Hi Birdy,
We have another member of the forum who has been missing in action recently, so you may find that there could be some confusing responses to your post if people don’t realise they are talking to a different birdy. – Since you have been on the forum we have got into a system of having a couple of regular threads that most people hang out on. We have a monthly, and normally weekly (but this week it covers 2 weeks) threads with the dates the threads cover in their title. You are more likely to be able to join in conversations to help keep your spirits and motivation up if you join one of them.
Please stop using the scales to measure your progress, its so easy to get disheartened that way. Each litre of water we drink weighs 1kilo. So if you drink 2 litres a day as we are advised to do our weight will fluctuate by up to 2 kilos depending where we are at on the water in, water out cycle.
Then there is the weight of the food you have eaten in your digestive system. 800 calories of cheese weighs a lot less than 800 calories of celery.
So you can see that your weight is going to fluctuate over the course of every day.
Also we don’t necessarily loose weight from our hips and waist initially. Our bodies can be unhelpful because they decide where to make the first changes, for me it was my legs and feet and then neck and shoulders (I dropped a shoe size and my collar bones reappeared before I dropped a dress size) .
Water retention occurs because a high carb diet means that our bodies have to store water to process the carbs. As we reduce the carb levels so our bodies can release the water stored.
I have been a vegetarian all my life and grew up on a diet with a high carb content (my mother came from the era where it was normal to have bread or potatoes as part of every meal to fill you up and because I wouldn’t eat meat or fish I was given extra portions of bread or potatoes or fruit instead.)
The idea behind counting carbs is to make sure that our carb intake is low enough so that we have low insulin levels. If our bodies have been running at high insulin levels for a long time then we become insulin resistant, which means that even a low level of carbs is enough to trigger an insulin response. Insulin levels do not just effect your health because high levels block your body from accessing your fat stores for fuel, they also interrupt a number of other hormone control systems, including the thyroid.
We can tell if our insulin levels are low enough for our bodies to be able to access our fat stores because we start using ketones as a fuel. – I use a cheap breathalyzer an AT6000 bought from Amazon for around £10 to check for the byproducts of burning ketones in my breath. – One of the cheap breathalyzers can’t tell the difference between ketones and alcohol. Don’t worry the police don’t use the cheap styles.
I have been following this way of eating now for 28 months. I have lost a lot of weight, I am much healthier and if I over indulge with Carbs on a special occasion I can get back into ketosis much more quickly than I used to. BUT I still need to stay under 25g of carbs to be in ketosis. For that reason I would suggest that you need to start monitoring if you are in ketosis (Don’t bother buying the pee sticks – they are heavily marketed but are unreliable. They are measuring excess ketones produced and then not used by the body, after a while the body gets more efficient and doesn’t want to generate surplus ketones. Breath and blood monitors measure ketones being burned for fuel.
I would also suggest going through some of the posts on the Take a Look at This Thread, especially links to podcasts by Dr Bikman and Dr Fung. Both are good sources of information to explain how our bodies work, and understanding that gives us more motivation to stick with it. My personal favourate is a pod cast from Dr Bikman that I posted around a couple of years ago now.
I would also suggest doing a search of the forum for discussions on trace elements. A couple of months ago someone was telling us about their experiences with taking an Iron supplement. I understand Omega 3 oils are particularly beneficial but I would spend some time going through the Take a Look at This thread because there are lots of links to podcasts that may help you address specific issues., .
