Am I eating too much?
 

For the past 3 weeks I've been on an Atkins induction-phase diet viz. 20 g of carbs/ day. Since last Saturday I alternate with 1 day of carboloading each week. A result is that I had terrible cravings for carbs, even though I felt bloated after eating them.. 3 days later they are finally gone.
But I am really wondering: is 1900 kcal/day not too much? I've based it on the 11 kcal/lb (=24 kcal/kg) body weight formula.. I'm feeling very full and often didn't even feel like eating the last meal of the day (1 hr before going to bed). My meals are 300- 350 kcal each.. so I have 6 of them/day.

After carboloading (10 g carbs/kg lean body mass = 70% total intake, thus total = 2900 kcal). I overshot that with 500 kcal as I had no idea that carbs were such caloriebombs and had bought way too much!
I gained 2 kg back (lost 4 in 3 weeks) and I've lost only half a kg since
Sunday..

So, was the carboloading too much (I keep it limited to 24 hrs though, rather than the recommended 36 hrs) or is it just the diet that leaves you feeling satiated.. I always thought you had to feel hungry when dieting!

BTW: I do Body-for-Life and weight train 3x week pus 3 cardio sessions, plus one final depletion workout with high reps (all body parts, 1 set of 15 reps for each) on Saturday just before carboloading, to make sure the glycogen gets to the muscles, not to the liver...

A puzzled Fietser

low carbing generally will not leave you feeling hungry. The extra fat satisfies your hunger, that is one of the reason that so many people are successful with it.

I have to set the alarm on my watch to remind me to eat my morning and afternoon snacks, otherwise i will forget about them.

Thoughtful reply from another board
 

Reply from another board:

I was never hungry on BFL. Frankly, I only ate 5 meals for most of the period that I lost weight because I just wasn't hungry enough for 6. I followed the book's nutrition plan, which is a little different from how you're doing it, but I think there's a lot to be said for grazing all day long. You're simply eating so often that you don't have time to get hungry.

Also I've heard that your stomach can be conditioned to handle a variety of meal sizes. In other words, eat a lot of big meals and your stomach stretches & becomes accustomed to big meals. Eat smaller meals and your stomach shrinks & becomes accustomed to smaller meals. It may well be that eating lots of smaller meals simply conditions you to feel full after less food.

Anyway, the short answer is a resounding no, you do not have to be hungry while dieting.

Your carboload day is Saturday, right? Give yourself a few more days to see if you lose the remaining weight. Then give yourself 2-3 more weeks to see if you're gaining, maintaining or losing. It may well take a whole week after carboloading to achieve a net loss, or you may not lose weight at all due to muscle gains.

Also, the carboloading may have a muscle volumizing effect wherein your muscle cells absorb extra water and become fuller. This is a good thing and not the same as water retention. Muscle volumizing is conducive to greater strength, better performance, and better recovery. Water retention, on the other hand, is associated with extra water held under the skin and has no real benefits (other than a defense mechanism against dehydration). Both have a similar effect of increasing your weight slightly.

Based on your earlier report about LBWO going so well, I might guess that this is what's going on. If indeed this is muscle volumization, you are in a good position to improve exercise perfomance & recover well. That could likely lead to gains in lean mass. Your weight may even go up somewhat, but so will your metabolism.

All of this takes time, so the only way to know for sure what's happening is to keep things constant for a few weeks and see what changes. Do you get stronger? Do your measurements shrink? Do you get bigger? Does your weight keep increasing? Based on the patterns you see, you can make educated guesses about what's happening, and then make educated guesses about how to redirect your training to achieve the results you're after.

As a final thought, and this is pretty much just a guess, it could be that induction caused you to lose a lot of water, both from muscles as I've heard reported by bodybuilders and from water retention. It's likely that carboloading directs carbs (and therefore water) both to muscles & subcutaneous tissue. It may be that going back to the low-carb portion of your diet helps to flush out water retention first, but that water in your muscles is retained longer. Therefore the pattern you'd see is a large initial water loss from induction, a moderate initial water gain (a "correction" due to muscle volumization) when you start carboloading, and then a progressive pattern of fat loss and/or muscle gain as you continue your cycled diet & training. Again, that's just me developing a theory to fit the facts, but I think it does make sense. Just don't be too quick to celebrate or panic, because how well your program works is going to take time to determine.

Take care,
S

Re: Thoughtful reply from another board
 

Hey, I just wanted to step in and say something about the stomach issue. Firstly, understand that your stomach is made of specialized tissue that stretches ONLY to accomodate the food you eat...it has nothing to do with your appetite.

What "grows" with your eating habits is your appetite, not your stomach, and it does so via the brain. So, you retrain your brain basically when you hold any eating pattern or schedule. I think too many people are misleading themselves with this idea that your stomach gets bigger when you eat larger meals, and by telling themselves this tend to think they can't do anything about it....when in fact they can.

Tell yourself it's a brain thing...because it is. :)

Also, the cravings are due to insulin, not your stomach. One of the bummers about CKD is that you have to basically go through the ole carb withdrawal thing after you go back to lower carb eating, but Lyle says this gets better after the 3rd or 4th week, and it all depends on how quickly you can rid yourself of the glycogen and get into ketosis. On the other hand, when you skip meals because you're not hungry, chances are that will eventually catch up to you, and possibly in the form of cravings.

It's pretty mechanical the way everything works, and once you understand the process you can actually take measures to help aleviate some of the discomforts---like cravings, etc. If you were on Atkins and had cravings, most of the time you'd be told to eat more fat. This you can do in the first few days after your carb up, I believe, without hurting anything (one of the pluses with low, low carb eating).

Good luck to you. :wave:

changed my mind...
 

I'm going to do the TKD. I love the energy I have after carboloading when I'm back to the ketodiet but hate the cravings. So, I'm going to try eating a small amount of carbs in the form of maltodextrin together with my morning whey & fresh cheese shake and will keep doing this on my active days (both cardio & weight training).

I'll see what happens.. will do this next week. When I think of it, I will take a batch of whey powder with me for the oncoming trip