Weight loss starting to piss me off

[Timeforallthecheese]

I had about 11 pounds to loose. Did all the checks and gave myself 1400 calories a day. I’m 5’7. I track everything. Even down to shelling boiled eggs and weighing them and inputting to MFP. I don’t eat back exercise calories. I have an active job. I’ve lost half a stone which took a while but I got there.

Now I seem to lose and gain the same pound and stall all the time. It’s been like this for 4-6 weeks. I was at 143 pounds on Sunday. Went to a friends house for lunch. She did Sandwiches, a scone and coffee which was difficult to track so I held back about 300 calories from earlier in the week to hopefully cover the scone at lunch. That pound has gone back on and today I’m 144.4.

I cannot seem to get below 143 and if I do, the slightest thing puts a pound or two back on, then it takes weeks to come off. I am fearful of the festive season or even just going out for dinner. If I’m struggling with 1400 calories, what would maintenance calories be.

Do you get to a point where your body just says no? Im 53.

Typical day for context is

Eggs or yoghurt and fruit for breakfast
Lunch a bagel with cream cheese, salad and cold meat or beans on toast
Dinner is a stirfry or cottage pie. I eat cauliflower rice instead of normal rice
Snack hummus with veg or, if on the go a cereal/protein bar
Alcohol is gin and tonic and only 2 a week.
2/3 litres of water a day.

As I say, everything is tracked.

Some veg does have protein in, as you say pulses and beans etc, mushrooms, broccoli are the higher rated veg for protein but they contribute quite small amounts, unless of course you eat huge amounts of them which is a bit tricky when it comes to the beans!

I didn't meant to be snippy, I just wanted to add that for me oestrogen helped in terms of exercise and weight loss- some women find they gain weight on HRT or the combined pill and I wanted to offer a different perspective.

I found with taking a combined pill instead of desogestrel (which I thought I couldn't for years due to age/weight/risk of endometriosis symptoms returning) I have more energy and am able to do weights and cardio again after years of trying and failing to maintain a gym routine and thinking perhaps it didn't suite me any more.

And complex carbs I find quite helpful in that regard also.

Hang around certain corners of the internet long enough and you’ll become convinced that carbohydrates are the devil incarnate.

Truth is active menopausal women perform best when they’re well fuelled and that includes carbohydrates, which are a primary fuel source for exercise (especially higher intensity efforts) and the preferred fuel source for our brain. Carbs improve performance, delay fatigue, and are good for our moods and mental health.
If you eliminate or restrict them, you are going to miss out on important fiber, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, and phytonutrients that you need as an active woman. Hillary Wright, MEd, RDN, who is a registered dietitian and the author of The Prediabetes Diet Plan, said in Episode 8: Eat Carbs! of the Hit Play Not Pause podcast, “You’re probably going to be tired all the time and maybe more depressed.”

Carb restriction also elevates your stress levels and increases your risk of iron deficiency and anaemia. This is true even among men. A study published last month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that race walkers who followed a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet for six days, had a higher inflammatory and hepcidin (which is linked to inflammation) response after exercise than they did when they were eating a higher carb diet. That’s a problem because hepcidin makes it harder to absorb iron after exercise. Women need to be especially cautious here. Hepcidin already stays elevated up to 24 hours post exercise in post-menopausal women. The higher it is and longer it remains elevated, the more problematic it is for iron absorption.

The athletes also had higher cortisol levels and unfavourable immune markers when they trained on the LCHF diet. Plus, they were more than 7 minutes slower on a 25K laboratory race walk test than they had been after following a higher carb diet.

Cutting out carbs may also be detrimental to bone health (which is something menopausal women should not mess with). A 2019 study investigated how diet and exercise impacted bone-health makers in elite endurance athletes after they spent 3 ½ weeks on a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet and then again after they started eating a higher carb diet.

The researchers found that markers of bone resorption increased and markers of bone formation decreased, and those markers didn’t completely bounce back after the athletes resumed their higher carb intake. The authors concluded, “Long-term effects of such alterations remain unknown, but may be detrimental to bone mineral density (BMD) and bone strength, with major consequences to health and performance.”

Cutting out carbs doesn’t make any more sense today than cutting out fat did in the 1990s.

https://www.feistymenopause.com/blog/should-menopausal-women-cut-carbs

I'm stuck at the same weight OP and it's tough. This week has been especially bad as I've had a massive migraine attack. Urgh. Just need my determination to weigh less (I am overweight) to be stronger than the feelings of disappointment and be a bit more disciplined on my macros. I can do it and have done it before. I do feel a shift in my approach and attitude and have identified some things to work on. Isn't there a saying that nothing worth doing is easy? Or some such bollocks!

@Elastica23 the thing you posted didn’t specify what is a carb though. I think it’s important for people to know what a carb actually is and it’s not just bread or pasta. It is many food items. Eating all your carbs in bread and pasta will not help you with weight loss and there is a fundamental difference which is lost in translation between posters. When I am cutting down carbs I should really say I am cutting down simple carbs for more complex ones, swapping bread for something complex with more fibre. I also should give advice to do that not just ‘eat less carbs’. I know when I did slimming world in the past - and now - I barely ate any bread but was eating lots of vegetables and other carb containing foods.

Am I missing something here? At that weight and height OP you are at a perfectly healthy BMI. It’s no wonder that the weight isn’t coming off because you’re probably having to push through your set point, let alone stressing out your system with only 1400 kcal a day.

if you’re not happy with your shape then you need to recomp, not lose weight. That means resistance training (and by that I do not mean curling pink 2.5kg dumbbells, I mean at minimum squatting and deadlifting your body weight) and eating 1g per lb of body weight in protein a day. Get a PT in the gym if you have to.

If you were always a skinny Minnie in your youth I think it’s healthier to accept that we won’t stay the same size all our lives and instead aim for a size that lets us live our lives actively and healthily. Life is short - don’t spend it fretting about dinners out or time with friends who won’t be there forever.

Also bagels, yoghurt, baked beans etc will all spike your insulin. Maybe have a look at the Glucose Goddess - I don’t ascribe to absolutely everything she says but I think her central thesis would help you.

I would suggest introducing some weight lifting and structured exercise. Get some dumbells, exercise bands, and start to build muscle.
Although you do 15,000 steps a day is your heart rate really getting up to fat burn level.
Building muscle will help you as you grow old, helps against osteoporosis, burns more calories so increases you daily calorie requirement.
Have a day when you eat more than the restricted calories but make extra calories come from protein. E. G. Snack on a pack of shredded ham
I lost 15kg on 1300 cals a day and a long power walk every single day.

These threads always go the same way

People really dont understand where and what carbs are

I highly restrict bread (dont eat it) pasta (dont eat it) potato (eat it sometimes), rice (eat it rarely)

But I do eat, fruit and veg, pulses, beans, lentils etc. I also eat milk and yoghurt which are predominately carbohydrate in terms of their macros

I still eat the odd bag of crisps now and then, I try to have porridge most mornings but not every morning

I find people's anger or panic or sneering about 'low carb' very odd. No one would get in such a paddy about someone saying they were on a low fat diet and shouting about 'you shouldnt cut out food groups'.

@bellac11 low carb doesn’t seem to be good for certain people especially if you are at risk of bone density issues, cutting food groups could be a mistake in the long term. Keto is not for everyone I absolutely hate it, but you can make carb swaps, I think the terminology gets skewered.

I hate seeing people advocate a very hard diet like keto to newbies when it takes so much hard work and is tough as hell - it’s 5-10% carbs! but you can make smaller adjustments to your macros from 50%+carbs to 30 or 40% and replace them with protein, you can continue to eat 40% carbs but make them all complex carbs - there are loads of options. Keto is literally depriving the body of carbs which I do think the body needs, it just doesn’t need its carbs from Hovis or pasta.

You're right the terminology gets skewed!!

You've done it yourself in the first paragraph alone, lunging from 'low carb' to 'cutting out food groups' to 'keto'

All completely different things.

@Elastica23 thanks for posting that article, I found it really interesting and the studies it linked to were interesting also.

My main take is that carbs are necessary for optimal health (including bone health), but when you reach menopause you need to cut down on the highly processed refined ones. I did some tests with a cgm a while back and found that
A) bread especially really spiked my blood sugar (most flour is highly refined)
B) potatoes varied - if I cooked and cooled them and reheated they did not spike it so much due to the resistant starch
C) tilda microwave rice gave me a spike lower than regular rice presumably for the same (cooling and reheating) reason
D) most importantly exercise had a massive impact on my blood sugar control. I now time eating carbs around exercise which is precisely what that article was suggesting. I do weight training which I think is really important in menopause to head off sarcopenia and slso becuase muscle acts as a glucose store.