One of the irritations we encounter on ANY weight-loss diet is the plateau. How to break through these stalls is tricky indeed, and i suspect they may be the reason most people never manage to meet their goals -- especially for those of us who have a hard time losing weight in the first place.
Sometimes you read a person's record and they say, "i plateaued out but kept doing what i was doing, and three months later, i started losing again." THREE MONTHS??? Hell, i plateau that long, and there's no way on earth i'd be able to keep my motivation to continue what i'm doing!!!
On the other hand, i have a suspicion that the body so likes to have homeostasis that it can actually be good for you to remain at a stable weight for an extended period. The problem arises when your mind has a reason for wanting to continue losing, and your body refuses to cooperate.
I think Dr. Atkins didn't consider a plateau a real issue until it had gone on for a month. He had a set of suggestions ready and waiting for his patients when/if it happened, but not having my book available right now, i really can't enumerate many of them. I suspect his first rule would be to step back 5 or 10 daily carb-grams, and to make sure one was using all the appropriate supplements. Making sure allergies and hormones are under control would be another suggestion. Checking fat-burning status through the use of keto-sticks might be yet another, and if they didn't show "enough pink" he might have recommended a fat-fast.
The tricky bit is, if you ARE producing ketones, a fat-fast is superfluous -- ITS major virtue is forcing a recalcitrant body to burn FFAs rather than glucose. In the presence of decent ketosis, other tricks will be far more effective in spurring weight loss.
I've long suspected that "shocking" the body with an abrupt change in food or exercise habit makes it perk up and take notice, start "thinking" about how it functions instead of coasting along on autopilot. What we DON'T want to do is make it think it's threatened, by dipping protein or total calories TOO low, or working out so excessively that stress hormones actually encourage more fat storage! That's the "logical" thing to do, from the point of view of a physicist; unfortunately, the biological system doesn't behave like a mechanical one....
This "shock technique" MAY be why low-carbers who abruptly start eating more starches see an immediate loss -- the question in my book would be, how long can it last? Now, in my case, an addition of carbs to spur weight-loss is out of the question -- i start feeling terrible, i get palpitations and tremors upon a too-large increase of carbohydrates in my diet! Not fun. Adding in fasts are effective for some people, too, which could theoretically work the same way, shaking things up.
For me, the most effective thing seems to be to stop drinking wine and spirits, stop eating any nuts, dairy or fruit that i may have been indulging myself with. A more strict observance of what kinds of vegetables i eat, too, can be important. Anything that sets off allergic symptoms is an automatic suspect.
Please, everybody -- leave a comment on your favorite and most effective means of breaking a plateau! I think that learning from each other is one of the best aspects of the internet!
Great idea for a post, I hope you get lots of response. Just my N=1, I went through a longish plateau even though I was technically doing all the right things and eating "paleo". It was very frustrating being LC and eating only 1,400-1,500 kcal a day and not really losing any weight for a couple of months. I got rid of nuts, berries and most dairy and started losing straight away again. Those are the number one foods causing plateaus IMO.
ReplyDeleteI must confess that doing the occasional carbload (nothing crazy, maybe 100-150 grams) helps boost my weight loss. I've noticed that anytime I go away for a weekend or end up cheating on my plan for whatever reason, I gain a bit of water weight which then disappears very quickly along with more weight when I return to VLC. I can't explain the mechanism of action but it does sound like a shock to the system that became too complacent. ;) But yes, I too get the palpitations and the shaking. Just as electrolytes are out of whack when you first go LC, the same happens when you go the other way.
At this stage I've accepted that an all-meat diet would get rid of my remaining excess weight in a couple of months but for some reason I just can't face doing it for more than a few days at a time. At the end of the day, there are psychological / quality of life issues involved in eating. Eating as I do now, LC but not VLC, it will probably take me about a year to get rid of the weight which is an excruciatingly long time.
thanks for contributing your experience! i, too, hope we'll get lots of input.
ReplyDeletewhat i'm going to try to do is, stay LC while i'm so busy, then when i get to a quieter stretch of time i'll go back to the all-meat thing, then hold steady on LC again, then repeat till i'm happy with my weight. i seem to see that once i've maintained a certain weight for x number of months, my body DOES seem to like to "defend" that weight. ...but i STILL don't believe in a "body-fat setpoint"! ;-)
Tess,
ReplyDeleteBody-fat setpoint is a very real myth. I know much has been said about it and I'm probably only capturing a little, but post obese is not the same as normal. You read Woo and she explains the adipocyte-leptin connection better than I can. I think this is a function of that.
As best I could research, we replace, through attrition, all of our fat cells every ten years. Different people can gain fat at different rates. Unhealthy looking skinny people can’t grow fat cells much faster than they can replace them. Healthy looking overweight people can produce much more than they lose.
Other than attrition, surgical removal, and fat-soluble vitamin overdose, I don’t really know how we can lose fat cells. Perhaps once science figures out that fatty acid liberation is a better method of weight loss than telling people that they are “Fat lazy slobs who need to put down the fork and exercise.” We will see some funded research in this area… but don’t bank on it.
So we have set-points… When they’re big, our fat cells are insulin resistant, and loss is easy… When they’re small, they’re insulin sensitive and regain is easy. It should take about 5 years of dieting to sustainably decrease body weight by half through attrition, but as time passes a little more loss is sustainable when calorie levels are held constant as some of the cells start to die off.
hi, Arby -- people with post-obesity leptin deficiency have a different problem from what i'm trying to solve in this exploration. as you say, Wooo probably knows more about THAT subject than almost anyone else in the blogosphere.
Deletewhat i'm hoping to do is to compile a list of tried-and-true plateau-breakers that real people have actually found successful. i don't see that this has anything to do with set-points (which i've heard about since the 70s without any convincing proof of their existence) -- it seems more likely to be metabolic adaptation to reduced intake that goes along with dieting, whether it be the traditional calorie-restricted kind or the spontaneously-reduced LCHF sort. :-) i'll let the researchers and theoreticians argue about mechanism, while i court solutions!