Strict all week and not a single ounce off!

[Vanillarose1]

Just looking for some inspiration. I'm a classic yoyo dieter - lost a stone and a half last summer, put it all back on since November. I only have to look at a biscuit and the scales bulge.

Anyway, I'm back to doing everything right - manageable exercise (rebounding), fasting until midday, eating healthy, unprocessed vegan foods, drinking water. No snacking other than a handful of nuts.

I weigh myself daily to monitor fluctuations and this week, the scales have not moved once.

My diet has changed so drastically that I'm intrigued as to why that would be. Has this happened to anyone else? And please tell me there is light at the end of the tunnel if I stay on the same path!

There is so much more that goes into weight loss than just eating healthy and exercise. Lack of sleep, stress, getting the right nutrients, age, time of the month… all of these things can affect weight loss. Plus one week isn’t long at all, stop focusing daily on the scales and start to think about how your body/mind is benefiting from these changes. The weight loss will come but a watched pot never boils.

You mentioned about eating vegan, is this a lifestyle you’ve had for a while? Are you still getting the right vitamins and protein?

Do your scales definitely work??

Give it a few weeks, not just one. What exactly are you eating? what's your current weight? What exact exercise are you doing? Etc.

If you're not counting the calories of what you're eating I'd suggest working out your tdee and finding out what it says, then calorie count. You might be under estimating how much you're actually eating.

A handful of nuts could wipe out your calorie deficit, especially if you're short.

It will. Sometimes it's a week or 2 in arrears before it kicks in.

Lay off the nuts though.

I think you need to keep a food diary and count the calories. A handful of nuts is a poor choice if your focus is weight loss and you might be making other choices that are negatively affecting your weight loss too.

I’m with you! 2 weeks of being famished and only 3/4 of a pound gone. But I’m going to keep going. Please do the same and return with news of success. You will start to lose weight. I def notice a difference when I reduce food and do some daily walking (no need for high intensity exercise). Also do relaxation as cortisol affects weight loss x

Same here - I gained half a pound after 10 days of sensible eating, walking/running every day, drinking plenty of water.

I won't do calorie counting, I refuse to live my life that way to be honest, measuring and counting everything, so I guess I have to accept that I might never lose weight if I won't do it "properly" but I've eaten so much veg this week, very low fat and low carb (I'm also vegan) and gained!!!
I'm just gonna focus on being healthy (get my 5 a day, and 10k steps as a minimum each day) and throw the scales away. They made me so depressed yesterday!

I’m in the same situation here too. Been fasting til 6pm all week, eating sooooo healthily, one meal a day. Homemade soup to start (celery or beetroot), healthy main (eg last night it was griddled chicken with courgette fennel and spinach) followed by raspberries and yoghurt with sprinkling of seeds. last night I was extra hungry so had two boiled eggs after. No alcohol, just water and herbal tea.
i have a fairly active job, I have done 2.5 hours yoga, a couple of short weights sessions, two walks and a 40 min cardio class.

after all that, I have put ON 2lbs.

dh is eating the same except not fasting and has lost 7lbs

Ive weighed myself a few times to see if it’s a blip but it doesn’t seem to be. I have had this many times before except that usually the first 10 days I do lose then despite doing all the same things I either plateau or start to put on a lb or two a week. I’ve stuck with it sometimes for over six weeks but still same.
I have also tracked muscle/fat on a Boditrax machine in the hope that it’s all muscle gain. In health kick, I worked out hard with a personal trainer and was careful with my eating. Worked out properly 3-4 times a week followed by swim
and sauna. Trainer was really happy with how hard I was working, said he couldn’t ask for more commitment and effort.
however, Boditrax showed that after a loss the first week, I then was putting on fat and losing muscle! When I’d put on 9lbs In total I really got disheartened….

I'm hoping someone on here experienced the same but at some point it clicked and finally worked in the end. It’s hard to persist and persist when you’re getting negative results.
this time I decided not to weigh or measure and just to do the fasting/eating well for the long term and know that results must follow sooner or later. But dh persuaded me to weigh as he’d had such good results. I should have resisted.

Finally! 2lbs off in one go this morning. The relief was immense (even if it will probably be back tomorrow!)

I'm going to keep going for the long haul. I'm prepared to put in the hard work, it was just frustrating when there was no instant gratification. Usually when I try and lose weight, I can get quite a big drop on the first week, even if it is just water weight. When there was nothing for almost a fortnight, I started to wonder what was going wrong!

Well done @Vanillarose1 ! Hard to feel motivated when not seeing the results you want. I’ve been really strict with not weighing myself too often so have been doing it weekly - same scales, same day, same time etc.
Im 7lb down after 2 weeks - have cut out all alcohol, walking a lot more, swimming a few times a week and most importantly sleeping better (although I have had to resort to sleeping tablets to do this!). I feel like when I’m tired I reach for sugary snacks to keep me going. Generally haven’t restricted my diet apart from no drinks but water.
you’ll get there, you might be the type that it doesn’t come off little by little, but more in chunks if that makes sense?

Oncetwicethreetimesalady; your diet might be lacking in enough fat. If you want to burn your body fat to lose wieght you need both a calorie deficit overall and to get into a state of ketosis, either thorugh fasting or nutritional ketosis by cutting out most carbs in the diet.
Foe the exact mechanisms watch Jason Fung, Eric Westman or any doctor promoting keto on youtube, I like this channel https://www.youtube.com/@lowcarbdownunder

But basically your body likes homeostasis, and glucose is the prefered fuel. Not the better fuel, but the fuel that is used up first by the cells in your body. Eating regularly and eating carbs regulary mean that there is always glucose on hand. Then when that dips you get hangry and reach for anything containing carbs, be it chocolate, chips or a sandwich.
But when you stop eating, by fasting, your body slowly uses up the glucose it has stored, and switches to burning fat. But unfortunately many of us never get to this point because our longest fast is over night and we get up and stuff processed carbs down our throat.
So, to burn our body fat we need to get into ketosis, the state in which we are using fat for fuel and not carbs. So either by extending our fast, or not eating carbs. Or a combination of the two.

And homeostasis, your body likes everything to stay the same. If you go low carb, but do nt increase your intake of natural healthy fats, the body is going to hold onto its body fat, because it is not getting any coming in. And you are going to be hungry.
Good luck with it!
And ready any of Gary Taubes books!

Same here. Two weeks in and finally scales are registering - last week, nothing.

@Unabletomitigate thabks for that, I have started Jason fung’s obesity code book and felt like I was doing the right thing. I have olive oil in lots of dishes and some nuts and seeds everyday, would I need more healthy fats than that?
I’m not actually hungry (other than momentarily) when I fast til 6pm.
the trouble is, the more you look into it, the more confusing info you can find. Everybody wants to tell you where you’re going wrong!
My friend and my son were telling me it is just calories in- calories out and must be eating more than I thought because I wasn’t recording it. When I did record, I was on around 1200 calories per day and my Apple Watch was showing I was burning c 600-800 cals a day (on top of basal metabolic rate). So, only 400-600 cals to fuel basic functions which just has to be a sizeable deficit but no weight loss.
I got a wegovy pen yesterday and might start that in the next few days but I’m not sure how it will help if I’m not really struggling with hunger atm. I actually got it because I normally fall of the wagon with fasting at some point and thought this could help me stay on track and give me a boost once the initial enthusiasm has worn off.
i think weight loss just has to happen in the end if I stick with it long enough… surely?

Hurts my head so many people see carbs as the enemy and go down the fasting bollocks. Fasting is fine every now and then for a week or so but it's not a way to diet for long term weight loss. It doesn't work long term.

No wonder people yo yo and see 1200 calories as the holy grail. Boggles man.

@gamerchick do you mean you have successfully lost and kept weight off eating refined carbs and not restricting calories or time? That’s amazing, please tell me how you did it!!!

Are you counting calories so definitely in a deficit?

This was me last week. Week one, four pounds off, granted there would be water loss and a flushed out body with all the veg, but last week nada. Not a single ounce, despite eating less than 1400 calories and doing 108,000 steps that week.

this week it’s started moving again, keep at it x

I calorie count religiously and measure my calorie burn, so I know I am definitely eating at a big deficit, and I still haven't lost any weight over the last few weeks. (In fact... I've gained a little, which just seems even more unfair!)

I was losing very easily up until now, and it's as my body doesn't want to budge beyond this weight no matter what I do. I'm now starting to wildly speculate, and wonder if the theory of set point weight is true and if so, how on earth do I fight it.

I still need to lose a helluva lot of weight, so it's not as if I've reached goal or something...

I think because it's so easy to go slightly over what you need to create a deficit it's very important to measure and weigh accurately, I lost a lot if weight but I weighed and measured everything. A good example is olive oil on a salad, if you don't measure 1 tsp it's very easy to be pouring a tablespoon especially if you gone for a massive plate of salad because it's virtually zero calories.

I also think generally peoples ability to estimate portion sizes has gone out of the window so you have to weigh and measure.

I too am interested in ours bodies having a set point, why isn't the set point lower and how can you change it?!

Sorry @nocalorieleftbehind but this is also my point - and I do t want to appear rude - but how do you know you are in deficit? What are you basing this on? Perhaps actually your body needs a lot less to lose and generally you just need to eat a lot less to maintain?

I say this because this is me - I lost easily and quickly on Fast 800. I believe to maintain I probably need to eat 2-300 calories more a day - what most people would consider 'being on a diet'. That 800 btw was also very low processed carbs - no breed, rice, pasta etc.

Today I actually went down 1 lb from my starting weight almost two weeks ago. Woop.
dh has been less strict than me and lost 11lbs in that time.
there has got to be something in this set point weight because I am being the most ridiculously good I’ve ever been in my life and the same techniques (nothing like as strict as I am right now) always helped me lose weight before even I only ever needed to shift a few pounds back then.
Unfortunately I put on 2.5 stone over the course of the pandemic which I think was definitely stress related (lots of shit going on in addition to pandemic). Immediately prior to that I was actually in the best shape of my life. I wonder if the stress has got me a bit stuck here.
the set point weight theory is Jason fung’s hypothesis and he logically explains it’s related to insulin being constantly stimulated by too frequent eating of refined foods. I didn’t actually eat much junk or drink much alcohol before but now I’m fasting and cut out every sort of tiny bit of not ideal food (everything is now sugar-free, whole, wholesome and homemade) yet still nothing happens…

I have been there and it took me a long time, but I’m over 40 so never expected fast results.
I improved my diet (lots more vegetables, only organic meat, more fatty fish, cooking at home from scratch, seeds and grains instead of pasta and flour, eating seasonal vegetables and so on) and started exercising regularly for health reasons three years ago. The results were invisible - I felt great, lots of energy but I was also slowly putting on weight.
I finally decided to try losing some weight last year. I counted (and I am still counting) calories and had only a small deficit of 200 kcal compared to what I needed daily. It’s been a very slow process but I’ve eventually lost all the weight I wanted to lose. I have been training regularly for so long that it’s become my daily routine, and I’ve also finally started looking much more toned with some nice muscle definition.

I have never yoyo dieted in my life and I accepted from the start that this would take a long time and significant commitment. I’ve not tried anything that I would not be able to maintain forever, so no extreme calorie deficit, no crazy fasting hours (I eat between 10 am and 6 pm). I basically eat a balanced Mediterranean diet.