Hi guys, it's been a little over a month that I started a low carb diet but no significant weight loss up to now. I have cheated several times by eating pastries or fries but on the whole I have maintained the low carb diet. Now after one month I simply feel like giving up but I know I will feel worse if I do. I really feel defeated and dejected. Btw I am 43 years old and go to the gym at least three times a week.
Urgently need some words of encouragement😣
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Calling TheAwfulToad
Not really much to add apart from what others have already said, viz., you've not actually been doing low-carb (LCHF).
I'm only guessing here, but you're most likely not eating enough fat, or simply not eating enough. There's an ongoing argument as to whether caloric restriction + LCHF is better than eat-to-appetite LCHF, but in my opinion it tends to just make people miserable, and they give up (most people can't cope with non-stop hunger). There's also no theoretical reason why it would actually help.
Anyway, if you drop in on the LCHF group you'll get some more specific advice. Then give it another go. There is a very specific protocol for getting best results. You'll probably find it's much easier than you think once you get the details right.
Hello and Welcome to the Weight Loss Forum Jeet7
I’m sorry to hear that your struggling ☹️ If we had more details then perhaps someone could offer some advice, we have a menu planning post called Daily Diary that’s a good place to start, details in the Welcome Post that’s in Pinned posts, here
healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh... Please read it carefully so you can find all the information you need to find your way around.
As a peer to peer support group we rely on mutual encouragement, and nothing beats joining in, reading posts and replying to others. Our Group Events are probably the best places to start. For specific Low Carb suggestions have a look at the LCHF forum here healthunlocked.com/lchf-diet
Best wishes in your weight loss journey
Indigo 😊
Don't give up Jeet, well maybe give up the pastries and change the chips to Sweet Potato fries. Have you included good fats into your eating plan? The cheating won't help, but you know that 
Come and join us on the Daily Diary and see what others are eating and see if you get any inspiration
DietDoctor is a good place to have a look for some really lovely low carb high fat recipes.
A month isn't really that long to adjust to a new way of eating.
Keep going and you will get there
You haven't been following a low carb diet if you've been "cheating". I just want to say this so you don't have a negative view of the lchf approach. You won't be giving up on lchf because you haven't started.
I recommend giving it a whole hearted, committed go for a month and then seeing what you think.
You'll find plenty of low carb followers on the Daily Diary and there is extra help and information in the LCHF forum.
Just realised you mention low carb without raised fat. The two go together. If you attempted to lower carbs without raising fats, that would be the reason you were struggling.
Don't give up - I'm one of many who can testify it works ... but you have to be good til body gets adapted and it wont if you have lapses ... patience and perseverance! x
Words of encouragement: (plus a little tough love)
1. Low carb diets work, (I've shifted 5 stones on such a diet myself)
2. But pastries & fries and aren't low carb, so your body went 'yay! energy!'
3. Identify nice protein / healthy fats + veggies foods and eat those instead
4. But less of it (portion control) because they fill you up.
5. Use the Diary and Weigh-In as Indigo says.
6. You are not defeated, you just haven't succeeded yet.
7. Round Two. Ding! (and good luck)
Sorry you feel defeated and dejected Jeet, it is early days but you can get there. It takes time to fully learn to live a low carb / higher fat lifestyle, but once you get there it can be very effective and satisfying. Pastries really have no place in the low carb way of eating and will prevent it working for you. As the others have said extra support can be found on the lchf forum and the daily diary. Hang in there and good luck
Hey Jeet, I can understand you feeling like that and I'm not necessarily going to give you the encouragement you're hoping for.
It's taken me 3 years here to reach a point where I've committed to lchf. I use the word 'commit' because the decision to give up (mostly) a large group of the foods you 'love' is one hell of a commitment. For me it was harder than agreeing to get married 
(didn't think there was anything harder than that ).
I did commit to following it and that 10kg badge you can see next to my name is the amount of weight I've lost since Jan 1. However, I would still be stuck at zero if I added in cheat moments because lchf doesn't really allow for those days. When you cheat you take your body out of fat burning mode plus your body goes back to storing the carbs you eat as fat.
You can do this and the best thing I can recommend for you right now is to start using the Daily Diary... healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh...
As you go through that post, you will see that several of the people posting are following lchf. Look at their menus for ideas and pinch them if that helps Post your own menu for today and you'll find yourself more likely to stick to it.
I do wish you all the best and hope to see you in the DD TODAY!! (If not 'today', then when?)
If you feel the need for a few indulgences like pastries or cakes, then perhaps LCHF isn’t for you. It’s a great diet and very effective but I really struggle with sticking to it for exactly the same reasons, so am back calorie counting. As Tiggerr says above, its to do with how it works, you need very low carbohydrates or else it just doesn’t work. Could you track calories for a few days just to see? I did this recently and was astounded how much I was going over 😩
Hi there jeet, I’ve ( in the past ) had great success on less than 50g carbs combined with 1500 cals , 30 min daily hiit and 16:8 fasting ( 3 meals in smaller window ) . For low carb to stop you feeling hungry I’m afraid you can’t cheat and you also need to be increasing fat rather than protein. I log everything in MyFitnessPal and at the moment am doing 60% fat 25 protein and 15 carbs
I lost 18kg - now maintain by just eating sensibly . I do have porridge for breakfast as it stops me snacking and that may be why you sometimes want carb rich food . I have an omelette sometimes for lunch, tomato , cucumber with half a tin of chickpeas , chicken etc as my downfall is snacking . I ban nothing or I see it as punishment - not lifestyle . I halved my exercise this week as I was stressed and busy but I haven't put on weight . I don't eat after 7pm , ensure I have breakfast about 8am every day and watch portions of anything except salad / veg . This strict regime may not be for you as we are all different as I am primarliy a manual worker . I can do around 1350 max cals but I need balanced food with every macro in it .
Hi focused1, this just shows how everyone is different as if I have porridge ( steel cut no sugar ) I’m starving all day !! Carbs make me hungry !!
Was wondering what is 'not a significant weight loss'? I have dabbled around trying to lose weight for a number of years, but after some planning in December I started seriously doing LCHF and calorie counting at the beginning of January. I have lost 6Kg since I started properly at the beginning of January using the guidance of NHS weight loss plan - sorry to say pastries etc cannot been any part of it- not at the moment anyway.
Stick with it! I love the bagginess of my jeans at the moment.
Wowww 6kg loss since Jan, well done, you've inspired me,thanks😊
Thanks, it was so lovely to hear that. All I have done is follow the advice on the NHS choices for my calorie intake for my weight, height and age. Then using the advice on this site I am aiming for a LCHF diet. I always manage to do the 150 minutes of exercise recommended per week. I utilize many cookbooks to help to maintain a variety in my meals, enjoying Hairy Bikers and Tom Kerridge at the moment.
This has given me a small regular weight loss each week.
If I can do it, I am of the opinion that anyone can and therefore so can you!
It's so difficult to stick to a diet and so easy to be tempted away from it. I've found that if I don't buy it, I can't eat it. Good luck
I would give up the low carb malarky and just consume a balanced diet and aim for a 500kcal deficit each day. Watch the weight fall away each day.
And this is the advice that leads to zero weight loss (in my case) or everyone reverting to their previous weight after losing it at
SW.
But you do you.
You do realise that if you eat less you will become less? Physics! Oh you do you and pretend that low carb is magic.
It is not "physics". Dieticians only get away with this statement because virtually none of them have studied physics, or any other relevant discipline for that matter.
Your body operates several closed-loop control systems for energy and mass balance; collectively, the process is called homeostasis - keeping things the same. Keeping things the same is what your body prefers to do. The overriding control target is to keep you alive. Everything your body does revolves around that. In other words, if you're fat, it's because your body believes that's the best way of keeping you alive. More bluntly, you're doing something to yourself that would ordinarily kill you if your body didn't have some built-in failsafes.
It's superficially true that energy-in = energy-out over the long term, but that statement conveys no information about what your body does with bodyfat. The point here is that your body's homeostatic processes control both energy-out (via all sorts of efficiency tweaks) and energy-in (via appetite). The optimal control strategy, given your body's target (keeping things the same) is to wind down metabolic rate if you eat less. And your bodyfat will stay the same for a long time, because that's a good strategy for staying alive during a food shortage.
Low-carb is not magic. It's just healthy eating. It only works because the EatWell Plate is disastrously high in refined carbs, and deficient in fat. No human has ever eaten in that manner, ever, for any extended period of time - mainly because it can't happen without subsidized grains and fossil fuels.
High-carb low-fat is the one single diet that - eventually - makes people fat and ill. Stop doing that, and you'll lose weight. You don't need to do "keto" for very long; keep your carbs low enough to reverse the damage done by a low-fat diet (about 2 weeks) and you can then let your carbs drift up naturally to an appetite-regulated level. Most people end up in the 50-150g/day ballpark.
The worst advice I ever got was from an nhs dietician nurse. I started forcing myself to eat breakfast and put on loads of weight as the carbs breakfast led to me being starving all day
Maybe for you, but for most people all calories are not equal and carb calories make you feel hungrier
Please read up on what a calorie means. It is not food. A chocolate bar has 500kcals, this means the body can get 500kcals of heat energy from that chocolate.
Kcals are not nutrients, they are measurements of heat energy. I recommend you watch Professor Richard Feynman’s lectures.
He was an incredible Physicist and teacher to the best minds in the world, watch his lecture “units of energy”
I am sure you will then realise “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie”
Calories from different foods affect human physiology in different ways . 500 calories of carbohydrate will trigger more fat storing insulin than 500 calories of fat.
You clearly have no qualifications in physics and biology and biochemistry. Please start studying and pay attention to the actual scientists with PhDs and BScs in thos subjects, buy a human biochemistry text book for University students, learn ffs!!
I’d like to ask what you (personally) know about weight loss?
Please try to remember this is a peer to peer support group, who offer friendship and encouragement.
Your reply sounds arrogant and patronising.
Please read our forum guidelines regarding protocol and replies to posts.
If people want to pretend to understand calories then they should show that they know what a calorie stands for and not spread nonsense.
Nobody here is qualified or pretending to be, we simply share our own experience.
I shall ask you for the last time to please remain civil
How can you stand by and let people spread nonsense about calories? “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.”Bye!
And you are clearly rude, sod off and go and irritate another support group
What does a physicist have to do with anything? Human beings aren't bomb calorimeters.
Calories are not food, and a calorimeter is how you measure the amount of heat energy that’s in the food.
When food is broken down the action heats us up, and to lose weight all we need to do is put less atoms into our bodies and exhale more than we consume.
You are describing a bomb calorimeter. That is a device that burns food to release heat. Human bodies are complex organisms, with many regulatory and counter-regulatory systems. It will fight to keep homeostasis - think how well we defend our core temperature. We defend our weight too, with lowering our BMR, reducing movement, hunger, cravings etc.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/271...
The amount of heat energy that’s in the food are the calories. Didn’t you pay attention in chemistry, biology and physics at school?
I didn't study biochemistry in school. Clearly neither did you. I have made up for it in the meantime. You have not.
You do know that we are open systems? We heat up due to how much we eat and we exhale the fat, did you know that?
I'm going to stop feeding the troll.
SB out!
Post removed by Admin as not helpful to the situation .
Hi Jeet7, welcome. I am new here,. I found keeping a daily food diary helped me honestly record what I was actually eating. This forum is so supportive. Good luck😀
When I called in TheAwfulToad I hadn't really taken in what you had written. You have "cheated" several times in 4 weeks? I have cheated twice during my 3 months, and they were extinction level events. I cheated on Christmas day - big time - and 3 weeks ago at a dinner party that was a gourmet feast. Christmas stopped my weight loss for a week, even though I fasted the day after. The gourmet feast did not, but only because when I left it, I did not eat for 62 long hours.
If you cheated once per week, in my experience that would change your weight loss to zero.
Both meals were planned diversions and I do not regret the setbacks. But if I couldn't resist pastries and fries in general, then I would not have begun this journey. Indeed, I have been aware of Atkins et al since the 80s, and ignored it previously as it wasn't something I wanted or thought I could do.
Note, that even with my Christmas blowout, I lost 7.4kg and 10 cm off my waist between 11 December and 11 January.
If you have been eating a pile of carbs once a week or so, I have to agree with everyone else, you are not on a low carb diet. I would say, if you can't commit to low carb for a four week stretch, then it's not the diet for you, and you should consider something else; probably calorie restriction, but I am not an expert on all the options.
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