I. Am. So. Frustrated!

fasting
progress
experiment
(Kel Ta) #126

can’t find the research but restorative yoga showed greater weight loss than hot power yoga in one study bc of cortisol being higher in the power yoga group. Stress reduction approaches emphasize parasympathetic dominance and reduction in cortisol. Maybe you are pushing yourself too hard and combo of cortisol and decrease in BMR you are stalled out. Maybe don’t exercise for a while. Crazy to ask that probably.

#127

Sounds familiar! In high school, I would start with 1,000 calories a day and reduce calories down as low as 400 calories just to lose a pound a day. I definitely screwed up my metabolism.

Following this threat and rooting for you to find your answers.

(Crow T. Robot) #128

Generally you will want to eat a bit more than usual on your feast days and you might actually have to push yourself to do so if you still struggle with a restrictive mentality. it’s nice to keep it simple, maybe just add a nice 12 oz steak or mince to your usual fare. You aren’t going to feel like pigging out. A big evening meal is good as you don’t want to start the next fast feeling empty.

No particular eating window. Your fast begins after your evening meal on Day 1, don’t eat at all on Day 2, then feast on Day 3. Some like to take the weekend off, which works well – you can just designate Monday, Wednesday and Friday as fast days.

(What The Fast?!) #129

That actually sounds like a great plan! I think I’ll try that out.

(Crow T. Robot) #130

Great! Keep us posted :slight_smile:

(What The Fast?!) #131

Also @DaveKeto - I googled Creatinine (since mine was low) and it said this: “Low blood creatinine levels can mean lower muscle mass caused by a disease, such as muscular dystrophy, or by aging. Low levels can also mean some types of severe liver disease or a diet very low in protein. Pregnancy can also cause low blood creatinine levels.”

Should I err on the upper side of the Phinney protein range?

@richard maybe you have some thoughts on that?

(Dave) #132

I’m finding extended fasts are more likely to be difficult for people who are at a leaner mass ratio (no big shocker). But I wanted to know with you in particular give your unique profile.

(Dave) #133

I was suspecting this myself, given the surprising ratio relative to both your food intake and current exercise regiment. Maybe you are indeed too low on protein.

FWIW, I average around 125g a day (90 on the low end, 160 on the high end). I weigh 180 and suspect around 150 LMW (I haven’t done a dexa yet). So I’m probably averaging around 2g per kg of lean body mass myself. Below that and I genuinely feel an intense craving for meat.

(Adam Kirby) #134

Have you experimented with zero carb yet? There are literally people who can’t lose weight even on low carb but do on zero carb. It seems baffling to me but I don’t doubt the stories.

(What The Fast?!) #135

I haven’t but I may. I think I need avocados and lettuce for my sanity, but if it comes to it, I’ll try.

(eat more) #136

if her insulin isn’t an issue i would think that standard 20g carbs would be fine?

please no one shoot me…
from my experience and a lot of other’s that have posted with struggles and what not…
lowering carbs is not the only player in the game. dear lord how i wish it was…i’d be at goal 10x over! :joy:

(Adam Kirby) #137

That’s the thing, I don’t actually think the minutely lowered carbs explains ppl’s success on zero carb when they didn’t have as much on low carb. It’s something else, maybe their body just responds differently to an all meat diet. Maybe something else.

(eat more) #138

yeah we are all so different…almost 7 months later and i am still tweaking!
but 7 months of figuring things out is nothing compared to a lifetime of goodness? :blush:

(Crow T. Robot) #139

Exactly! In fact, “zero carb” is a little bit of a misnomer because even then you’re still getting trace amounts of carbs. Really, what it is is zero plant food. I think that might be where the magic happens.

(Dave) #140

I’d consider that more for elimination / experiment purposes rather than a presumed way of life past that point. It may help with discovery in the off chance one of the factors is something you are eating on the non-animal side.

(Adam Kirby) #141

You might be able to remove stuff like plants or dairy for weight loss purposes then add it back in the future without resulting in weight gain.

(KCKO, KCFO) #142

Since you do hot yoga and hot pilates, I think you should up your sodium game. Plus both of those are stressful on the body. I think you would do better with the biking and weight lifting. If you just enjoy yoga, do hatha yoga in a room that doesn’t make you sweat out your electrolytes.

A week or two of zero carb might reveal some good information. If it doesn’t work or you can’t live that way, nothing lost, nothing gained. Go back to eating the way you are now.

(Richard Morris) #143

Me too. Except not a girl, and 7.14 lbs. But yeah I’m denser than the average bear. 0.77 standard deviations above the mean for my age and gender (that’s the T score).

woot Data

Trigs/HDL = 1.103 … A ratio under 2 means you are likely not very insulin resistant. I’m not convinced that getting further under 2 is better than being just under 2. But you are comfortably under :slight_smile:

Just so you know how a metabolically deranged person with good glucose control would go, I’ll give you mine. My TG/HDL when I do @DaveKeto’s protocol is 1.73 … but when I don’t it’s 2.1

This is a synthetic test that correlates a little better with insulin resistance than Trigs/HDL but it’s a complicated patented formula using the number of VLDL-P, LDL-P, HDL-P (particles) and the size of VLDL, LDL, and HDL.

25 is great, it means you aren’t very insulin resistant.

They don’t do LP-IR in Australia so I can’t give you mine for reference, unfortunately.

Great glucose control.

Mine is 5.2, when I had bad glucose control and about to be diagnosed diabetic it was 11.2%

Normally one test can’t rule out insulin resistance, you need to know how much insulin you make for a large amount of glucose and test it several times over several hours to get a definitive answer as to how insulin resistant you are (although SPOILER: I don’t think you are insulin resistant at all).

What we do know is your result means that for those 71mg/dl of glucose that your body was making to keep your brain comfy your pancreas needed to make 2.2 mIU/l of insulin. That indicates that you are really quite insulin sensitive when your glucose is around 71 - you only need make a little to do the job.

For reference my fasted glucose is 91 mg/dl. But my fasted insulin is 13.7 mIU/l. My glucose is just as under control as yours but I have to make 6 times as much insulin to do the same job. And insulin is a likely driver of atherosclerosis (Heart disease), so my pipes are likely more corroded than yours.

Just for reference, the first insulin test I got was in April last year and that was 29.3 mIU/L so that’s the biochemical basis of “keep calm and keto on” the longer I can stay keto the lower I expect that will go.

So we’ve already seen 2 diagnostics that have said that you are insulin sensitive, the third is even more accurate - it’s called HOMA and it uses Fasting glucose (0.71 mg/dl) and Fasting insulin (2.2 mIU/l) to gives us one number indicating how insulin sensitive you are compared to a 35 year old man with no metabolic disease called HOMA:IR and another that tells us how well your pancreatic β-cells are working…

The formula for HOMA is;

So I reckon we can say that you need to make less insulin than the reference, and your pancreas is able to run a little more efficiently than his to do it.

That’s 3 diagnostics of insulin awesomeness.

It’s kind of a shame because it means we don’t have an easy solution to why you can’t reduce your body fat %. If it were high we’d know that was the cause.

But the good news is with such low insulin, it won’t be getting in the way of your access to stored energy.

That’s an important number to know when working out your protein intake, and also it gives you a benchmark to observe how well you maintain lean mass as you age.

I think this probably gives us a hint as to why you appear to be a hard loser. Your metabolic rate is low, and if you are currently eating to satiation then I suspect it drops further when you restrict calories.

One target is looking into thyroid function - which I have no experience in.

I suspect you may have done multiple caloric restriction diets in the past and your body may just be a bit too keen to respond by cutting your use of energy. It may be that a keto diet to satiety for a while, and your body realizing it now has energy when it needs it, it may decide to take it’s foot off the brake a little. At the very least you know that your body is capable of dropping insulin low when it needs to … and a keto diet does that.

(Adam Kirby) #144

What are methods for raising metabolic rate? Does “overreating” work? I put it in quotes because who even knows what that really means. I remember either you or Carl was doing that experiment where you eat low cals for a few days then very high cals for a few days.

(Kathy L) #145

Richard -you are an awesome voice of clarity & reason! Love your explanation! The body is such a complicated machine!! :heart: