I'm pondering how to know when it's time to switch from losing to maintaining. I'm not looking for advice here, but I have been musing on it for a while, then me and Hidden started discussing it deep in the Daily Diary. I thought others might want to join in.
The question is, how do you know when you have reached your ideal weight? Sfg has all sorts of biophysical reasons to do with hormone interactions which I hope she will repeat here. I am a simpler sort of person, and am on what I guess you would call a diet. That means, when I reach my goal, I need to change my eating slightly to keep it there. But recognising that moment is tricky.
I can't deny, I am pretty happy every time I walk past the mirror. So happy that if I needed a swimsuit, I would seriously consider 👙! I am now below all my goal weights from January (67.3kg this morning), but I found on my medical records that 5 years ago, pre-menopause I weighed 5kg more, but my waist was 5cm (2 inches) thinner. I would love to get that waist back.
My current weight might have been my ideal weight in my 30s, but now I have presumably less muscle and possibly less bone (working on both) and because I am low carb also less water, it might not be now. Waist measure seems a better metric than weight, but who knows what is attainable and when I should settle?
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Subtle_badger
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I am full of admiration for you S_b, I agree that the post menopausal female silhouette is decidedly 'matronly' enough to make most of us weep and I wish I could have got on with HRT because I may have had a proper woman's silhouette still! I did try it, but gained 2 stones in 2 weeks, they said don't even think of trying it again!!!!
In hindsight, that may have all been because my thyroid was failing, because it was around the same time as I was diagnosed low thyroid. Either way, I bemoan the lack of a waist very much too!
I should probably stop bleating. My figure is not matronly - yet. In fact, since I have lost the weight, I am back to an A-cup, which is the opposite of your classic Nurse Gladys type.
You did make me reconsider HRT, but as my only symptoms are the slightly thickened waist and 1/2 dozen hot flashes, it doesn't seem enough to bathe my body in mares urine (or whatever they make them from)
I was always 36A and very happy at that size, but now I am in a 38C & I hate it, absolutely hate it!!! I never wanted more than my fair share and that is my A cup. Even when I got down to a size 12 in 2012 I never got into an A cup, which was pretty devastating for me.
I wish now that I had pushed more for a form of HRT which suited me, but the docs all put me off and told me that I shouldn't go that way. I had a freind who had HRT implants, she was still having a full menstrual cycle until the day she died and was as slim as slim could be, no waist thickening or anything. She died at 79 years of age not so long ago.
Plus everything has come on apace since I was of the age to be trying HRT, I am 68 at the end of this month & started the menopause at around 43/44 ish.
I got married in 1999 at 47 years and you should see the videos of me have hot flushes right left and centre! LoL
I had to use my cousin's room in the hotel to have a cold shower twice over the evening, Karen helped me in and out of my dress twice because of unbuttoning & buttoning me up again. It is amusing to watch, but terrible to go through!!
I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy!
My husband was forever moaning that because I was using an electric fan on me all night,I wasusing too much electricity and should pay more towards it!!! I wish I could arrange for him to have a weeks trial if what I went through! I am so glad he left here!
Oh, the hot flushes! I've really hated that bit. It's not just the heat, I've found it positively painful. They've settled down now, thankfully, but many's the time I've gotten up in the night and thought, 'Oh lord, I'm going on HRT'. Primary reason I didn't was because the doc told me he'd put me on one that gave me a false period, and I thought, 'knickers to that, I'm not giving up the best thing about all this'. I really love not having periods. When my younger friends talk about their monthlies, I have to admit to being, 'yay, menopause' about it. I find it a huge freedom not to have to think about all that any more.
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I couldn’t live without my HRT! My figure has still changed - my fat has discovered gravity and now resides around my waist and hips. I have also gained around 2 stone since starting the menopause (it’s a surgical menopause so it happened literally overnight!). But I’ve no reason to believe that with some effort on my part I can’t get back to a weight I’m more comfortable with. Wish for you BrynGlas that you’d had access to decent HRT!
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I think when you have the sort of forced menopause like you are describing, it's a bit different to going into it naturally. I might well have gone for HRT in that situation. As it was, the only reason I even bothered going to the doctor was because I was only 40 when it started as was concerned there might be some sinister reason for it starting so early. There wasn't, thank goodness. I've had an easy time of it really, compared to some.
I was around 40 when I began with flushes too, my GP said I was being absolutely ridiculous to be even thinking of menopause at that age! Guess who was right?
Once I got to the REAL hot flush side of things, when it was happening night AND day, I had to stop wearing jumpers - especially polo necks - because I just couldn't pull them off quickly enough! I used to literally panic because I felt as though I couldn't breathe properly. Driving while in a coat/jacket/jumper on was deadly, I just couldn't cope with the flushes, I bought a Volvo (old one) with air conditioning and used that to tame the flushes during the daytime. I still have occasional hot flushes and still have to strip off as soon as I feel one coming on! LoL
My opinion is that all men should have to go through something similar - especially GP's because I haven't found one yet who was at all sympathetic. I was just a neurotic woman of a certain age as far as they were concerned, still am if I mention having hot flushes to this day!
Mine were mainly at night. Poor hubs had had to get used to the bedroom window being open midwinter. I've been known to go out in the pouring rain at 3 am into the garden with nothing on, lol.
I know the feeling! I have been glad that we are 1/4 of a mile from a neighbour at times.
I once walked down the garden path, climbed the gate and stood there without a stitch on, a little like the scene on Titanic, holding my arms out and upwards trying to catch the slightest breeze to cool me down!
I have also tried those cooling aerosol things, but I found that a spray with plain water in it worked just as well!!! LoL
Well done you for getting where you are now.🌸
Thanks for this discussion and drawing me in Subtle_badger . I have rehearsed this elsewhere but for completeness of this thread, this is my understanding of the biochemistry of fat stores and appetite. When everything is working as it should, we are sensitive to our metabolic hormones. Leptin is produced by the fat stores and makes us feel full if we have sufficient or too much fat. It suppresses our appetite and we do not feel especially hungry if we are carrying too much fat. Grehlin by contrast is produced by the stomach and other parts of the intestine and makes us feel hungry. (Grehlin also has a role in reward, comforting and other lovely things harking back to when we were breastfeed (or held very close using a bottle), where food and comfort were most closely related. That's another story to this though.) So, when everything is working as it should, we can let our subsconscious bodies, decide how much fat we should carry, determined by how much leptin we produce and how hungry we feel. There are a number of buts to this:
- When we produce too much insulin over time, we lose our sensitivity to leptin. Grehlin gets a much louder voice, and we just hear that voice saying we are hungry, but do not hear the voice of leptin that says stop you are too full. Indeed obese people have masses of leptin in their blood streams and their fat cells are screaming stop eating, but their bodies cannot hear it. We can regain this leptin sensitivity by cutting right back on the need to produce insulin, that is, either by intermittent fasting, or by cutting carbohydrate right down
- How long it takes to regain leptin sensitivity will vary from person to person, probably a couple of months, but I have not found any proper studies on this, just opinion. Typically people on a low carb diet say their appetite drops after a couple of months, but that's anecdotal. The doctors / researchers monitoring low carb dieters, seem to weight people and measure their insulin as part of a T2D focus, rather than sensitivity to leptin. I personally have rather random metabolic hormones, so would not be surprised if it took my body a couple of years to regain leptin sensitivity
- How thin will my body take me when leptin is setting my level of fat? I have not found ANY study on this. TheAwfulToad has empirical evidence that people who have a high amount of muscle (from weight training but presumably farming would also apply) settle at a lower amount of body fat that people who are less muscly. Does leptin expect older people to carry more fat than younger - I certainly seemed to have settled at a weight that is higher than 15 years ago. I would like to see a study that measured body fat in people who eat low carb. Certainly I can find a lot of pictures of very slim people on the internet (15-18% body fat) who eat low carb, but by definition if you are confident to put your pic on the internet, its going to have worked for you!
- Does our body allow us to lose all our weight in one seamless flow? Does leptin keep up a constant message of 'step away from the pies', or are plateaus involved, where the body adjusts to the new amount of fat it is holding? Given that keto plateaus seem to be a common google search, plateaus on keto diets are not unusual. The answers are always, you have allowed carbs to creep into your diet, but what if that is not the case, and our bodies are just taking a break from losing weight. I began a monster plateau in mid February, decided this was my body's happy place, but just in the last few days my appetite has fallen through the floor. Am I about to lose some more weight (not that I need to, but I'd be more confident in that bikini if I did)
- Badger is experiencing hunger despite having been eating low carb for months (8?). Because she is not metabolically weird (as far as I know), her insulin and leptin ought to be working right now. Badger is experiencing considerable hunger though, but finds she is needing to ignore those hunger signals in order to lose weight. So, (and I hope BAdger won't mind me using her as a case study), is Badger at her body's ideal weight already, but her brain has other ideas? Is Badger just on a big plateau while her body adjusts to the significant weight she has already lost? Or is the leptin / grehlin balance not right in her body yet?
Theoretically, when we are eating low carb, we do not need to change anything when we maintain, we should not change how and how much we are eating as our appetite sets that. BUT the thing that I have found that I need to change is my expectation or hope or disappointment about further weight loss, and my personal acceptance that I am FINE.
From previous conversations, I suspect Subtle_badger has not yet let go of the idea that bodyfat has something to do with calories, and is therefore (consciously or unconsciously) attempting to "eat less".
Use the Force, badger. Reach out with your feelings. Failing to listen to your appetite, AFAIK, is the one and only reason for feeling perennially hungry.
It is a pernicious modern idea that we have control over nature. We do not. We are very limited beings. Yes, you can tweak and sculpt your body if you're prepared to dedicate your life to that and nothing else, but for the rest of us we have only two choices:
1) Be healthy, by eating proper food and avoiding "low fat" nonsense.
2) Be ill, as a result of eating far too many of the wrong foods, for too long.
In case (1) your body will maintain a modest amount of bodyfat, and you have little or no control over that. In case (2) your body will attempt to stop you dying by storing masses of bodyfat in which to dump the junk that you're consuming.
There is no transition between weight loss and weight maintenance - no decisions to make. Your body will make its own decisions.
My recent experience (2 months of unrelenting exercise) is my n=1 experiment on the muscle-mass theory. My bodyfat is the lowest it's ever been, and I've really done nothing to my diet (apart from adding few carbs). In addition, my social circle includes a lot of personal trainers and fitness gurus who insist that muscle mass is the key to low bodyfat, and they all have the bodies to prove it.
So my suggestion to anyone unhappy with their 'plateau' level is to get down to the gym and sweat a lot
I think the problem is an aesthetic one. At my healthiest and most energetic, I was lithe, lean and 6.5 stone, 18 % body fat. I felt great, had bags of energy, but looked, frankly, awful. My ribs showed excessively, I was toned, maybe, but I looked, as my husband put it, like he might break me if he hugged me. I had a very physical job then, I basically 'worked out' every single day without any effort on my part. I ate one good healthy meal a day and didn't feel hungry other than at that time. My body's 'natural' place appears to be 'scrawny scarecrow' and this is why I worry a bit about it, because although I'm considerable older now, I do know there's a good chance my body would naturally take me back there if I allowed it, because I'm built that way. Unfortunately, our bodies don't 'naturally' find the spot, necessarily, exactly where, mentally, we find it aesthetically pleasing. That depends on your body type. I'm just about where I want to be now, both in measurement and aesthetically. My body, on the other hand, might have other ideas, and that is where the problem lies, for me. My body thinks it could do with another stone off. That's where the choice lies, in our brains. In what we want to look like and where our bodies would, if left to their own devices, naturally place us.
I think I need to adjust my language. If hunger means a desperate, unignorable craving for food, then I am never hungry. I am briefly peckish throughout the day, as if somebody inside me were saying, “Now then, Pooh, time for a little something.” I wait to see if that feeling is indicative of real hunger, or whether it fades. Invariably it fades.
Like yesterday, I went for a walk at "lunchtime". Ten minutes into the walk, I felt peckish. As I hadn't had the foresight to bring a jar of honey along, I could not immediately address the hunger. When I arrived at the shops I was no longer hungry, so I didn't buy anything to eat. I do the same thing at home. I don't think it's "natural" to spend your life 2m from a fridge full of tasty food, so I don't put something in my mouth the second I feel the mildest craving. I wait to see it if it is the sort of craving that would have made my ancestor pick up a spear, or myself pick up my wallet, or just a fleeting feeling.
Come to think of it, I am feeling a little peckish now. 🤔
I am sorry if I have misunderstood or misrepresented you. I got the impression that your 36 hour fasts were requiring a bit of endurance rather than periodic peckish feelings! Perhaps I imposed on you the sort of stress that I would be experiencing.
A little time ago, I asked on the LCHF forum what hunger felt like when you were fat adapted. In more courteous terms I was told to shut up, stop asking stupid questions, I’d been told everything there was to know about LCHF. However, I don’t actually think it was that stupid a question. I think it is very interesting and enlightening to learn how leptin and Grehlin express themselves in different bodies. I now never have a moment when I could eat a little something Pooh style. I either do not want to eat AT ALL, or am so hungry I could die. Very little in between.
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Again, slim, because we don't fit a one-size-fits-all pattern. Some on the LCHF wagon like to push this as 'everyone will feel like this on this way of eating', but it ain't so. It wasn't a stupid question that you asked at all, but it was one to which you'd get different answers to, because we're all different. I don't get hungry in the mornings, which is why 16/8 works well for me, it fits with my natural pattern. Other people can't bear to eat later in the day and are starving when they wake up. We've got out of touch with our natural rhythms and our ability to recognise hunger as a genuine need or simply a learned feeling because food is available all the time to us. And it doesn't matter a damn what diet you are on, it's something we all have to re-learn if we've been used to eating every time we think we want food. But it's different for everyone. Time of the month, the weather, these are all also factors which affect hunger. I lose most weight in the summer when it's warm because I'm never hungry in the heat, and I live on salads. I gain in the winter because I'm hungrier when its cold. I notice people who talk about the eating habits of our cave-dwelling ancestors have a tendency to ignore the role climate plays and the fact that in colder places people ate more fat to survive winter, and in warmer places, there's less of a need for the insulation. Not just about availability, but also about temperature. Our bodies adapt to their environment, both what it provides and what your body needs to survive in it. Heating, air conditioning, modern housing and clothing have to a degree removed this dietary aspect, but not entirely. Our bodies haven't totally forgotten it.
I'm sorry! sometimes it must seem like I am laying landmines for you to trip over. I may have slightly over exaggerated my hunger to make myself look brave! I'm not sitting there, clutching the arms of a chair to stop myself diving head first into the cheese, it's more a "I hope that lovely young woman with the tray of hor d'oeuvres comes back soon"
I didn't answer the hunger question only because then I didn't have a sensible answer. I guess I do have one now. It's like being at a cocktail party when the drinks are being topped off faster than the snacks. I only experience a polite hunger now,the sort you would ignore if it wasn't convenient.
And I guess that's part of my conundrum; it's always convenient now, and that's not a natural part of the human condition. Sometimes there is nothing to eat, or getting it would be an effort. I think my fasting is replicating that experience, but 🤷♂️
It’s a very good point. If we had to do material stuff to our food in our mouths (ie a bit more than tear open a bag of almonds would we do it? My equivalent is whether I can be bothered to stop gardening, take off my gloves, wash my hands to eat? I can always tear myself away from my work computer though... I used to think I was very hungry as I drive away from the supermarket, but now my hands are covered with hand sanitiser then, I find I am strangely off food altogether in that setting.
There's a theory that wild animals are never fat, and that's probably true, but take them out of their natural environment, even if you keep the food the same, might they not get fat?
Bears are programmed to bulk up in summer and autumn, building fat reserves to see them through hibernation. But what if the food never ran out, and it never got really cold? Might not that same programming driving them to obesity in a year or two, especially if they end up working from home?
That's certainly true of geese. You can buy ethical foie gras create by leaving such an abundance of tasty food for passing geese that they overeat without gavage.
My kitchen is in a continual state of late summer early autumn. It's great, but it does not seem like going against nature to leave the fridge door shut for a day or two, every now and then.
My dog (a golden retriever) would eat until she burst given a chance (on a meat not carb diet). She used to break out after Christmas & ransack my neighbours bins full of leftovers and have a new year tummy. Ooh the foxes get worse every year I trilled as I quickly cleared up. Mostly I kept her thin though. A friend’s jack Russells have food available to graze on all day. They are skinny and leave their food. Another friend’s spaniel also has food to graze on all day and he is obese. They also give him cake. Horses can get fat & a gout type thing from the sugars in too rich grass and excess hard food (ie oats & sugar beet etc). For all these conditions the vets advise low carb and low sugar for the horses. Maybe all animals just want to stuff their faces given half a chance???
It's one of the reasons why I posted a while ago (and got pooh-poohed a bit by some of the anti-carb fundamentalists on here) that actually, one of the biggest problems is the availability of food like never before. Just there to eat, all ready, nothing to do. The slightest sign of hunger, and there it is, all ready for you. Fewer and fewer young people today grow up with the sort of controlled food environments those of us brought up in the 70s or earlier might typically experience. Food between meals wasn't encouraging when I was a child, and I grew up with an appetite that wasn't geared towards snacking. A few potatoes and toast in the morning really weren't the problem, because we weren't snacking all day on crisps and sweets. How many fat kids do you remember? But that discipline simply isn't there nearly as much now.
Fasting's good for those of us who can do it (I appreciate Slim can't) because it reminds us that we DO have control. We've just never been in such a position where we've had to exercise that control so much before, because outside factors such as foraging for what was available back in the day, or later simply such easy to eat food not being so readily available.
LCHF is an easier method of exercising that control because it fills us up more so we are less tempted, but now, more than ever before, we are far less limited by economy/necessity and most of us are oblivious to our hunger cues because we've not allowed ourselves to experience it. Hunger is a dirty word every dieter is looking for a way to escape from, but hunger would have been par for the course for our ancestors. I wonder why we've moved to 'feeling hungry means you are doing something wrong with your diet' instead of 'feeling hungry is natural as long as it isn't like Slim experienced it, and you don't have to satiate it or find some diet where you don't feel it. Not experiencing hunger and not being able to cope with it is a modern malady that really needs addressing. 'Wait until dinner' wasn't such a bad thing for parents to be saying.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about being ravenous, here, I'm talking about the mild peckishness that is all most of us that eat every day really know about.
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Agree agree agree.I can’t do the full fast, but I am taking baby steps in control (holding the cream & breakfast at 11am not 7.30am) to show myself I can and to practice a degree of control around food. Well obviously I can because I don’t eat the carbs in the house, but this is a next stage.
I think there is a lot of confusion and concern around the word hunger, including on this forum. Typically the diet narrative is not to let yourself get insanely hungry or you will crack and eat crap. That’s certainly my own experience - I won’t eat crap but I’ll go off my day’s plan and eat whatever needs least motor control to get it into my mouth. BUT back to my original question , what does hunger feel like to different people - it clearly does feel different. I think you and Subtle Badger have done a great job in describing what it feels like to normal people. I find it interesting that neither of you describe a desire to stab the person standing between you and the fridge, if only you could hold a knife steady...
S_b I can get hunger pangs just reading recipes, or deciding what it for dinner, or what I want to buy from the supermarket!!! Most of the time it disappears as fast as it arrived and I am absolutely NOT a saint so I have occasionally eaten something.
At the moment I get that feeling which seems to be what you are describing, I just want to have food in my mouth, not particularly in my stomach! This happens mostly at bedtime and I have never been an evening eater particularly.
So I think the brain cell that I have left tries to sabotage my weight loss, personally.
That brain cell is not getting anywhere mostly, (though 6 cashew nuts, or 3 cherry tomatoes have been brought into play occasionally) but I have been but I am stuck on a bit of a plateau at the moment, going between 12 stones 8lbs and 12 stones 11lbs on a daily basis, up a pound or two, down one pound. I am struggling to keep on track, still on my low carb diet, it can't go on this way forever, but my weight loss graph is looking very sad at the moment.
B. low thyroid is driving me quite mad!
I've a feeling it is a mental thing. I'm a couple of pounds off my original goal weight, but now I'm thinking, 'yeah, but I could keep going a bit.' I think we have to accept that we won't look like we did 20 odd years ago, and we shouldn't expect to. If you feel healthy and well, and your weight is within a healthy range, keep doing what you're doing and treat anything else as a bonus, maybe?
I worry about the possibility of becoming obsessed with watching the scales drop, and not being able to stop at a safe level. I hate to pee on slim's (dammit, someone showed me how to tag people and I've forgotten) theoretical notions but I can't really see how a diet that causes you to lose weight will magically simply stop causing you to lose weight if you don't change anything when you want to stop. I've reached a settled appetite level, but I'm still losing. Surely in order to stop losing, I need to change something somewhere? Otherwise, I'll keep losing. And that does worry me slightly.
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Oh I don’t mind metaphorical peeing! The idea is that our hunger increases as we reach the right weight and eat more. Does it work in practice? That’s the question. Are you about to fall through a grating despite your appetite not increasing?
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No, not quite, lol, but if I drop much further than my goal weight, it might not be the best.
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I’d like to think we can trust leptin not to get carried away and starve us. However, I guess those cues may not come through perfectly. If you are worried about counting your ribs, put some cream in your coffee or eat more cheese?!
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Then it'll just go on my middle. It's just naturally where my body stores fat. As I said in my response to Toad, it isn't really about me actually starving, because obviously I wouldn't be, it's about the fact that I tend to LOOK it. I don't gain muscle mass easily and, as I said, all my weight gain is in one area. So I can be perfectly healthy at a stone less than I am now, but look like a twiglet with the marmite licked off. I have absolutely no doubt my body won't let me starve, but my body isn't concerned with aesthetics. It isn't quite so good at leaving me where I don't LOOK like I'm starved, if you see what I mean. And I think that's where the key lies. Most of this isn't so much about where your body gets you naturally, it's about the fact many of us want bodies we don't naturally have, because we've got an unnatural ideal of what we should look like, and don't recognise that we aren't all built the same. Some folk store fat on their bum, thighs and chest, but have the kind of waist sizes I could only achieve if I weighed less than 5 stone. I was discussing this with a lady on here who weighs more than me, but is roughly the same height as me and has a waist that is now an inch smaller than mine. She's a different shape to me. Her weight is distributed differently. I could do all the diet and exercise I liked, I'm never going to have that lovely hourglass shape, because my figure is straight up and down.
What I'm saying, in a nutshell, is not that my body would let me starve, but that I don't want to get to the point where it's simply not letting me starve, because on my frame, that doesn't look good. Most people's stopping point isn't as simple as when their body tells them, but when they've reached the point where they are happy with their appearance and level of health. I've decided 8 stone is the magic number for me, so yes, I am going to have to do a little bit more than just leaving it up to my body to keep it there.
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This is one of the most interesting things I have read here! Thank you . It would seem that there are some common experiences for people eating low carb, but many areas where we diverge. I certainly do not have a classic experience because of my neuroglucopenia.
There’s also a point in a weight loss journeys when we shift from just not wanting to be unhealthily huge to thinking about aesthetic specifics.
For myself, I’ve found it hugely freeing to let leptin decide how much fat I should carry. I probably have a distorted view of what I ‘should‘ look like, and I have stopped losing weight at a stone more than i hoped. I cannot imagine being in your shoes of being too thin to look my best, but that’s my baggage - and maybe my body type too (big skeleton & muscly). I could ignore my hunger cues, put up with the stress of that, and go for my brain’s goal - but I’d rather go with TheAwfulToad ‘s prescription of loads of exercise & seeing where that takes me. It might only mean it’s easier for me to lift my bike onto the roof of my car - which would be fine...
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It gets to a point where it is all down to how you feel and what you want from your journey. Once you've got to the 'healthy lifestyle, healthy weight' range, it does get down to the specifics. I remember it being said on here that 6.5 stone for an adult looks ridiculous and isn't healthy, but that's what I was and I was fit as a flea, never better. But I was too light to be allowed to give blood and the nurse when I went for my contraceptives had a go at me about my weight. It should be said that, post menopause as I am now, I'd be unlikely to get that low again, but I still think about it with a little concern. I'm not what you might call vain, I've got a face for radio, but I don't want to look ill. I can't be having with all the questions you get from people who'd never say someone was 'too fat' to their face but have no problem expressing their 'concern' about my health when I'm 'thin'. To the point where this diet has been difficult because I can't discuss it outside of here because people think I don't 'need' to diet. My belly was two inches over the recommended size, so yes I needed to lose it, but no-one sees that because I don't wear tight tops. I wanted to be healthier, and I've finally made it (just got to kick the fags) but I've still got to watch how far is too far.
I worked at an office that had airlocks with scales, to make sure only one person entered at time. They had to recalibrate a door for one of my colleagues, because she weighted about that much, and the door wouldn't open for her because it was less than the system thought a human could weigh! She was tiny, less than 5' and a Vietnamese boat person at the age of 5, so probably malnourished until then. She was perfect, and healthy, just built on a smaller gauge than the rest of us.
I'm guessing you are taller.
As you say, we are all different. Until menopause, I never put weight on around my waist. Which was amusing because I would join a gym, and they would do lots of measurements, then I would get fit, and they would do the measurements again. My waist/hip ratio always got worse, because my bum got smaller, but my waist never changed.
Post menopause, I have found LCHF took weight from all over my body equally, but fasting or going very low calorie targets my visceral fat and takes cms off my waist. . Or so I thought; apparently me and my tape measure are delusional. 🙄
I think my right leg weighs more than Sherlock... I don’t suppose the average woman here can understand how I can have rib showing at nearly TWICE what Sherlock weighed at her lightest..
Really glad the visceral fat disappears for fasting. Can you recommend anything specific for Hugh Jarse shrinkage???.
Yes, I do have advice for Hugh Jarse shrinkage: menopause!
You have reminded me: as a teen I resigned myself to my huge arse when I lost weight and looked in the mirror. I could see ribs in my decolletage, but the arse and saddlebag thighs were still present. I realised that was just me and mostly accepted it.
But now with menopause, and estrogen no longer protecting me, I seem to be able to lose weigh off my hips and my thighs don't fill me with horror.
Well that’s something to look forward to in a couple of years 🤣. My mother (from whom I inherit the pear shape) has lost her pear shape in her old age...
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Yes it’s very rude to remark on someone’s weight whether large or small - but how ridiculous of the nurse. If you did have an eating disorder keeping you thin, nagging you about it was hardly going to make a difference. It’s great you’ve taken the steps to improve your health so much & best wishes for the smoking thing...
Good to read this subtleB. I agree...ive also past my original goal but not sure when and how to stop....eating more, different...dont want to relax on the carbs...or sugar..since my main goal was to reverse my pre-diabetes if possible...which i think ive achieved during this lockdown but havent had a blood test for 6m. Look forward to hearing more!!!!
I'm the top end of healthy at the moment and want to be bottom end of healthy and it is to do with body image and for internal health reasons but not in an unhealthy sense of the word.
I'm extremely flat-chested and my stomach often protrudes-out further than my breasts, so I'd like to consistently eat healthier and less to look after my organs for the long-term and also lose weight and be slimmer to what I feel suits my body externally - all within the bounds of what is deemed as healthy.
I know many might not agree with me and and may have different opinions but I think as long as it's within the bounds of healthy eating and healthy behaviour... and all self-worth isn't placed on body image - it's down to each individual to do what they feel is right for them, whether that be to keep weight on or to lose more. And it shouldn't feel like a stressful process.
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Can't stop eating
Please Join Me for a Bank Holiday Monday Weigh-in (31st August 2015).
I have actually done it!!!
Beginning to a new start! 
Need to get back on track 😪
