Hi all, looking for some help/advice.
Started on the 800 diet on the 3rd February, now the 19th, so over 2 weeks since I started.
A bit about me: 59 year old male, type 2 diabetic, active, not a sedentary job, walk 5+ miles as I have a dog, and have an active job.
Follow Med diet a lot of the time anyway, as that’s where I’m from.
I weigh and measure everything, and check my meals/menus on Fatsecret.
Within 48 hours of starting the diet, I had GAINED 4 kgs. Two weeks later, I am still 2 kgs above my starting weight.
I drink 2+ litres of R.O. water a day + tea and coffee so plenty of liquids.
1 glass of wine a week, and 1 square of 80% chocolate every evening, otherwise nothing for breakfast, 2 x eggs a day, and lots of green veg either cooked or raw, virtually no fruit because of the sugar.
The only consolation is that my blood sugar reading first thing is now 5 to 6, but that may be partly because I started taking Berberine recently (highly recommended!).
Any ideas/help welcome, thanks.

Bump. Anyone?

Hi,
Welcome to the forum. We tend to organise ourselves on the forum into a weekly and a monthly challenge thread. Most people tend to only read the posts on one or both of those threads, so its unlikely that many people will have seen your post. –

To be able to help you we really need to know your macros, the figures of grams of carbs, protein and fat. – There are lots of posts on the Take a Look at This thread which cover the research that explains how this way of eating works for weight loss and may help you find some clues when you review what you are eating to discover the problem but some thoughts.

1. Carbs not low enough. – While the diet is referred to as the blood sugar diet, in reality, what we are trying to control is insulin levels. That is the hormone that controls if our bodies can access our fat stores for fuel. Some people need to be below 20g of carbs a day to be in fat burning mode, others can achieve it at 50g of carbs a day. – But either way, counting carbs is more important than counting calories.

2. When you keep your insulin levels low then other hormone systems can work as intended. – That includes the growth hormone which controls how the body responds to exercise, (building muscle and strengthening bones.) both of which result in an increase in mass but its a healthy mass. This is one of the reasons why monitoring progress via the scales is a bad idea.

3. The main reason why monitoring progress via the scales is the fluctuation resulting from intake. – Each litre of water you drink weighs 1kilo. So if you are drinking 2 litres of water a day depending on where you are in the water in <> water out for the day your weight will fluctuate by upto 2kilo over the course of the day. – Also the scales are recording the weight of the material in your gut. 800 calories worth of cheese weighs a lot less than 800 calories worth of celery.

The best way to measure progress is with a tape measure and photos, rather than the scales. But if the scales are important to you, then use them to measure progress over time to smooth out the daily fluctuations. Our bodies can be determined to change shape in every area other than the one you want them to focus on. Some of us even dropped a shoe size as well as having collar bones emerge before our bodies started to work on our spare tyre.

Hi JGwen, thanks for your post.

1) Should I move this thread to one of the topics you mentioned? Or ask a mod to do so?
2) I understand what you are saying about carb thresholds but none of this is mentioned in the book? Counting calories is mentioned ad nauseam but not as far as I can see counting carbs?
3) You mention monitoring via the scales is a bad idea – yet MM mentions in his book that the more you weigh yourself, the more you can monitor your progress accurately. There is even a MM supplement from the Daily Mail captioned “Why you should weigh yourself every day”.
4) Lastly, after nearly 3 weeks of 800 calories a day, I am still 2 kgs heavier than the day I started, and eating 800 or less calories a day, weighing and measuring everything, and having no carbs to speak of. Any explanation for this, apart from maybe extreme survivor syndrome?
Thanks

Hi,
There isn’t any active moderators on the forum, so I would suggest doing a cut an paste on to one of the common threads.

Like many others on the forum I started out by reading Dr MM’s BSD book. – After a few weeks I had discarded a considerable amount of weight but still had a lot to discard. I was also concerned about what would happen regarding loose skin. – I started lurking on the forum back in October 2017, and started to join in the conversations in the December. As part of working out what to do from that point I started to look into the research behind the eating program. I am not unique in being interested in that, which is why there is a Take a Look at This thread. As people have found interesting snippets of new research or articles which may explain issues they have shared links on that thread. I think that being able to share information from a range of sources rather than having a policy that DR MM is the only source of information accepted is one of the strengths of this forum.

Since I started this WoE, I have discarded over 40kg. and have returned to a physically active lifestyle. I am not unique on this level of achievement. There are a number of us on the forum who pay back the helping hand we received from forum members when we were newcomers by helping to point people in the right direction.

I would suggest using an app like fatsecret to record what you are eating, and how that breaks down as macros.

Hi again, as I mentioned in my 1st post, I already use Fatsecret to log everything.
Any other suggestions?
Still 1.5 kgs heavier than when I started btw.

Hi Notlosingweight. I think JGwen has given you comprehensive replies and some great pointers especially to the Take a Look thread and the weekly thread. Not sure if there is any other way to help.
You don’t mention how many carbs/calories you are having each day but most people need to drop below 50g of carbs a day and some as low as 20g.
Could the Berberine be the cause of your weight gain?
Have you changed anything else in your diet recently?
The lower blood sugar may be a result of lower carbs rather than the Berberine?
Sorry not to be of anymore help but if you keep following the guidelines you should lose weight, if not see your doctor.

Take a look at what you were doing before you started this way of eating. Were you already walking 5 miles a day? If so, then you were able to walk 5 miles and retain your weight. I guess you had an active job before starting as well? I would advise looking at the BSD as part of making changes to your life.
Having yoyo dieted for many years, the changes i have made this time have been to really change my habits. Previously i have thought in terms of reduction of the things i ‘love’ this time I have genuinely changed the way I live my life. I have stopped rewarding myself with food/drink, I really don’t need chocolate every evening, even the dark stuff. I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since I started.
I am not your doctor so I cannot advise you about exercise, just relate what has worked for me. Instead of 6000 steps a day I hit 11000, and as time has gone on I walk faster to raise my heart rate and breathing rate. I also do at least three sessions of high intensity exercise a week. Far longer than Dr MM suggests in the BSD book as I was already cycle fit. What is true is that when you lose fat it breaks down and is expelled from your body as three things, energy, water and 86% by mass as carbon dioxide. The more you are breathing the more mass you are expelling from your body and if you are not eating enough carbs for your given exercise regime, then the body will use stored fat, which is nice.
So i would talk to your doctor as Verano suggests, there maybe something else going on.
Good luck with your journey, for me it has been a change for life, not just 8 weeks!