.

@PointlessUsername
Actually, my best advice would be to not think in term of calories, but whole food, real food.
The calorie system was invented in the 1850s and it has been proven to be totally ineffective when applied to the human body complex system.
"A calorie is a calorie" and " weightloss= calories in and calories out" is a recipe for disaster.
Look at these videos, they are short

And read this very well written article by the Economist www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie

When libraries open again, borrow Michael Pollan' book In defense of food which can be summarised in "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants "
Your only fresh vegetables in the day are a cup of green beans.

In 150+ years, we have learned a lot about the body, and the calorie system is outdated as you have learned with your own weight loss journey.
Despite very low calories, you are no longer losing weight.
Change what you eat.

Of all this is a huge oversimplification and we could debate for years. But medical papers are questioning this calorie measurement for weight reference. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639963/

Very often a calorie based diet is a synonym of how much a person eats. But when the same amount of calorie 1200 of crisps or lettuce will be processed in a different or two different women on the very same 1200 cal will not use the same weight.

Some will be ferociously against this. I get it , it is hard to change your own beliefs, which we receive 24/7 on every media, Mumsnet included.

The science is not there. Watch these very short videos and then continue to look into it, OP

good advice LeGrandBleu.

bluebell34567 not sure if you ever listened to Jason Fung but he really explain the calorie deception and if you listen to any of his conferences such as he explains the role of hormones especially insulin.

Insulin rises with refined carb, so white flour, white rice, etc...( and of course sugar, so drinks, snacks, processed food) but it is important to be aware that it is the net carb that enter the equation when it comes to insulin and the net carb is calculated like this = total carbs - fibre , so you can still have carbs, in the shape of whole grains and legumes and if you eat big amounts of fibre rich food, such as vegetables, your net carb balance goes down.

What I like about cronometer.com is that it gives you the net carb, as well as total carbs, and fibre. I find it way superior to MFP as it is totally free not only for the Macronutrients but the micronutrients as well, and nutrition is not only the big 3 fat, carbs and protein, it is minerals and vitamins.

Another thing to consider is that when the calorie system was invented, food industry like we know it didn't exist. Ultra processed food is a disaster on the body systems, even so called weightloss food. Calorie system was created for real food, not artificially engineered food that act not only at a metabolic level but brain response as well.

groceries.asda.com/product/tinned-pulses-beans/asda-chickpeas-in-water/910001787059

I think you have the values for dried chickpeas there? Even if you ate the whole tin that would only be about 15 g. I am not saying that the OP would be protein deficient but that she would be unlikely to be able to stick to a diet that basically just allows her to eat green juice, vegetables and a few pulses. Not exactly a recipe for success when someone has 60 lb to lose. It’s not sustainable. Drinking nothing but green juice for breakfast and eating nothing but vegetable soup for dinner for longer than about a few days isn’t something that most people can do. It’s incredibly low calories unless you’re suggesting adding oily dressings, which I can’t see in your posts. Therefore it will cause serious issues with hunger. Also, if you are to cut grains, which you also suggest, you do need to compensate by seriously upping protein to prevent severe hunger.

but @LeGrandBleu Chickpeas are 364 calories per 100g! munching through 200g of them would make a salad quite tough going and not a very healthy meal.

PointlessUsername that daily diet looks extremely low in calories, with most of them coming from carbs. You must be starving! You’ve lost quite a bit i presume if you were losing 4 lb a week before. Remember that the rate of recommended weight loss is only around 2 lb a week so if your loss was achieved through eating like that then your body has probably plateaued by getting used to running on a lower amount. You don’t really want this because it makes it even harder to lose.

It sounds odd but you do need to increase your calories. If you are 60lb overweight, your body will be burning a lot of calories a day. If you were losing 4 lb a week it suggests you had a caloric deficit of 2000 a day which is a hell of a lot and usually only possible if you eat very little and exercise a lot. How about a limit of 1700 instead and including plenty of protein, whether from it pants or animals for each meal to keep you full. You’ll find it easier and more sustainable and sooner or later the scales will start to shift again, albeit at a lower rate than before.

Extreme caloric deficits fuck with your metabolism in a major way and you don’t want to go there. The contestants on the Biggest Loser in the US are prime examples. They lost weight fast but hardly any have kept it up. Scientists investigated this and found that if you consistently starve your body, it does affect your metabolism so that you permanently need fewer calories to survive. That makes it almost impossible to lose weight again if you then regain and sounds awful.

Good luck with your journey.

Funny the last two posters contradicting each other, one saying too little calories, the other too many calories.
Stop looking at the calories. Read my links , watch my videos.

korr.com/blog/biggest-loser-resting-metabolic-rate/

LeGrandBleu that’s because you put the values of dried chickpeas rather than the tinned ones you’re talking about (they don’t contain many calories but also not much protein). You’re the one who’s telling an obese person to live off nothing but vegetables and green juice when her diet is already clearly insufficient. I am assuming she wants a sustainable plan she can do for a long time. Your suggestions are not that.

As an aside, I do agree with many of the points you have made about food but I cannot agree with the actual suggestions for what to eat because they would make most people incredibly hungry.

This is where I disagree. It is not the calories, but the composition of the calories that will leave you hungry or satisfied.

400 gr of steamed cauliflower(= 100 calories) or one of those 100 calories/pack crisps from Boots will not touch my hunger in the same way. And I will get hungry and cranky way faster on the crisps after 2 hours.

Eat a lot of fibre, a lot - and I mean a lot - of fresh vegetables, not a cup a day, steam a whole cauliflower, cook asparagus, baby spinach, artichoke, fennel, switch your white rice for quinoa or at least red rice , and the fibre shoots up, which will bring your insulin down and your weight will improve.

@PointlessUsername You haven't lost weight in 4 weeks, why not try a change for a week? Don't aim for a certain amount of calories, but a certain amount of fibre from vegetables, at the very least least 25 gr ideally more, switch your banana for raspberries or passion fruit which are very high in fibre.

Don't increase all at once, but progressively in the course of the week.
Spend some time on cronometer and at the vegetables section of your supermarket. Cook from fresh, and no refined grain (white rice, white bread, white pasta, white flour, ...) , but think rolled oats for breakfast with maybe some 1 tbl grounded flaxseeds, and other days green kale smoothie, at lunch big salads (lettuce+rocket+radicchio+spinach+tomatoes with a sliced chicken breast, or tuna or hemp seeds, and some nutritional yeast or a mix of these ) , dinner oven roasted vegetables such as pumpkin (don't cut off skin!) , zucchini, red pepper, broccolini and some quinoa on the side. And berries, passion fruit, or some unsweetened kefir in between if you feel like it. Adapt based on your protein needs/day. Play around on cronometer planning your meals and finding a good balance between nutrients. Plenty of yummy dressings recipe on Forks over knives. www.forksoverknives.com/recipes/vegan-sauces-condiments/#gs.63p7j6 or use extra virgin olive oil

You won't get hungry, I guarantee!
I've put it up on cronometer for you, results in the picture attached. For me, it would be way too much protein, but you can calculate your target number
More than your current amount of fibre at 34.6 and lots of green on most vitamins and minerals.

Is it perfect? of course not, but not bad. Definitely not malnourished. Then you can add targeted single food such as a single Brazil nut for your selenium, and so on, to cover for specific micronutrients.

You can eat a 1200 calories / day diet without being restricted because a calorie is not a calorie.

Good luck!

LeGrandBleu can I ask if you have ever had a weight problem yourself? I think most people who have would not be satisfied with 400g of cauliflower. I entirely endorse what you say about the nature of calories and how the body perceives them. Eating oatmeal for breakfast is also far better than the first stuff you recommended which was green juice, vegetables and some chickpeas. Veg is nutritious but mostly very low in calories. People with weight issues very often have problems with compulsive overeating and are liable to turn to a binge/starve cycle of dieting. Telling them to eat nothing but veg and that cauliflower will fill them up is unlikely to help them long term because it’s not sustainable. I have also seen people swear blind that juice fasting for 50 days is easy and great but for 99% of people it’s not.

Someone who needs to lose 60 lb is very overweight and can lose weight quite painlessly on a lot more than 1200 calories. Forcing the calories lower and lower is counterproductive (even if it’s all veg) and it’s likely that the reason OP isn’t losing weight is not because she’s eating a bit of rice (as you told her), but because she has been losing at twice the recommended rate for several weeks, likely as a result of severe restriction (as shown by her very meagre meals in her food diary). If she continues, she could cause serious harm to her metabolism, as witnessed with the Biggest Loser contestants who regained all the weight and are now virtually incapable of losing because their bodies adapted to very low cal diets.

Oh dear, this is tiring.

The cauliflower example was to show how 100 calories can look like, so either half a whole cauliflower (400gr) or a very small bag of crisps. To illustrate what I keep repeating that a calorie is not a bloody calorie and your body, your hormones, your gut bacteria, your satiety , .... will react differently to the same calories.

Within the calorie frame the OP was eating, I was suggesting smarter food choices and a more balanced nutrient distribution and especially fibre. To increase fibre vegetables are a good option so eat lot of vegetables which your gut bacteria also love.

We can agree that we disagree, I don't really care, you seem very angry and not very encouraging.

Good luck OP, I hope you get some good results soon!

LeGrandBlue you are right, but it’s like shouting in the desert

.... no one can hear you

People have obsessed with calories for too long

What do you think about things like nuts? In theory very high in calories. But I always think that surely your body does not absorb all those calories, as your teeth do not actually chew it down to a paste (like smooth peanut butter). Basically I wonder if people even absorb all the calories they eat? Or excrete part of them? I think not (esp not think like nuts and food like sweet corn with husks and lots of fibre)

Nuts are interesting.
I don't eat that much of them because they do not really belong to my culture. As French, we don't really eat them. Unless the almond come in the shape of macarons.
You would find pistachios in a small bowl when there is a drink party (apéro) and maybe in winter a bowl of shelled walnuts at the dinner table, and everyone in the house would have fun breaking the shell and eating the walnuts, but nobody would have more than 4 or 5.

I read Valter Longo's book on food, fast mimecking diets and health, and he really stressed the fact that you should eat as your ancestors and focus on foods that belong to you. So an Argentinians shouldn't have Sauerkraut every day and a Germans shouldn't eat quinoa every day.

I eat 1 Brazil nut a day to cover my selenium, I use Pine nuts to make pesto or pistou, I know Walnuts don't work for my omega 3 because I test myself for them and they were crazy low despite eating 836% of my daily need of walnuts-flaxseed derived omega 3. And last, I don't really enjoy eating them, because I feel the urge to brush my teeth straight after as I have pieces of nuts everywhere.

So for me, nuts have no place in my diet. They don't give me pleasure and no specific health benefit. That's for nuts in their natural state.

Then come the roasted and salted nuts. Peanuts, these Mexican mix, almonds, ..... I could eat a massive bag of them because my brain goes banana. The combination of fat + salt is something most brains can't resist. After all, in nature that combination is absent, you have fat food , you have salty food, but fat and salty! Gosh, don't touch my packet. The same happens with all the fried food. Who would eat French fries without salt? How many would you eat? a lot less that if covered with salt. Oh and roasted nuts have zero health benefits.

Back to nuts. On a general level, I would be careful about going nuts with nuts and eating lots of them. IT is true, they are high in fibre, but the fact that corn goes through digestive system untouched is not true. The cellulose shell might still look intact, but the content inside the kernel has been digested and if you were to fish it out of the bowl (beurck) and open it, the content would be crushed and brownish. (I watched a science video with my DD).

I think that there is no THE rule book when it comes to bodies, diet, metabolism. There are general rules more or less valid for all, such as a massive steamed cauliflower bowl a mini crisps bowl both equalling 100 calories, but then there is your body. And you can fine tune it.

I am not a keto fan. So I would never go for super high fat diet. They just look wrong to me. I go super high vegetables, high variety of them.

Industrial food is definitely to avoid. The spongy white bread so popular here in Australia. I can play volley ball with it. I could kill you with a loaf a rustic French bread. So hard, not only do you have to chew hard on it, but you wouldn't eat more than a slice.

I have gone off-rail. As Michael Pollan say, "eat (real) food, not too much and mostly plants. " if nuts appeal to you, have them, but not too much.