I’ve just stepped on the scales. Last night I was looking forward to it. I was convinced that I would have lost an *astonishing amount of weight over the last week...I have been in ketosis, not as deeply as I would have liked. I haven’t felt like I was dieting, I have eaten lovely food, the food I long for because I have been spending most of my adult life cutting things out, avoiding things, treating myself to a mouthful...
I don’t know why I waited so long to try Atkins type eating again after about 20 years. Well actually, I do know, I tried again about 3 years ago and lost no weight over a difficult 2 weeks and got scared I would put even more weight on and went back to putting weight on with carbs instead! I started low dose treatment for low thyroid 2 weeks ago and lost a kilogram straight away that week. I met a lovely, encouraging woman who said that she had started a LCHF type programme and lost some weight. We’ve been in touch for a lovely two weeks. when my plan kicked off last Wednesday, I was struggling with trust of the method, but as of last night, I am totally on board. Then this morning- no weight loss. I’m not devastated but I struggle so much with fear of putting weight on (that I may never lose again), and the despondency of no reward for my hard work.
I don’t think that I can cheat the system, I have been told that I shouldn’t ‘diet’ whilst getting my thyroid under control, but I do not think of LCHF as a ‘diet’. So my supportive friend thinks that I may not be eating enough. I realise that I don’t know what ‘enough’ is anymore and I have spent decades ignoring feelings of ‘hunger’.
Can anyone spare a few helpful thoughts?
*in my case ‘astonishing’ would have been a pound or two
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Thank you, Mike, I just had a nice ham and cheese roll without the roll. I’m sticking with it. Maybe I should spend more time here reading through posts, like I did on the thyroid community. 👍🏼 Thanks again
Thank you, Praveen, I’m going to stick with it and have some patience. My mind has been whirling round but I have been thinking how to maybe eat a bit more of the high fat stuff and try to switch my old dieting worries about calories off. I’m going to read more and not rely on my memory about the programme and try a ‘new’ fresh approach to it. 🙏
I think you've pretty much answered your own questions. You seem to have a good insight into your own mindset, the potential pitfalls, and the nature of the "diet" (and you're correct, it really isn't a diet - it's just healthy food).
It may just be that your body hasn't quite got with the programme even if you brain has. If you've been eating a high-carb government-approved diet for 20 years (which, as I'm sure you've realised, seems perversely designed to make everyone fat and ill) then it will take some time for your internal machinery to figure out it can switch off the General Alert and resume normal service. There's a Dr Berg video somewhere which mentions a client who took three months to see any significant weight loss - but after that, everything went smoothly.
As you said, you're not gaining weight, so all is well so far!
Regarding your comments about not eating enough (and the fear of doing so) - this could well be the source of your problem. It drives me nuts how dieticians are endlessly telling people to "eat less". Nobody can keep that up for any length of time, and psychological fallout is almost inevitable (people blaming themselves for "failure", or for being "weak willed", or believing that they're gluttonous, or simply formulating wrong beliefs about what a full adult meal looks like ... because the advice can't possibly be wrong, can it?).
Anyway... as others have said, stick with it, and you'll see results, even if your thyroid issues are throwing a spanner in the works. Just make sure to eat until you're full. Don't be afraid of eating too much. On LCHF, it's virtually impossible.
Thank you so much for your comments and the understanding you’ve shown. I really like Eric Berg and have binge watched a lot of his videos after I tried to find out whether the loss of my gall bladder 20 years ago was contributing to my weight gain. He talks a lot about low carb eating. I got a bit side tracked by Alan Christiansen who was talking about carb cycling, but his adrenal reset diet felt so complicated I was a minor disaster and another kilo later I knew I couldn’t manage it (though I did make some great protein smoothies).
I am going to stick at it. It does make sense to me. I haven’t gained when, strictly speaking, after the number of calories I have eaten, I should have, and my eating and hunger has changed in the last week. It’s a bit like letting go and trusting that there’s someone there at the bottom in some ways, (and I totally understand why I would have a problem doing that) but I also understand the scientific arguments for this kind of eating better than I did before. So it’s not only about faith. I’m going to read much more and watch more Berg. Thanks again
You mentioned going back on an Atkins-type diet. Does this mean you're eating loads of protein? I'm no expert and I've never done Atkins, but I thought that if you eat too much protein that isn't Keto and it just gets turned into fat again.
I follow Dr Berg as well and it's worked amazingly on me. I eat moderate protein, loads of fat, and very low carbs, but I have unlimited salads and green veg which I don't count at all.
Can't remember how long it took to get results but I don't remember it being too quick, a month something like that?
It's a bit of a misconception that Atkins advocated eating protein as a substitute for carbs. As with any other LCHF variant, he advocated the majority of energy-calories from fat, and plenty of natural foods. There are three reasons Atkins has become associated with "high-protein" diets:
1) He suggested that protein could be eaten ad-lib, although we now know this isn't a great idea, and I don't think he realised that fear-of-fat would cause people to latch onto protein to construct a "compromise" diet that was closer to the USDA recommendations. The vast majority of doctors, research papers, and Public Health organisations still describe "low carb" in terms of "high protein", not because that's what Atkins actually advocated but because they simply can't conceive of any healthy diet being high in fat.
2) The media and the Establishment conducted a very successful smear campaign against him, by painting his diet as something that it wasn't and then deriding their strawman-Atkins as unhealthy (which it would be).
3) A lot of people never actually bothered reading Atkins's book and just followed the media reports about "steak and eggs". Although you will lose weight this way, it's not very pleasant, and it isn't LCHF.
Atkins got most of it right. His induction protocol still stands, and has been adopted into almost every modern LCHF variant. However modern LCHF gives a lot more leeway in the weightloss and maintenance phases, because it turns out that most people have a higher carb tolerance than Atkins suspected. OTOH, I believe Atkins would counter that his protocol is guaranteed to work for everyone - his intention was to present a by-the-numbers diet that people could follow without too much trial-and-error involved.
Amount of protein to eat seems to have very varied recommendations. When I counted macros I think I was about 1g per kilo weight. Now my intake varies - if I cook 300g of chicken and fancy eating all of it I do, and probably have a snack of cheese too while it's cooking. Another day I might have just veggies and a bit of cheese .... perhaps swings and roundabouts applies!
Yes, I don't bother counting. I think as long as you're eating good, wholesome meals it really doesn't matter. Your body manages its own nitrogen balance the same way it manages anything else. I find that if (for example) I go for a BBQ and eat loads of meat, I only feel like an andyswarbs-type meal the next day
Hello again, thank you for this. I can remember the Atkins method being explained during the backlash, as a just another calorie controlling diet. Television programmes and newspapers did ‘pieces’ which appeared to confirm that it was a gimmick which resulted in people in eating fewer calories and this was what lead to weight loss rather than it being about Atkins’ ‘metabolic advantage’, or ‘fat burning’. I remember feeling ridiculous for falling for it, started to cut back, eat less (it was, after all just another calories in/calories out diet)...
The "debunking" campaign was very successful. Millions of people were convinced to stop eating healthy food and go back to eating low-fat rubbish. Big result for the pharmaceutical industry: lots of guaranteed prescriptions for blood pressure medication, diabetes treatments, statins, etc etc.
That particular "explanation" drives me mad, because it sounds superficially plausible, but if you think about it, the logical response is, "well, no s**t Sherlock". Of course LCHF results in a caloric deficit. So what? The critical advantage of LCHF is this: you can maintain that deficit totally naturally, without going crazy with hunger, and without "counting calories" (which in itself in nothing more than a meaningless ritual - you can't count calories, not even in principle). You body just starts working properly again.
Imposing a calorie deficit in the face of hunger has a completely different effect: it convinces your body that you're starving, and it must therefore conserve fat in order to stay alive.
As I've ranted about before, the problem with nutrition experts is that they don't know what they don't know. They don't know anything about dynamic systems theory or control theory, which is critical for understanding appetite and energy balance. They don't know anything about chemistry, physics, anatomy, or biochemistry - in fact they genuinely believe they don't have to because "it's all about thermodynamics" (which, likewise, they know nothing about).
When you get right down to it, your body is a self-fuelling machine that can adapt its energy output to available energy inputs. The behaviour of such machines is well understood .... by engineers. Not nutritionists.
Hi. As ever “Im late to the party” on your post! I hope that by now you have settled into your new way of eating and are doing well. Just wanted to add that fluid intake! Especially water, is a major part of LCHF eating imho. If you are still trying maybe up your intake to 1ltr a day as well as your usual fluids. But I really hope you are well on the way, or have arrived to where you want to be.
Thank you Annie. I’m delirious to report that I am now 5kgs lighter and really understanding the whole LCHF thing a lot better. I have had great support. And was just saying to my friend these last few days that I really need to focus on water! That’s my new challenge. Who’d have thought it and how stupid it sounds to concentrate on drinking water! However, I’m with you absolutely on it and am gradually improving my intake.
Ask your doctor for help, he might give you a tablet that traps the fat in your body. My doctor gave me some, but recently he said your thyroid should not stop you losing weight if you are on the right dose of levo.
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