I see a lot of "this food stalled me" or "Aspartame STALLS, avoid it!" and my question is:

How do you KNOW that's what caused the stall? I know I don't have the patience to introduce ONE food in, say, 2 weeks time or even more, document my loss pattern, any changes and such, then move on to ONE more new food, etc...can someone point me at a conclusive study?

IMHO, unless you isolate one food or substance at a time, there would be no way of knowing in such certain terms that it was that packet of nutraweet or maybe a natural pause in your weight loss.

It's not just nutrasweet and sweeteners, but I'm just also curious about how people go about nailing the right culprit?

I'm with you Potatofree. I think saying, "I ate this and lost a pounds", or "I ate this and didn't lose weight" is kind of a dieting myth. I know people feel strongly about it. But I'd be willing to bet that anyone who claims a food stalls them, is probably just getting too many calories when they eat that food.

Eat 1200 calories a day and include the food. See if you don't lose weight. I don't think anything has changed in that it takes 3500 extra calories to gain a pound and the same to lose one.

I'm having low carb chocolate, aspartame, nuts, pretty much everything and not stalling now.

Before I was eating the same thing and stalling.

What's the difference?

I started watching my calories.

i completely agree. it's not so much what you eat that stalls, but how much of it you eat. always gotta watch those calories. that's just the nature of dieting, IMHO. it just so happens that not eating carby foods allows you to do this without those horrible cravings! thank goodness

Freckles, I think the point is that very few people would look at these influences as scientifically as you have, and probably not for anything like 2 weeks, which as you correctly suggest would be the minimum time needed to take normal weight fluctuations out of the equation. I know when I have had a good result on the scales the tendency is to ask yourself what have I done right recently? - and that would be since you last weighed yourself - and I am afraid I am one of the ones who is addicted to weighing every day, since I started this WOL and didn't fully trust or understand the principles of why it works, as I do now. So, even while i know it is faulty logic, it is still hard to resist trying to replicate the excersise and diet prescription to see if another "whoosh" occurs.

And of cause the same applies in reverse when you are on an apparent stall, although the experts say a stall is not officially a stall unless you have no change for 4 weeks - and that even if you are on exactly the right diet, you may still have shorter periods when your body just needs time to adjust before continuing to lose. In addition you need to ensure that a weight stall, is not masking fat loss and muscle gain, which is great anyway, but is hard to check for small amounts of a pound or two.

Malcolm

I think that is one of the reasons Atkins states to make sure you follow the carb ladder, or at least just add one new food in at a time. That way you have time to see how your body reacts.

It also takes some experimentation and just learning to read your body. I found out cream stalled me by reading the signals my body gave me more then the scale. When I had cream I would instantly crave more. Even if I was full having some cream as a dessert would make me want to eat more. Weight loss wasn't as good of an indicator because it was anything but steady normally. I had ups, downs and flat lines on the graph.

Eliminating the majority of foods form your diet then slowly adding them back in is a great way to see what foods you are sensative too and what can stall you.

i can tell something stalls me because every night when i go to sleep, i am one pound above what i was that morning. And when i wake up the next morning i am one pound less than when i went to bed. So i always loose one pound overnight. If i eat something with aspartame in it, i dont loose that pound at night.. its like it messes up my metabolism and i will gain a pound.

Most of your loss overnight, though, is water. If I eat salty food, I get the same effect, but it's just because I'm retaining too much water.

It's funny; I was going to post on here last night that freckles was going about it the right way in attempting to find out if particular foods are stalling. Most people, though, don't.

I have a theory that many people who believe they are stalled by sugar alcohols are just overdoing it on calories, because candy made with sugar alcohols is NOT low calorie, especially if you're digesting some of it.

Moonwalker- to the best of my knowledge, everybody weighs more at night than in the morning, which is why it's recommended you weight yourself in teh morning, after toileting and before you eat or drink anything.

Freckles-IMHO the way you went about it would be the only way to determine what is causing the slowdown, or as close as you can get to really knowing.

I'm not trying to criticize anyone, but I do think a lot of people jump to conclusions. It's impossible to gain 3 lbs of fat overnight from a serving of sf jello or one Atkins bar. Now if you eat a bar or two a day over the course of 2 or 3 weeks and change nothing else in your diet and you gain 3 lbs, THEN I'd blame the bars...

I think, and this is just my opinion, that people are just a little quick to point the finger at certain theings because they were told by someone, who was told by someone else, that they HEARD of someone stalling from aspartame. Things take on a life of their own on the internet.

I have lost up to 3.5 pounds during the night. Needless to say, its a night I'm up peeing quite a few times.

I think another reaction people have is, "I'm going to cut out this bad thing, this bad thing and be more careful". They end up cutting several things out of their diet and end up cutting back on calories by a fair amount. Then they start losing weight again. Was their weight loss because of what they cut out? Well.... sort of. It combined with everything else they were eating was too many carbs or too many calories or both.

Interesting thread -- 2 weeks ago I committed to induction (again) -- and I've since lost 6 pounds (my weight had actually been creeping up).

Going back to induction meant, for me, eliminating protein bars, sugar-free candy and ice-cream, nuts, Atkins' breakfast-cereal, berries, and most cheeses -- probably went way down caloriewise.... I do know that I'm in heavy ketosis, before I would only occasionally be in light ketosis.

I enjoy the above foods, maybe I'll slowly add them back in (like 1 piece of candy after supper) and see if I continue losing weight. I had wondered if the soy (the cereal has a lot, probably the protein bars) could have been hurting me -- I guess the only way to find out is to add them back in very slowly....

Just curious: If a food creates a stall (as the nuts did for one of the respondents) -- does that indicate a sensitivity and/or allergy?

To make it reasonably accurate, you really need to count calories too. If you just add back a food, you're adding additional calories, unless you cut out an equivalent number somewhere else.

So, sure, add in 300 calories of chocolate or nuts and you might very well stall. That 300 calories would equal a pound of weight loss in a little over a week.

I think a lot of people cut down their calories on induction, simply because their food choices are so restricted and how many steaks and eggs can you eat in a day? Also, they're probably cutting back on their carb stores a bit too and each carb molecule clings to 4 water molecules, so that's a lot of weight carrying around an extra load of glucogen. At least, that's how I understand it.

Last night I agonized over walnuts in my salad or a little SF chocolate after dinner. Something had to give or I was simply going to blow my calories out. Ok, granted what gave last night was the calories, but at least I'm cognizant of the choices here and if I stall out, I know what did it... TMC! Too many calories.

I agree with Freckles and it's easy for me to figure out what stalls me for sure because I follow induction and eat basically the same thing all the time, so adding something in and having it cause a pause in my loss is very easy to pinpoint.
Ex: if I drink 2 diet cokes a day, I go on my merry way losing. If I add in 2 diet Rites, forget it, loss comes to a dead stop. Or, if I have a little cream cheese with Equal, fine, if I sweeten it with Splenda, dead stop again.
I can't get any more scientific than that, and since it's not any additional calories or other variable, then I am stating that it's the Splenda and I do not use it at all. I wouldn't say this if it only happened once, but I've been on atkins on and off (more off than on sadly) for 4 yrs and have seen it consistently that whole time.

I also do not lose when I eat more than a serving of low carb ice cream, but I won't say that stalls me because it most likely puts me over my ccll, so that I will save for maintenance.

Very interesting thread....

Freckles, I'm wondering if the nuts were salted? Too many salty things slowed things down for me. I know when I quit my daily dose of pork rinds, my weight loss nearly doubled for the week and continued to be better without them. My calories didn't change but my sodim intake sure did. Just a thought... but it sounds like in your case those nuts were stallers for you.

Another thought I have is what is really considered a stall? In the stickys somewhere I know it says it is 4 weeks without weight loss or inches. I don't think that it's accurate to say "I drank a something with aspertame yesterday and it stalled me". I wonder how many people are really stalled when they post something like that.

I personally have yet to have a 4 week period where I lost no inches or pounds. I may stay the exact same weight for 3 weeks, but I'm losing inches those weeks. Or I might be losing weight all 3 weeks, but the inches aren't moving. My body is losing weight slowly but consistently. If it choses to stay the same weight for 2 weeks in a row, I may be disappointed in the number on the scale, but I know long term things are moving in the right direction and if I'm patient my efforts will pay off. That can be tough when I'd really like to be dropping tons of weight each month and be at goal tomorrow!

I don't think there is a magic formula that works for everyone. All of our bodies are different. I really think it's our own science experiment. And I'm not about to give up my occasional low carb treat if I read that it stalled someone else, unless I can prove it also happens to me.