3 weeks in and nothing shifting

We have not checked the qualifications of anyone posting here. If you are have any health related symptoms or concerns, you should contact your doctor who will be able to give you advice specific to your situation.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Ive been on this crazy diet for almost 3 weeks and apart from a wedding last weekend, Ive kept my cals below 800. This week i reduced my carbs to no more than 25g a day and increased my fast period to 18 hours. Im veggie so my protein comes from eggs, quorn products etc and I dont eat fatty foods. We cycle several times a week, I garden almost every day and Im a nervous fidgeter so I rarely sit for long. BUT I cannot lose weight. Despite all my efforts, in 3 weeks Ive lost 2kg and no cm, never mind inches. Its so depressing and I just feel like quitting. Im hypothyroid and dont do well on Levothyroxine but surely I should still be losing something. I could cope with being hungry if I was seeing results.

    The only positives Ive seen are that the visual problems and headaches I was having have pretty much stopped so hopefully my BG is dropping. Either that or Im so damn hungry I don’t notice anymore.
    What am I doing wrong?

  • posted by Birdy76
    on
    permalink

    Hi polly this WOE is low carb, moderate protein and high in good fats. You say you don’t eat any fats could this be the cause of your no weight discard? How is your water intake? You also need to eat the 800 cals if you can. Nuts ate good and cheese in moderation. I don’t know anything about the thyroid but maybe shake up you water in take needs to 3 litres a day and have a look at good fats. I am sure someone more knowledgeable will be along soon to help. Keep on keeping on as this does work when done correctly hun. 💞🦜

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Sorry, when i said i dont eat fatty foods, i meant big fry ups and nasties like that. I eat cheese, nuts and yoghurt, cook with olive oil and use butter rather than margarine. Water is probably a good point. Ive never been very good at remembering to drink

  • posted by Birdy76
    on
    permalink

    Polly it is so so important to drink water. The 3 litres a day are a must. I think if you start drinking the water you will soon see massive results. You will
    Lose a lot of water weight and with it electrolytes so make sure your salt intake goes up a little with it. Hope this works for you.

    Birdy 💞🦜

  • posted by alliecat
    on
    permalink

    Hi Polly! I can understand your frustration with your results so far. Birdy is right about the importance of water.
    The one thing that you haven’t mentioned is how you are managing your macros. Too much protein can be an
    impediment to weight loss. With more information, I’m sure that we can make a few tweaks and get your scales
    moving again 🙂

    Allie

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    Hi, Pollywatsit,

    Could you share with us your usual daily food diary and times of day you eat to help give people more information so that we can look at helping you with that.
    The scales are not a good way of monitoring progress, as we keep insulin levels down our other hormone systems can work as they are intended which includes the growth hormone that supports the development of stronger bones and muscles. Both of which weigh more.
    When you say no inch loss, how hard are you looking for it. ? – I know it sounds a silly question but my body started off by reducing my lower legs and I dropped a shoe size, then it went on to reveal collar bones. – It was a long time before I saw any changes in my spare tyre.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Thanks for the advice folks. I eat between 12 noon and 6pm generally.
    Im using My fat secret https://www.fatsecret.co.uk/Diary.aspx?pa=mdcs The diary should be public.
    A big part of the problem is being veggie. Im finding my diet so bland I frequently dont eat it. Must try harder

  • posted by alliecat
    on
    permalink

    I’m sorry Polly. I don’t use a smartphone, so I don’t do apps.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    its not an app Alliecat, its a website

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    Hi, its not showing you what you have eaten, so take us through a standard day, what drinks would you have, what food would you have.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    hmm weird.
    this is todays
    Tea with a splash of semi skimmed x2
    12pm
    cheese salad – rocket, radish, spring onion, cucumber, celery, 20g grated cheese, tea spoon mayo
    Tea with a splash of semi skimmed x2
    roasted cashew nuts
    5pm
    veggie stir fry with bare naked noodles (YUK!), olive oil, spring onion, sweetcorn, carrot, red cabbage, soy sauce
    Tea with a splash of semi skimmed x2
    and lots of water!

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    OK, here is my suggestion from reading your list, each of the teas with semi skimmed milk will be causing an increase in insulin. – Semi skimmed milk is much higher in carbs than double cream. – So I have coffee with double cream when I want a hot drink.
    If you are insulin resistant, so you have a high level of insulin even when not eating, and you are causing even a small spike in insulin from your tea’s then you are effectively dieting rather than time restricted eating if you take the tea’s during the day. That will cause your metabolism to slow down.

    How about changing over to soda water instead of some of the tea’s, especially outside of your eating window just for a couple of weeks to see how that changes things. As you spend some time with low insulin, eventually the insulin resistance will heal and your background level of insulin will drop. Then you can move back to higher levels of carbs if you want.
    —————————————————————————

    You mention hypothyroid. Apparently during TRE, our gall bladder works better and our gall bladder is responsible for T4 -> T3 conversion. Are you taking supplements to support your thyroid? –
    I like it when people ask questions that I don’t know the answer to and it sends me off with something to research. I found this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PniPifdEbo which set me thinking. – I know that a high carb diet causes inflammation of one form. It hadn’t occurred to me that the symptoms of hypothyroid is also a different form of inflammation. –

    I spent years struggling with counting calories / trying to fight my weight, constantly cold and often tired. ( but as a vegi while I was counting calories it was a high carb diet). I got caught up in the cycle of doctors saying – must be low thyroid, run blood tests, don’t believe the results / re run the test / no blood is still in normal range / we don’t know the answer. Eventually when I was working in London I found a private doctor who treated based on symptoms rather than blood tests. He prescribed Armor, and depending on result he would prescribe T3. But he was hounded into retiring by the medical council because that wasn’t the approved process of treatment by the NHS. It didn’t occur to me until I started thinking about the answer for you, but since I have been following this WoE, I have been so much warmer. Especially as I have dropped carbs down to the under 20g mark.
    ——————————
    This link may also be interesting for you with suggestions on supplements and an explanation of dieting v fasting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SOvEuaQ-Xc

  • posted by Scottishgal
    on
    permalink

    Forgive me for jumping in here JGwen but you always post really informative stuff. You seem to have great knowledge and understanding and can explain things in a way that’s easy to follow.
    So, I just need some clarification from your last post as I’m confused and think I may be doing it all wrong.
    As you know I’m type 2 diabetic. Since my last blood result and the end of the initial 8 weeks I’ve been concentrating more on BG levels than anything else but still want to lose a little bit more weight. As my BG levels are consistently low (4.6 tonight even after 2 yum yums today but the less said about that the better) I assumed that my carb intake is low enough ( in general but not today) and also that this meant my insulin levels are also low. Have I got it wrong? Could my insulin levels be high even when BG is low and that is why I’m not losing much more weigh as it’s slowing down my metabolism?

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    Hi Scottishgal,
    Thank you for the complement, I am on the same learning curve that you are on, I have just been on this path for a longer time. – And I still have lightbulb moments as I come across another aspect.

    You ask a very interesting question, with does low BG = low insulin. You haven’t got it wrong exactly, – you have after all stabilised your blood sugar levels which is a massive positive, and so many other people with T2 have not achieved that. But the bottom line is there is research that its possible to have high insulin levels and normal BG levels. – There are some very nice graphs in this article which demonstrate different patterns of insulin response to a standard glucose test.
    https://www.bbdnutrition.com/2017/03/22/featured-significance-of-insulin-resistance/

    The really good thing is that it doesn’t matter which pattern of resistance you have, by keeping insulin levels low through Time Restricted Eating and keto, you can reverse insulin resistance over time and also loose weight.

    If this doesn’t cover the info you need please shout out.

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    Hi Pollywotsit and Scottishgal,
    Your questions set me thinking about my experience this week and I thought it may be helpful to share those with you.
    I was a vegetarian from childhood because I really hated the taste / texture of the fat in meat to the point where eating it made me throw up. – There were not all the recipes and acceptance of vegetarianism when I was a child, so my diet was high carb. I was slim enough to wear a bikini in my early teens, but gradually the weight increased and increased and for most of my adult life I was a dress size 18/20 despite living a very active lifestyle and calorie counting. After an accident when I fell landing with my foot back under my leg, I had to spend 6 months not putting the foot to the ground to allow the bone fragments to heal without needing operations to install plates and screws to rebuild the ankle. I was left in constant pain when I walked which led to spend a few years of comfort eating and my weight ballooned. I was fortunate enough to encounter a trainee physio, who helped me become pain free when walking. So then my journey to loose the blubber started, and I found the BSD in October 2017.
    I started off cutting out all the big carb sources, bread, pasta, pizza, chocolate, sugar, rice. Then I moved on to using fatsecret to monitor my food intake and tweeked the choices I made to reduce carbs further. That has meant that I have lost 6.5 stone and I got back to my “usual” size. But I don’t want to stop there. I want to be a better shape, and would like to enter my next decade being shapely enough to wear a bikini again.
    I love the description someone else came up with that we are each our own experiment on this journey. That is certainly what I have been doing for the last 6 months. – As a vegi its really difficult to have interesting tasty meals and be under 20g carbs. – But the reason for the 20g carb level is to ensure that your insulin levels are low enough that your body can access your fat stores and be in ketosis. The amount and type of carbs each person can consume and stay in ketosis is very individual, it depends on your level of insulin resistance, the mixture of your gut bacteria and the type of carb. – 20g of carbs from sugar is very different to 20g of carbs from fiber rich veg which it takes your body a long time to break down and digest. I use one of the cheap breathalysers to check if my body is in fat burning mode so I can learn the patterns for myself.
    I am at the point in my journey where the next issues I need to tackle are emotional eating, and avoiding worrying about loose skin. – Both those are issues that fasting is the solution for. I was playing around with 36 hour fasts but still using coffee with double cream during the fast as I broke down my reasons for heading into the kitchen at different times of day. – Stopping work for the day is linked for me with having a meal. So I needed to find alternative options away from a plate. So far in when its raining, thats a long soak in the bath, or when dry sitting outside with a book while the dogs race around the field.
    Decades of being in an office when the only acceptable reasons for putting down the document and stepping away for a few minutes when you wanted to walk to help you think was making a coffee or going to the loo have set a pattern in my life that I am finding it hard to break free from even though I work from home. Its almost a reflex to head into the kitchen and switch the kettle on as part of the process of needing to step away from the keyboard to enable me to think about how to explain a train of thought to someone else.
    ——————-
    Sorry its a long post, but now I am getting to this weeks experience.

    I did my first water only fast from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning this week. Breaking my fast with a couple of coffees with cream during Tuesday morning and then between meetings headed into town to buy food. –
    I allow myself 1, item that I fancy and isn’t to BSD plan a week. So a box of 4 individual egg custard tarts went into my shopping trolley this week. My excuses are that 1. I see a lot of posts on Dr Fungs facebook group about how people are combining fasting with having a wider range of foods. – 2. I had a couple of stressful meetings on Tuesday. 3. Living out of town means that I have to do a weekly shop. 4. There had been boxes of egg custard tarts calling to me from the supermarket shelf for months. – The obvious happened. I hoovered all 4 tarts up on Tuesday.

    I felt really rough on Wednesday, tired and almost like having a hangover. – So I tried another experiment. – eating high fat to get myself back into ketosis as quickly as possible. I really felt so much better as soon as I achieved that. It was like a cloud lifting from my brain.

    So the outcome of the experiment – can I combine fasting with not counting macros in my eating window is a definite NO. – But it also highlighted to me how much more alive I feel when eating low carb which makes the work involved in having to plan, and cook from fresh ingredients rather than just being able to open a packet, shove the contents in the oven and go on to do something more interesting less of a hurdle to overcome.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Thanks everyone. lots of food for thought there. Ill work through it and tweak things accordingly. Im not sure Im going to be a pleasant person to be around if i cant have my morning cup of tea. Hungry and caffeine deficient are not a good mix 😉

  • posted by JGwen
    on
    permalink

    You could swap your tea with semi skimmed milk for either herbal tea, or use a dash of double cream instead of milk, or look for a different milk type which is low carb.

    Having a small number of calories which are fat based so don’t trigger insulin is fine if your focus is on weight loss. –

    Apparently its when you get into the 100lb loss region there is a risk of loose skin. – I am intending to get into that territory, so by incorporating water only fasting autophagy will be more active and that is the way to encourage your body to break down excess skin.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    My dad had type 2 and I started to get symptoms that worried me so instead of marching off to the GP demanding tests and meds, I embarked on the blood sugar diet. Ive been reading a lot this morning. Im feeling really rough, very tired, foggy brain, achy etc and I’m concerned my body isn’t reacting quite the way i hoped it would. I weighed myself in boots today and I’ve actually gained back the 2 kg I lost in the first week, plus a little. Feeling very defeated just now. Im going to look into getting a consultation with an endocrinologist. Perhaps privately i can get the t4/t3 combined thyroid meds. Quite what I’m going to diet wise, I dont know, but being miserable for no reason is not ok.

  • posted by alliecat
    on
    permalink

    Polly, I think that consulting an endocrinologist is an excellent idea. However, the symptoms you are describing are
    very typical for carb flu…It generally doesn’t last long, and a fair number of new BSDers go through it. If you type
    that into the searchbox, there should be many posts about it.

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Ive decided to change to the 5/2 with long fast and concentrate on keeping my carbs way down. I think ive felt rough today because Ive finally got my carbs down low enough to have an effect. Complicated innit.
    Thank you all so much for the support, help and advice. I will get there!

  • posted by alliecat
    on
    permalink

    🙂 🙂 🙂 Call us if you need us, Polly! Best to you!!

    Allie

  • posted by pollywotsit
    on
    permalink

    Thanks Allie.

    JGwen, finally got time to watch those vids you posted. They both make so much sense. Pretty sure I have hashimotos and apparently very low cal is a complete no-no. I should be on reduced calories with intermittent fasting and its the fasting that is the important bit. Absolutely no grains, processed food, sugar or ‘vegetable’ oils and I need to take more supplements, so ive added vit k2 to my already extensive list. Anyone with thyroid related weight issues should watch those videos.

  • posted by Scottishgal
    on
    permalink

    Thank you so much for sharing your story, your experience and your knowledge with us JGwen. It really does help. That’s me ordered my cheap breathalyser now and it gives me more figures to aim for over and above the bgl readings.
    Hope it’s going well for you too Pollywotsit

Please log in or register to post a reply.