Wow. That is phenomenal. It’s taken me 6+ years to lose somewhere over 50 pounds (hard to tell, as I’ve gotten more muscular too).
Take a look at what you’re eating and move away from anything that’s high PUFA: bacon, nuts, avocados. Even limit your oils (olive, avocado). Try to up the saturated fat content if you can. For instance, if you can handle dairy, add some butter/cream sauces to your meals. Add cocoa/cacao butter. (Yes, this is exactly the opposite of what I said just a few months ago, when I was a Ted Naiman convert. Now I’m a Fire in a Bottle convert. A few months from now, I might say something different. )
First some good news. Here is some data that puts the magnitude of your accomplishment into perspective. It draws from a massive NHS database tracking weight loss success as a function of starting BMI for over 100,000 subjects. The table below calculates the annual probability of achieving a normal BMI as a function of starting BMI. Given that you were 300lbs, I’d wager your BMI was over 40 unless you’re 6’3" or taller. The probability of doing what you did is 1 in 1290! You’re basically a unicorn!
You should be enormously proud of that. The key is going to be to keep those gains long term. It probably seems completely ridiculous that you could regain that weight given your stupendous success. This is where things become a bit complicated. 80% of people who lose more than 10% of their body weight regain it within 2 years. Why would that be? Your metabolism is about to start fighting back in ways you need to be aware of. You’re still thinking about offence (getting below 200lbs) when you need to get laser focused on defense (evaluating and/or repairing your metabolism).
I’m likely to get flamed off the forum for the next few paragraphs because it could be interpreted as unsupportive, but I think it’s worth saying. You’ve accomplished something amazing, but you’ve flown really damn close to the sun by losing 100lbs in 6 months. The closest analogue I can think of in the literature is The Biggest Loser Study done back in 2016. It was a study done of folks that lost >100lbs in 6 months. Basically, some not-so-good stuff happened to them metabolically that you need to be aware of. The majority of them experienced a persistent metabolic slowing equal that was on average 500kcal/day below normal/predicted even 6 years after the weight loss. They lost an average of 60kg in 6 months and on average, they regained 40kg over the subsequent years.
That said, you are in a much better position than they were because you did a couple things right that they didn’t do. You were eating a ketogenic diet, that may well have been been protective metabolically. Secondly, you didn’t excessively exercise. Excessive exercise in conjunction with severe calorie restriction is the most metabollically destructive thing possible. Additionally, the people in the study who are most similar to you in losing around 45kg (100lbs), actually fared much better than folks who lost significantly more. These are all good reasons to be optimistic.
My two cents is that before you decide whether to take a break, eat to satiety, and maintain your gains for a few months, or whether to continue to press on down to your goal weight, I think it might be a good idea to get your resting metabolic rate tested (RMR) and get your leptin levels tested (leptin is the hormone responsible for satiety). That’s information you’re going to want to have before deciding what to do next. If your RMR is close to what the Mifflin St Jeor equation predicts, and your leptin levels are not significantly depressed, you have dodged a serious metabolic bullet. If on the other hand your RMR is seriously below the predicted value, and your leptin is in the single digits like the subjects in the Biggest Loser study, you should probably press “pause” and figure out how to fix your metabolism, before pushing any lower.
I’m genuinely not trying to be pessimistic or an asshole. I could also be wrong. People are free to contradict the points above, and I hope that they do. It’s just my 2 cents and nothing more. I just want you to have some context and information before deciding what to do next. Here is the study:
Awesome results. Sometimes our bodies need change. So figure out what you can change up.
I didn’t have as much to lose as you, but I got within 15 lbs. of my goal weight stayed there for 3 months and hadn’t changed my eating etc. I listened to Megan Ramos’ Changing it up segement of the 2ketodudes podcast and then added in extended fasting, I had done IFing but not extended and within a month, I had lost down to my goal weight. I have stayed within 5 lbs. of that weight for almost 3 yrs. now. Mostly dropping lower and on only two days did I go 1 lb. over.
We are all different but that is what really worked well for me. I’m a slow loser, I’ve dropped 30 lbs. multiple times in my life before keto/lchf WOE, and it always took me about a year to do that. To lose 15 lbs. in a month was mind boggling to me.
Ummm. What I take from all this is that firstly it isn’t helpful to starve your body - a surefire way to make it store fat for the future when you do eat, and to lower metabolism. Secondly, adding strenuous exercise on top of starvation exacerbates the issue.
IMO the problem there is not that peeps lost a ton of weight, it’s that they starved their bodies while subjecting them to unusual strain. Of course the body tries to prolong it’s life by lowering metabolism and storing fat.
Ahh, smart girl! This idea that just the rapid loss of weight might cause metabolic issues has never sat well with me but I failed to put my finger on the the point that you just made.
What bothered me was that some people upon simply giving up sweets and flour products can lose tremendous amounts of weight quickly with very little other effort. No caloric restrictions, no exercise, not even super low carb or keto. It’s hard to see what could possibly be causing a metabolic slowdown in such cases. They’ve just made a dietary change that has had a huge impact on their bodies set point.
But adding in deep caloric restriction plus insane amounts of exercise and you are stressing your body into protective measures that would be potentially life-saving if the situation were not artificially self-imposed.
I’ve exercised my entire life, often riding my bike 90+ miles/week in the summer. Gained weight the entire time.
As soon as I went low carb (and reduced exercise, by the way), I lost 30 pounds in a short time (for me – nothing like the time scale the original poster achieved). And I ate as much as I wanted to eat.
This is where CICO goes awry, as it does not consider hormones, the biome, etc.
If I exercised a ton, I would lose a little weight. I think it was because of hormones, though, not the exercise itself. That is, sometimes after biking for hours, I would eat, and oddly not be hungry. I think biking had an effect on insulin perhaps. But I also did not do (overt) calorie restriction. Instead, I “restricted” calories solely because I was not hungry.
It’s like the high-saturated-fat diet I’m on now. I have had multiple days where I only ate OMAD, which was previously not possible for me. I have experienced a marked decrease in hunger. And I eat as much as I want.
Also, when you have been exercising in this way your entire life, your body is accustomed to it and it is your normal. In the case of the peeps in the biggest loser, their bodies were shocked by the exercise as well as the starvation diet. That double whammy caused the body to pull out all it’s defenses.
That’s the gist of it, but it’s complicated. Metabolic adaptations to calorie restriction, especially adaptive thermogenesis, vary widely on an individual basis. Likewise, there is also enormous individual variation in response to exercise. Then there is the added variable of dose/response.
In calorie restriction experiments that report changes in resting metabolic rate (RMR), it’s always the mean that’s reported, but standard deviation is the interesting part. People are all over the map. Some people’s RMR’s drop precipitously, some slowly, and some barely at all. Likewise, in over-feeding experiments, some people’s RMR’s sky-rocket, some rise slowly, and some rise somewhere in the middle.
How individuals will respond to exercise varies similarly. When I lift weights for 15 minutes once per week I get so hungry that I consistently eat 4000kcal to 5000kcal in response. Some people can exercise an hour a day and barely notice.
So you’ve basically got 4 natural permutations of risk categories (we could add “normal” as a third category, but normal still implies metabolic damage as an outcome so it’s still high risk):
High Exercise Risk : High Calorie Risk High Exercise Risk : Low Calorie Risk
Low Exercise Risk : High Calorie Risk
Low Exercise Risk: Low Calorie Risk
Basically, by combining the exercise and calorie restriction, you’ve dramatically increased the odds you’re going to have a problem. Three out of four outcomes result in metabolic damage (as highlighted in bold). Only the folks that are low responders for both exercise and calorie restriction are ok.
All of this presupposes a large dose, so it’s important to take dose/response into consideration. As a general rule, calorie restriction becomes more damaging as a function of magnitude or duration, or both. Dropping calories 50% below TDEE continuously for a month has a surprisingly modest effect (-5%RMR). Dropping calories 50% below TDEE continuously for a year has a massive impact. The dose response relationship between exercise severity, duration and response is similar.
The absolute perfect metabolic shitstorm is extreme exercise combined with severe calorie restriction continuously for a long period of time (6 months for example). Everybody is damaged, but the extent to which you are damaged will depend on which of the 4 phenotypes you fall into. If you are very, very lucky you fall into the Low Exercise Risk: Low Calorie Risk phenotype. We see a few of those people in the Biggest Loser Study results.
Incidentally, I think that the odds are good that @GlasgowKetoKing falls into that lucky category. Losing 100lbs in 6 months without a gun to your head, or $500,000 in cash at the finish line is indicative of either super-human will or superhuman genetics, but most likely both. Put differently, the OP is basically a weight loss Olympian. I think his odds of being ok are way better than most.
That’s my 2 cents anyway, but I’m hardly an expert.
I think there’s something “special” about people who can lose weight so quickly. I haven’t figured out what it is, yet, but some people seem to be able to lose weight very quickly, while others don’t.
Is it liver function/repair? pancreas function/repair? types of body fat? hormones?
I lost similar to @GlasgowKetoKing. No will required, I lack self discipline. The more overweight you are, the faster you lose. The first 40 to 50 pounds hardly even count - I did those by simply cutting out sugar and starch, I was still gorging myself on fresh fruit, two or three pieces a day. I don’t exercise much, undiagnosed Lyme disease left my joints a shamble. Exercise is painful and further injures the joints. So, that part is out, unless you call 10 minute walks and light housework exercise.
I have adjusted my diet as I went, no more fruit by now, and I don’t miss them, I just didn’t want them anymore. I eat plenty. I do some intermittent fasting, but if I want to eat, I eat. Losing this way is easy for me, I don’t oppose my body, I work with it. Losing a lot of weight doesn’t have to be hard, you don’t have to deprive yourself and you don’t have to force yourself into strenuous activity. The hard part is the last 20 pounds or so, and really, once you have shed 100 pounds, you can afford the time to lose the rest a lot slower.
That looks interesting! I thought of you when I was reading The Big Fat Secret a few days ago and Nina Techoltz talked about saturated fat. I remembered you saying that you’ve been nibbling on cocoa butter and I just bought some.
I was going to refrain from reading more diet stuff though so I’ll just leave it for now at “Saturated fat is good for me so eat some.”
I definitely agree with you on that one. It’s a total mystery to me.
I’d love to know why if you take 20 people who are 100lbs overweight, and put them on a 500kcal diet for 8 weeks, they will all lose a different amount of fat, and the spread is probably going to be normally distributed. What makes for a 3 sigma fat burner? It must be some genetic or epigenitic advantage in lipolysis. I think Fung hit on part of it with his insulin hypothesis, but that’s an insufficient explanation, and hasn’t been validated in a clinical setting to my knowledge. There is more too it than that. I think you’re right that it’s “horomones”, but which ones and why? You’re guess is as good mine!
I lose very rapidly at first, and the closer I get to a reasonable weight, the slower the weight loss. The first week I lost 20 pounds. Despite eating fruit and drinking wine. Just no sugar added, no starch. Now I am good to lose a pound or two a week, and I am still 47 pounds from my aspired weight (which is still on the pudgy side). I went from 320 to 250 in some 7 months.
I agree. Your body has gone through tremendous changes, internally and externally. Make sure you are eating enough to fuel it sufficiently, while keeping the carbs as low under 20 as you can. You will still lose weight, but maybe at a more moderate rate. How much more do you wish to lose?
GlasgoKetoKing,
I’ll differ from those below. I am near my goal of 165 lbs after losing 60 lbs, my weight loss plateaued. I was so constipated that I fasted for 48 hours. I lost 4 lbs by doing that. In my case, I fasted to reduce the pain from constipation. My Bk went from 0.5 to 1.7! My brand new pants are lose now. I will add more days to my intermittent fasting. Just my experience and not advice.
Being the human skeleton weighs around 28 pounds if your body weight is around 196 pounds (12-15% of your body weight).
Females may lose some of that 28 pounds prior to losing weight because (unlike most males but not limited to females) of the testosterone advantage in bone mass density, so ‘…it can appear they have gained weight when actually they gained bone mass density and muscle volume and a DEXA scan confirms this…” per - Amy Berger on Megan Ramos[3]? (paraphrased)
Weighing less than 127 pounds or having a body mass index under 21 is a risk factor for osteoporosis. Regardless of your body mass index, if you lose weight during the menopausal transition (late perimenopause and the first few years after menopause), you’re more likely to lose bone. …” …More
[3] How does osteoporosis happen?
Osteoporosis causes bones to become weak and brittle — so brittle that a fall or even mild stresses such as bending over or coughing can cause a fracture. Bone is living tissue that is constantly being broken down and replaced. Osteoporosis occurs when the creation of new bone doesn’t keep up with the loss of old bone. …More
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