We are all different and I seriously doubt anyone wanted to judge or hurt anyone else here...We are all in the same position or at least we HAVE been and it's the reson we post here on the TDC...It's not an enviable place to be for the ones who havent been so big... we are a little like a family...and there is always bickering in a family ;) Love and War...

Anyway, I am guess that most of us could ride out our stalls and things will pick up again.. and I am guessin that many of us, including me, start to get comfortable at out current weight and arent being as strict as we had been carb wise... some of us are on and off plan non stop...or somewhere in between...

I dont really think there is an answer..jsut a chance to discuss it. We are all so different and will experience this whole thing in a different way...

just to address one question, as an (I really hope!) non-menopausal woman (I'm 30) I have hit just as many stalls and plateaus as you slightly older people.

Jerry, I know that I also ate too much before I found LCing. But my 'quarrel' with the way you say it is after finding out about LCing and giving my body its long awaited break from carbs, I found it more than easy to give up eating those huge portions of carbs. I didn't eat more because I was greedy, which I think is what it sounds like you are implying for those of us who ate more. I ate more because my body kept telling me to eat more, because I didn't know how to stop the insulin levels skyrocketing.

It's interesting how clear it is to me now, because I can *feel* my body reacting. For example, I went to friends for dinner on friday night and ran into several difficulties. First, the soup wasn't clear chicken soup, as it usually is, but it was tomato based, with 'kubeh' in it, which are semolina dumplings stuffed with meat. I didn't have any of the kubeh, but I did have the soup, and I'm sure that added up to a lot of carbs. I hope they didn't put any sugar in there, but I don't know. Then main course was chicken, potatoes, broccoli, roasted peppers and salad. Sounds fine, if you avoid the potatoes, which I did. But they'd made the chicken with pineapple, and I'm pretty sure the broccoli had some kind of soy sauce marinade that had sugar in it. I didn't eat any of the pineapple from the chicken, so all in all I probably didn't have too many bad carbs; they were just floating around as supplements to the protein and lc veg I was having and I couldn't avoid them. I didn't have any of the dessert. Why am I listing out this menu in such detail? Because when I left their house I WAS HUNGRY. It wasn't even merely cravings, it was also hunger. I didn't eat too little, but I think the small amount of sugar etc that was in the food I ate changed the balance of good carbs/bad carbs and made the food I ate not enough for me because too much insulin was released. If I felt like that eating basically healthily with only a few grams of sugar etc creeping in, imagine how much stronger my insulin response would have been if I'd eaten the potatoes, the bread, the dessert - which is still a balanced meal for people who don't have an insulin problem.

anyway, that was a total tangent. i'm stalling now (as Diane knows, I moan about it often enough) and haven't lost weight in a month even though I've worked out my BMR, and am eating the right amount of calories and doing the right amount of exercise to create at LEAST a deficit of 500 calories a day which should lead to a pound weight loss a week. I just hope that it is water weight I'm holding on to, and that I have lost that fat, and I've just got to wait for the water to say bye bye and I'll whoosh again. I have plateaud from the beginning - I didn't even have the 50 pound weight loss and then the stall. On the other hand, I was doing a fairly liberal version of CAD to start with, not Atkins. But you know something? That just shows that calories in/out does not work 100% because when I was doing CAD I am sure I was eating more calories than I needed - I really 'enjoyed' that reward meal - and yet I still lost weight.

time to get to work...

Deborah

Deborah,
You were certainly one of the people I was thinking of when I commented above that some dedicated low carbers reach a point of "crawl" (I've decided to call it that instead of "stall") that really shouldn't happen based on the logic of the Atkins WOE.

I was in a big stall just before I hit my 100 lbs lost goal. My doctor said that it was normal to hit a plateau after losing that much. I bought into that for a few months and didn't worry a lot about the slow weight loss.

But...

In hindsight I don't think she gave me the right advice. The first part of my weight loss was done by following a diabetic diet and eating 2200 calories a day while maintaing a 10,000 - 12,000 step a day program. The latter part was straight CALP with unmeasured portions and my exercise had settled in to about 6,000 steps per day.

I saw a jump in weight loss when I upped my exercise back to the 10,000 to 12,000 step per day level. I had a second major speed up in weight loss when I started being a bit more choiceful about portion sizes. I am now back to losing at a really good pace and credit keeping track of food intake, nutritional balance, and exercise in Fitday desktop version software.

Given my experience with my current weight loss, past weight loss, and past weight stable and weight gain times, I've reached the following conclusions about what my body needs to finish losing my excess weight and keep it off.

1. I'm not going to be able to lose consitently or keep weight off without intentional exercise, and the 10,000 steps per day goal seems to be right for my body.

2. I absolutely cannot lose or maintain unless I am managing my carb intake well. About 70 grams of net carb per day is right for me AS LONG AS I'm taking in the bulk of those carbs as part of a CALP balanced reward meal. If I spread them out through the day that level is way too high for me.

3. I need to weigh and record my weight every day. I don't get obsessive with it, but I'm way to good at drifting upwards if I don't make it a priority to stay aware of the scale readout.

4. I give myself much better nutrition when I track food intake in the Fitday software, and I need to think about making this a lifetime habit. When I don't track, I'm more likely to have my protein/fat/carb levels drift, eat too little during time of heavy physical activity, eat too much during times of low physical activity, and drift toward a diet that gets unbalanced from a vitamin standpoint.

I had a sleepless night a few weeks ago when I got thinking about the effect that 500 cals per day of exercise had on my ability to lose weight, and the effect it would have on maintaining a loss for me. When I get to my goal, if I cut back from say 11,000 steps to 6,000 (stop having my intentional hiking time and just getting steps at work instead) that would cut my calorie expenditure by about 290 a day and that alone would be enough for my body to pack on 29 lbs in a year. It is easy enough for me to have lifestyle changes that amount to 500 calories per day chage in my normal activity - and that puts me at risk for a 50 lb per year gain (and I should add "been there, done that"!) I lay in bed doing all sorts of mental math and it became really clear why I wasn't able to sustain weight loss during the times when I exercised while dieting and then adopted my old "maintenance lifestyle".

I didn't much like realizing that there's going to be a lot of weight management involved in my next 50 years of keeping the weight off! It would seem more fair to work hard, fix the weight problem, and then go through the rest of life being "normal". Kind of a wake-up for me to know that for my body, with my incredible ability to store fat easily, I need to make points 1 - 4 lifelong habits and not just consider them to be weight "loss" strategies.

Your bodies may vary, of course. For me, I need to watch this and that with my foods, wear a pedometer, work at a job that allows me to get movement at times during a day instead of being parked at a desk all of the time, have hiking my land be a form of daily entertainment instead of using that time to read or enjoy less physical activity. I also need to burn enough calories that my body can handle eating good portions of food that deliver ample nutrition.

Wow. Long post. I just really believe that my stalls were due to things that I could have controlled with intake, nutrition balance, and output. My doctor wasn't right in telling me how a stall "just happens" at 100 lbs lost. I'm done wishing that the weight loss process (and long term maintenance) could somehow become easier for me. My body is just set up to be good at packing on fat and it will take certain efforts on my part to keep from letting it get back into fat storage mode. I need to view my weight loss stalls as signals that I drifting more toward that process than away from it.

Lynda

Of course it always works, thats like saying sometimes gravity doesn't work. Honestly, its explained by simple physics, and the exchange of energy. Its the same principle as gas in your car.

I don't know you, but I'll point out two areas which I think are causing you problems.

#1 You have lost about 70 lbs it looks like, which is a great loss so congrats :Party:

Part of the problem is that you are getting close to your goal weight now so the difference in calories in/out window is getting narrower. Lets say your body required 2400 calories to stay at 240 lbs (not the real numbers, just using these as an example), and you were eating 1700 because of CAD, which is a nice program. In the begining, you had a deficit of 700 calories per day.

Now, your body only requires 1700 to stay at 170 lbs, and you have cut calories down to 1400 to compensate, having to give up CAD. Now you only have a difference of 300 calories per day. But this difference gets even smaller when factoring in reason #2

#2 In losing the 70 lbs, you have lost quite a bit of lean tissue with the fat IF you aren't resistance training to BUILD new muscle. I know Quest just hates the way I harp on this, but its true nonetheless. Doing a few mindless sets of curls with 1 lb dumbbells isn't going to do it. Its hard work. If you haven't been doing this, then your metabolism might have slowed down to requiring 1500 calories to maintain 170 lbs. Now you only have a difference of 100 cals a day......slow weight loss ensues.

Now I didn't make any of this up (even my mommy would tell you I'm the family idiot), and it affects me just the same way, even though I have GREATLY worked on eliminating #2 as a problem for me.

My first year doing this (2002), I lost at a rate of 1.3 lbs per week, while in 2003 it dropped to 1.1 lbs per week because I haven't cut calories. So far this year, its looking like 0.75 lbs a week as I approach goal (another 15 lbs).

I think that some of what is going on here is definitional. Jerry, you and I weigh about the same and we are losing at about the same rate -- I'm averaging 2 to 3 pounds a month and you are averaging .75 pounds a week. I may find this somewhat more frustrating than you do, because I have set my goal at 180 and you have set your goal at 240. However, you are only three inches taller than I am (I'm 69" versus the 72" you report in your profile). That difference in height translates into a BMI of 35 for you and a BMI of 38 for me. You can accept slowing down as natural because you are getting close to your goal. I'm further from my goal because I have set a more ambitious goal and therefore the slowing down seems more like a stall to me. However, it looks as though our bodies are reacting in very similar ways to having lost a lot of weight and having gone from the "morbidly obese" category to the simply "obese" category. Quest has also made that transition from morbidy obese to obese and Deborah is thinner than any of the rest of us.

I agree with you that there is nothing magic about losing 50 or 75 or 100 pounds, but there is definitely something different about having less left to lose, particularly for those of us who have a natural tendency to become quite fat. (Not everyone has this tendency -- until the past year or two my husband could and did eat everything in sight without gaining any weight and both my kids share his metabolism.) Most of us seem able to fairly easily get ourselves out of the morbidly obese category and into the obese category. If I started this way of eating today and heard that, I wouldn't feel discouraged -- I would feel encouraged. It's harder for us to get ourselves out of the obese category and even harder for us to get ourselves out of the overweight category. Perhaps more of us need to be realistic -- as you have -- and choose somewhat higher goal weights. If we did that, much of the issue of stalling would go away. We could simply say that our weight loss was slowing down as we got closer to our goal weight, which everyone accepts as totally normal.

If anyone has said anything on this thread that you interpret as flaming, please hit the "Report This Post to a Moderator" button and report the post. That is how the forum rules require us to deal with those types of posts. The forum has this rule for a good reason -- it just escalates things if you try to respond to them yourself.

I, personally, have not interpreted any of the dialogue on this forum as flaming, but I am well have different standards than you do and the forum moderators are the ultimate deciders of what constitutes a flame.

Jerry, please don't drop out of the thread. Based on my reading, I really think everyone is trying to understand this. Each of us are at different stages and we all are looking for input from the others. I am sure no one is trying make this a flame fest, but are really just trying to understand.

I think Lynda makes some very good points about learning how our bodies work. In the beginning, with so much to lose, it's easy. But as we reduce our weight and reduce the calories spent, it becomes harder to manage. And pointing out that managing our weight will be a lifelong need is important. I'm sure many of us, when we first started seeing the success, were hoping that we could just lose the weight and then just "keep an eye" on our carbs. Lynda's detail about how to "watch" carbs is important. We are going to have to work a bit harder at it than those other folks.

Calories in/calories out do matter. However, I believe there are additional factors at play here. I was reading about fat cells just yesterday. The theory is that as the cells age it is harder for the energy to be removed from them.

Hypothesis for cell aging

The third stage is marked by cell aging with deterioration in every major aspect of the cell's functionality, except for the function of net energy-storage, which is preserved even in aged adipocytes. Compared with young mature adipocytes, older cells are increasingly insulin resistant, have decreased glucose uptake and fuel consumption, and show impaired glycerokinase-mediated fatty acid re-esterification. Moreover, aged adipocytes show reduced gene expression for adiponectin and leptin, each of which is important in systemic regulation of energy metabolism.

Now, what I don't know is what this "aging" really means. Maybe someone else on here knows. Does this mean that the fat we put on our bodies 10 or 20 years ago will the hardest to lose because the cells are old? Do we lose the fat from the recent cells first? Still lots of unanswered questions here, but if the fat really is harder to pull from the older cells, then maybe it makes sense that after you reach a certain point, then weight loss would be tougher.

I've mentioned in a couple of places that I've redefined my current situation as a "crawl" rather than a "stall." The smallest loss I've had in a month is 3 pounds (not sure if the current month will match that, but I have lost 2 so far with about 10 days left). I won't pretend that I haven't sometimes complained about this pace, but in this thread I really was more interested in exploring the WHY behind these slow downs, particularly on the Atkins diet (which isn't to say that other plans should not be discussed). These WHYs may not be the same for everyone. For example, isn't there a theory that weight loss itself releases estrogen into the system, which in turn retards weight loss?

Diemde makes an interesting point about aging. One of Dr. Atkins last books, which I haven't read, and which is rarely mentioned on this forum as far as I know, is specifically devoted to "Anti-aging" across the board, not just weight loss. It's really a shame he was killed by an accident, so that he couldn't continue to live, work, and represent his own theories.

I like the idea of crawl, not stall. When I started, I thought in terms of my monthly average weight loss, because my weight loss was uneven over the month but at the end of each month I had always lost weight. Lately, my weight loss has been even more uneven -- seven or eight pounds one month and then nothing for two months -- so I've been trying to think of my weight loss in terms of a rolling average over six months. Doing that, it has averaged out to two or three pounds a month. That helps to keep me from getting discouraged during the months in which I lose nothing. Just adjusting the way we think and talk about this issue can be a big help.

That is a wonderful post Jerry. You are very right, as long as you are making some kind of a caloric deficit you will lose weight. The reason weight loss tends to slow to a crawl after a big loss is because people aren't aware they are no longer making the big deficits they were when they were morbidly obese. It is easy to make a 1000 calorie deficit per day and lose 2 pounds a week when you weight 350 pounds. It is much more dificult to make even a 300 calorie per day deficit when you weigh 150 pounds. It requires a conscious effort to get in activities and not over eat.

However, there is more to this than meets the eye. As one approaches a low body fat level, the body will "react to starvation" by slowing down metabolic processes. This is usually not a problem for those who are still obese after losing a bunch of weight (their stalls are covered above), but for those who are near low body fat and still trying to lose will tend to see things slow down considerably even if they are working out a lot and eating less.

I understand that this type of situation is very uncommon and usually only found in people who want to achieve extremely low bodyfat like body builders and girls with body image issues (anorexics), but thats not hte point. My point is that the body does have control over how many calories it wishes to burn, up to a certain point. Though tracking calories in and calories out is very useful, and I think less people would stall if they simply ate less, please be aware some people may stall even though they are eating less. Even though 1300 calories per day to lose weight works for me at 155, it might not work for another lady with similar height and bodyfat. She might need to exercise more and eat less to lose.

Interesting observation about body fat levels. I woud be curious to know at what percentage it starts really slowing down. Or does it just drop linearly as your BF percentage goes down?

Sorry to jump in here, but I've been reading this thread with interest and I have to say that while the above statment sounds perfectly reasonable in theory, it sometimes doesn't work that way in practice.
Case in point: According to Fitday, my basal metabolism plus average daily activity (just lifestyle, not with added exercise) has me burning nearly 2,600 calories per day. I track my intake on fitday and on the average over the past month, I've taken in an average of 1,300 calories per day. According to that, I've had a calorie deficit of at least 1,300 calories per day over the past month. Have I lost weight? Yes...2 pounds. In fact, I've lost about 10 pounds in the past 10 weeks; an average of 1 pound per week and it's come off in chunks, not steadily. Either Fitday is way off on their calculation of how many calories I burn in a day or something else is going on because according to the calorie deficit theory, I should be losing an average of 2.5 pounds per week. I'm not saying this to complain. In fact, I'm perfectly happy with my average 1 pound per week considering that I could be (and have in the past in pre low carb days) gaining at that rate instead of losing. I'm just saying this to illustrate that the calorie deficit theory doesn't always work as well in practice as it should according to theory.
My point here is that there are times where your body simply does not want to shed pounds no matter what you do to it and for reasons that you may or may not be able to figure out and/or have control of. I think it's a bit unfair and somewhat demoralizing to tell someone that if they only cut their calories more and/or exercised more, they would lose or lose faster. Yes, it's certainly something to consider if you are in a prolonged stall, but it's not THE (as in one-and-only) answer. What sounds good and reasonable in theory and what works for you may not be the answer for the next person. I think ultimately, we all have to tinker and tweak (and keep doing so as we progress) to find the right combination of caloric intake/activity/percentages from fat/carbs/protein that works for us individually. My age/metabolism/hormonal state/past dieting history is unlike that of any other person exactly. It stands to reason, therefore, that my weight loss experience will not be exactly the same as any other person as well.
Yes, calories DO ultimately matter; I'll be the first to say that most people simply can't take in 3,000 or 4,000 calories per day or more and expect to lose weight on that, but where do you drawn the line at cutting them? 1,200 calories per day? 1,000 calories per day? There comes a point below which you are doing more harm than good even if you manage to lose a few pounds going very low cal. Is being unhappy with a 1 pound per week loss on average and attempting to speed that up by cutting your calories and increasing your activity worth wrecking your metabolism over? It isn't for me. At the current rate I'm going, it's going to take me at least another year to reach my goal and I've already been at it for almost 3. Yes, it's taking a lot longer than I'd like, but I've got the rest of my life to get there and I'm confident that I will get there...eventually.
If you are following Atkins, he does state emphatically that excercise is non-negotiable...you must do it for a healthy body and I've heard the good doctor state that if you are not excercising, you are not following Atkins. Does that mean you have to kill yourself with cardio 5 days a week or lift weights like a body builder? No...it just means get up and get your body moving on a regular basis, preferably at a higher level than it's previously been used to. Find some physical activity that you can do and enjoy doing and do it regularly. Those that don't want to excercise, feel free to beat me up but I believe that the good doctor was right about that one. :rolleyes:

First off, I'll agree with some others... i haven't seen any flame-type activity going on here, just vigorous discussion.

I want to clarify something I said, and to agree with Lisa about a calorie is not just a calorie. I was definitely not being discouraging to people, or saying that once you hit that 'wall' of stalling then it's over. I may be frustrated with my current stall, but I have no intention of giving up the LC lifestyle ever, and I do have some faith that the weight will keep coming off, eventually.

But I really don't think that the whole calorie/energy expended thing is so simple. We all know people who can eat tons and not put on weight - and it's not just that they *can* eat tons, but they *do* - so what is their body doing that it allows a thin person of say 140lbs to eat 3000 calories and not put on weight? Conversely, I've only got to look at myself as an example of things going the other way. Two examples:

When I started LCing I did CAD, as I mentioned before. Yes, I was heavier, so I could eat more calories just to get by because my BMR was presumably higher. But I have to admit that during my reward meals, I binged, a lot of the time. I ate a real meal, but I also ate chocolate, and crisps, and ice cream, etc. I didn't do what you are supposed to do at reward meals. One of the reasons I switched from CAD to Atkins was because I felt I just couldn't control myself within that hour even though I controlled myself very well out of it. My point is that although I am sure I was very often eating over 3,000 calories a day, I still lost weight. Those calories should have meant me putting on weight, but instead, because I kept them within an hour, and cut my insulin levels, I lost weight.

Then this summer, when I was on holiday, I went off plan for 9 days. During those 9 days I didn't binge, but I didn't eat particularly healthily - I had some salads, but my diet was very heavily carb based; easy food to carry round, like bagels. During those 9 days I put on 9 pounds. Now I've been told that it takes 3,500 extra calories to put on a pound - there was no way I was eating 3,500 extra calories a day. Maybe 500, even 750 more, but that should have meant putting on a pound or two during the week, not nine pounds. And it wasn't just water weight either - it took months to lose those pounds again.

All I'm saying is that the calorie equation can't be that simple. According to a simple mathematical equation, I shouldn't have lost weight when I did doing CAD, because I was eating too many calories, and I shoudln't have put on so much weight when I went off plan last summer, because I didn't eat that much.

A few people here have talked about this, but I want to echo them: the whole reason I/we think LC works is because it changes your underlying metabolism, and it is going at least some way towards fixing what was wrong with it in the first place that made you put on all that weight. I don't think it's simply a matter of a different kind of low calorie diet - that because fat makes you feel fuller you can be more satisfied with less calories than you would have if you were eating more carbs and less fat. I think it makes our bodies work more efficiently at processing our food too, and helps us burn the fat better. This whole process is gone into at some length in the Atkins book, and other LC books too.

I also calculated my BMR and with just moderate activity, which I certainly do, it's 2,100 cals a day. I walk quite a lot, and recently I've been doing weights workouts every day too. I'm eating an average of 1,400 cals a day, probably sometimes more, sometimes less. I should be losing more than a pound a week according to traditional calculations. Yet I've lost nothing at all this past month. Could be it's water weight, could be I'll get a whoosh (damn, but I hope so!) but so far, I haven't - and I know that in the past 3 or 4 months have gone past with no weight going at all, and then I whoosh a lot, so it could be that will happen again. (I just wish my body would give me a calendar and let me know...)

I'd be the last person to tell anyone to give up because of a stall. I just try to stop thinking about 'progress' - I stop getting on the scales, and I just live my life. Most of the time I don't feel like I'm on a diet in anycase - Atkins has eliminated so many of the cravings for me that it truly doesn't bother me to sit with my friends (like I did tonight) and watch as they eat ravioli or sorbet or drink hot chocolate, and I had my solitary glass of dry wine. I am 100% better off now than I was when I weighed 240lbs, and I know that LC is the answer, and that if I stopped all that weight would go back on - I aint never stopping even if I never lose another pound!

Deb

ps Liz - "Deborah is thinner than the rest of us" - you don't know how weird that sounds to me! Me, thinner than others? ;)

pps Diemde - I actually said something in Diane's journal a few days ago that would go along with that cell aging thing. I'm currently stuck at the weight I got to the last time I dieted, when I was 22. That means that up until now, I was losing the fat that I'd gained after that age. But now that I've gone back down to 174, the fat that's left has been around longer - since I was 17 (after I put on weight again after the first diet). I proposed some kind of theory that maybe because it's older fat it's harder to get rid of. Would be interesting if there's truth to it. In which case, if I ever get out of this stall, I predict another long one when I hit 154, because that's the lowest I ever got when dieting, and anything below 154 has been there since I was about 13.

And now it's twenty to one in the morning here, and I gotta hit the sack...

night all

Interesting stuff! I'm a biology major and would be interested in this info (fat cells filling up with water). Do you know the journal articles or where I could get research info? It would really help with a paper I'm doing in Nutrition. Thanks!!