We’re of a similar age.
You’ve had some great advice in this thread - the two pieces I will offer are ‘easy to say, difficult to do’, but hopefully they help:
- Relax.
- Eat.
I am guessing that, like me, you didn’t become overweight overnight. It is difficult emotionally when you overhaul your eating, and you see few results - we are all victims of the diet trap, where we are promised on the front of magazines that you can ‘drop a stone in a month’ or ‘lose 8lbs in 13 days’. Even if we recognise that this is nonsense (or manipulation of water weight), we internalise those messages and when we make drastic changes, we feel as if we’re not receiving appropriate reward for our efforts.
It’s very difficult to trust in the plan if you feel that it isn’t working. I am confident in the approach, and even I have had wobbles where I’ve thought, “I am eating too much? Are my macros incorrect? Should I do x, y, z?”
It’s difficult to let go and trust in your body, but my advice would be to relax and give your body time and space to do what it needs. As many people have said, keto can heal from the inside, so fat loss may not be your body’s first priority.
Secondly, on the topic of internalising messages, we’re all surrounded by traditional thinking. This includes things like, ‘women should eat 1500 calories to lose weight’ or ‘your BMR is calculated as this’ etc. Some people will disagree with me here, but I can only give you my experience - I have lost weight in the past with extreme calorie restriction, but I also put it back on because I was clearly starving myself.
I deliberately raised my calories to 2000 - 2500 when starting keto, because I didn’t want my BMR to drop through the floor. I’ve been eating keto/carnivore for 7 months, and I eat to satiety without counting now (but I have a fair idea of how much I am consuming because I eat similar things each day), and I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight.
It’s very tempting to use calorie restriction as an additional lever to see quick results, but my feeling is that you can hamper yourself moving forward; I much prefer the idea of a life where I can eat 2000 each day, rather than collapsing my BMR and eating 1500 for the rest of my life.
There is a lot of content on this site about people finding that when they eat more, they lose more weight. It doesn’t always happen - your mileage may vary etc - but I agree with the logic of ‘feast’, ‘fast’, ‘famine’ (which basically means that large amounts of keto food can cause the body to realise that it is well fed and can afford to drop fat, whilst meagre amounts of food can cause the body to fear that food is scarce, so won’t drop fat). Again, this flies in the face of so much traditional diet wisdom, it can feel counterintuitive.
The final point I will add is that I feel that traditional diets do not take into account women’s hormones. Your body requires extra nourishment at certain points in your cycle. It takes a lot to be able to trust your body, and to switch off the ‘brain food trigger’ (oh I want something tasty) versus the ‘body food trigger’ (I am hungry).
Someone had advice on the forums previously to consider eating a hard boiled egg when hungry; if that sounds delicious, you’re hungry - if you’re not convinced, you’re not hungry, you’re looking for something ‘nice’. That was very useful for me in determining whether I was hungry or whether I was looking for a treat. If it was the latter, I deliberately found something else to do which was non-food related.
Anyway, on a hormone point, I have eaten 2.5lbs of meat on certain days without pausing for breath - and then, a few days later, struggled to get past 1lb. It’s like being a different person, and if you’re watching your calories, I feel that you wouldn’t provide your body with the nutrition it desires on certain days because you’re scared of going over. Being able to trust yourself is tricky, but it’s been exceptionally helpful for me.
Personally, I would also drop the scale. As is often said here, would you prefer to be 10 stone and wearing XL clothes, or 11 stone and wearing S clothes? With bone density and other factors, weight does not necessarily equate to size; it is fat loss that matters for aesthetics, not weight.
Eat more. Give your body time. Only limit carbs. Good luck.