No loss

(Sharon) #1

Hi I’ve been on the Keto diet for almost a month and I am gaining weight. Help! I haven’t had any bread, pasta, rice or any kind of potato. I have had no sugar either. I make everything I eat and never eat fast food or ever drink soda or juice. Why am I gaining weight, I’ve been so good.

#2

Do you track your macros?
And what do you eat? Some people experience, well, lack of loss, not actual gain usually when they eat certain items like sweeteners or dairy…

And how much have you gained? Our bodyweight fluctuates so a tiny “gain” may not be any fat gain at all…

(Robin) #3

Welcome! And sorry you are not seeing results yet. It may just be slow for you. But after a month, if you are staying under 20g carbs, you should at least be stable in weight and feeling better. Unless you are restricting calories. It’s also possible eat too many carbs with veggies, fruits, nuts.

Sounds like you are on the right track.
Can you provide more info so we can help?
Age, weight, height, (if you’re comfortable with that) and a normal days food intake? And any specific health issues?

Glad you’re here. Hang in there.

(Sharon) #4

Hi,I’ve put on 4 pounds, I don’t drink milk and I’ve switched from full fat 7 carb yogurt to Two Good with only 2 carbs i cup once a day. I don’t use sweeteners of any kind. It’s true I usually never weigh myself well not till recently anyway. I haven’t had bread, pasta, rice or potatoes for a month. I bought a pkt of Red pepper hummus tortilla wraps 17g carbs and 10g fibre about 3 weeks ago and i still have one left.

Typically for breakfast everyday I have 2 eggs, a slice of bacon asparagus 4, mushrooms 2, brussels sprout 1 and a spring onion 1 stalk. If I add oil its usually avocado about 1/2 tblsp. Lunch has been 4 ox drained tuna, Cains Mayo spring onion 1/2 cup green pepper and 1 teaspn seasoned white wine vinegar. A typical dinner is salmon and salad with oil and vinegar. Morning snack a Two good yogurt with about 4-5 berries then afternoon snack cheese olives and perhaps a couple of Keto carbs 6g fiber 2g crackers. If I grab something else it’ll be a smal piece of cheese an olive or a berry.
I drink straight vodka martinis 3-4 times a week. I never use soda water or vermouth just vodka. My friend has lost weight with Keto she drinks gin almost every evening. I am 5ft 4 inches and now weigh 198 lbs I am 71. I have new knees but don’t exersize much but I’m active otherwise.
I really don’t understand.
Hang on whats this about calories?
What’s a macro?

regards
Sharon

#5

The macros are carbs, protein, fat.
It seems you eat okay, IDK about the amounts of course but I don’t know your personal needs either and everything seems fine…
I don’t know what happened. 4 pounds is still little, it can be water somehow… My body doesn’t do that but some people fluctuate a lot and that’s water… I really don’t have other ideas at this point.
But for 4lbs of fat, one needs to eat A LOT of food extra. Energy can’t come from nothing. It’s quite unlikely it happened.

(Edith) #6

Macros stands for macronutrients (grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrate.) On this forum we suggest you keep your grams of carbohydrate at 20 grams a day or less. Especially when starting out, use total grams not net grams of carbs. Protein can be up to one gram per pound of desired body weight, and then you fill in the rest with fat.

According to your menu posted above, you are doing pretty well. I would suggest sticking to the meat and veggies and do away with “keto” processed foods. The amount of carbs in them adds up pretty quickly. They may be putting you over your own individual carb threshold.

Unfortunately, what works for one person does not work for another. The alcohol consumption could definitely be keeping you from going into ketosis. Because alcohol is toxic to our bodies, the liver processes it first, similar to carbs, and that gets burned off before your body uses either the fat ingested or the fat stored in your body. Your friend may be metabolically healthier than you.

Keto is not just about dieting and losing fat. It is about healing our bodies and metabolisms. Healing takes time. It takes a long time for our bodies to become damaged, and therefore healing doesn’t happen overnight. With that being said, it can begin pretty quickly as in months.

I’m willing to bet you drop the tortillas, crackers, and booze and you will start dropping weight.

(Sharon) #7

Hi, thank you. Today i had 2 eggs about 3 oz ham, 4 spears of asparagus, 2 mushrooms a spring onion, a brussels sprout and a tblsp avacado oil with coffee. I wasn’t hungry so I skipped lunch. I just got home It’s 6pm. I will be having a hambone soup with just cabbage onion celery and spices no bread. then I’ll have salmon and salad. What is a macro?

(Sharon) #8

I eat very little carbs so can easily do without. I have no idea if portion control matters with protein? I was told no. It was suggested that I shouldn’t have a morning snack even if it is fats protein and berries. I do eat well and quite a lot I suppose. I have no idea what to do.

(Geoffrey) #9

I’m not keto, I’m carnivore but the principles are very close to each other.
In looking at what you are eating I’m not seeing very much fat. I know that keto allows for things that carnivore does not but both are high fat and moderate protein diets. Animal fats play an important role in how our bodies handle weight loss as well as overall health.

(Sharon) #10

OK I’ll give it a go. How much Protein can I have each day. I’m completely confused. My friend who’s staring weight was 50lbs more than me and who has some health problems high blood pressure for eg ( I don’t take any medications.) says that she doesn’t measure or count proteins or fats.

(Sharon) #11

How can I find a typical Keto regime without having to pay that site for a meal plan. I don’t know what I’m doing. The more I read about Keto the more confused I’m becoming.

(Sharon) #12

I can up the fats but I’m nervous about gaining more weight. Years of hearing the opposite ideas I suppose.

(KM) #13

It’s tough to get your mind around the idea that so much of what we’ve been lectured about all these years is probably wrong, isn’t it?!

Fat, especially animal fat, is not an unhealthy thing. Salt is not the enemy either.

I agree that your diet doesn’t sound off the wall, you have the right idea, but you may need to try some more radical moves. 1. Try to eat til you’re comfortably full, and skip snacking. Protein and fat will keep you going a lot longer. If you’re hungry, eat til you aren’t. If you’re not hungry, don’t eat. 2. I know it sounds strange, but some people eat No plant foods and they’re healthy. You might try shifting to more meat and less of everything else and see if that does the trick. 3. Some people don’t tolerate artificial sweeteners or alcohol well. I know that stinks, but if you cut them out entirely, you may be surprised to find you no longer crave them. 4. Don’t be afraid to test your body, to make an experiment of discovering your personal needs and quirks. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, “I did not fail 1000 times, I succeeded 1000 times in learning what does not work”. Keep calm, and hang in there. (We usually say “and keto on”, but it sounds like your keto’ing need a bit more tweaking first. :slightly_smiling_face:)

Eta: I like YouTube videos by Dr. Ken Berry. He’s gone mostly carnivore but he’s relatable and keeps it simple and he has a bunch of older intro to keto stuff.

One final edit: I don’t love exercise for its own sake, and it doesn’t really help with weight loss. But I do find that moving my body more kind of … Tunes it up, makes me feel like everything works a bit better.

(KM) #14

Oh gosh, one more thing. It’s possible that your body is shedding fat while either gaining muscle, bone or just water. (Or just that your scale is as ridiculous as mine. Who knew having a pee could cause a person to gain half a pound. :roll_eyes:). You might try skipping the scale for a bit and measuring your waist or observing the fit of your clothes instead.

(Robin) #15

How many calories do you average per day?

(Robin) #16

This may help you. In the beginning… When counting my 20g carbs, I did NOT deduct fiber. In fact I always rounded the number of total carbs up, just to be on the safe side. I personally believe that kept me in the zone where I saw best results.
Plus yogurts and other packaged “keto” friendly food can be deceiving. Try as much as possible to eat real food. It’s on the outside perimeters of the grocery market. Super fast and simple. shopping!

#17

After reading about how much you eat nowadays… I don’t think you need to worry about it (but of course, I don’t have all the information and knowledge so I may be wrong). It’s for people like me! You don’t seem to eat much, more like too little, at least when you skip lunch…

I don’t think you should worry about protein being too much. Very few people should. I easily overeat it but even I can’t do it to the point of protein toxicity… I just have it in unnecessarily big amounts sometimes. But more sensitive people may work better with less protein and more fat I suppose… But normally it’s really not something you should worry about especially that the whole thing is new for you. You can’t do everything consciously and perfectly, focus on the basics, little carbs, enough protein and fat, from food you kinda like as most of us quit if we dislike our diet (and anyway, we should enjoy our food or at least not actively dislike it).
But fine. Maybe don’t go over ~160g protein on average? :smiley: I am the same height and that is my guess for my upper protein limit? If that 3.3g/kg is true and it’s for lean body mass? We all have that, we just almost never go beyond without extra conscious efforts. What is the minimum you need I can’t possibly know but probably way less. I wouldn’t worry about even my SO and he’s an active male, taller than me and he eats about half as much. He gained muscles like that, even donated blood plasma… Many people have somewhat excessive ideas about the right amount of protein but of course, it depends on many things, some needs more than others. I agree with a pretty common range, 1-2g/kg for LBM, more like 1.5-2 but it’s really individual what works. Some allegedly gain muscle with 1 and I am starving with only 2… So exceptions happen. But something like 4 isn’t right for anyone not on steroids (no idea about those except they can use more). And extra fat doesn’t need extra protein. The extra muscle gained to move the extra fat, on the other hand, does.

Yeah, there is a lot of things but as you read more and especially experiment on yourself more (what works for others may not for you), things should get be way more clear!

Agree. Though I wouldn’t overestimate muscle gain, that’s super slow especially for females and older people. Even I can’t expect it to be measurable at 48 years old, wait 47? Yep, 47. I am lazy, that’s true but I still use weights and other exercise that may help with muscles… A decent paces fat-loss is usually WAY way quicker than what a tiny bit of muscle gain could mask. I still think about water but muscles, bigger bone density and such can happen too so it’s a very good idea to measure. I have some just fitting pants, they help more than my stubborn scale I keep forgetting standing on in the morn!

(Sharon) #18

Thank you all for making the effort to help me, it’s really appreciated. I will continue to try and get it right for me. Thanks again.

#19

  1. I am walking proof that 1 month is not enough time and should not be a cause for concern. It took me a few dedicated months for true weight loss to even begin, almost through to month four, while it seemed like everyone around me in Keto communities were dropping pounds easily. Well I learned that in the first month most of the weight others were losing was water weight and I didn’t have much of that even though I was near 200lbs at 5’2” before starting Keto. In month two I saw how much complaining others did when they stopped losing so much so easily and normalized their loss down to .5-1 lb a week. They didn’t understand that what they initially lost was water weight. And the slower you lose weight the more sustainable it is. A healthy sustainable loss is .5 - 1 lb per week, not observed on a weekly basis, but measured each week for about 2-3 months and then averaged out over those 8-12 weeks. So I may have a week where there is no loss or a gain, and then I have a week where there is a sudden drop, and averaged out over 8 weeks it shows about 1/2 lb per week was actually lost. I gained too at first and in the past year I have had gains here and there again, but the overall trajectory is a downward slope so you can’t really judge it by looking at one small span of time. You need a way to zoom out the picture. Therefore it’s often recommended to only use a scale once or twice a month but to just record and don’t interpret it until you have a few months of data. What I did in my first four months was to weigh myself only once every two weeks but use a tape measure on several body parts every week. Those tape measurements showed a very different picture than what was happening on my scale.as did the pants that started to fall off me and required a belt. Lol

  2. Our bodies don’t like to work on too many things at once and if you’re like me and require a lot of internal repairs your body is going to hang on to weight while it first tends to those repairs. IF it’s getting into ketosis that is, and that is key.

  3. Ketosis is really important. It’s the magic bean. You need to keep your body in a state of ketosis for everything to start working proper, the weight loss and physical repairs. Alcohol can interfere with the state of ketosis. So even if you’re keeping your carbs below 20g/day, a drink or two every couple days can knock you out of ketosis and never give you the chance to stay in it for any meaningful period of time.

  4. Calories matter in the opposite direction, meaning if you’re eating way below what your body’s base metabolic rate (BMR) is, your body is triggering starvation mode and it won’t give up the weight for anything. For me personally, calories do matter the other way too. I know many Keto and carnivore believe you don’t have to track calories, and possibly that’s true once you’re near your ideal weight already? I’m not sure why but for me as soon as I eat more than 200 calories above my BMR weight loss stops cold. I start to gain it back above that even when I’m close to eating full carnivore. I have a very small window that I need to stay between to prevent starvation mode problems or weight gain. It took a lot of tracking for a year to learn I have to stay above 1150 calories at all times and under 1400. When I ate over 1500 calories a day regularly I gained weight, every time, regardless what I ate. But I can see that once I am at my goal weight (I have 20 more lbs to go) I will have a lot more wiggle room and can maintain my weight with a few days here and there at higher calories. At first I would track calories to learn what your windows are. Make sure you are never eating less than 10% below your BMR.

  5. For me personally net carbs work. I keep my net carbs below 16-18g day and my total carbs below 40g day. Those are my personal carb macros. (A macro is a macronutrient - there are only three of them: fat, protein, carbs.) Obviously the lower the total carbs are the faster things move but I’m taking the slow and steady road so I don’t mind using net. I know others that can handle up to 50-60g total carbs a day so long as their net carbs remain below 20g every single day. And then there are those who can’t do net carbs and found their body needs to keep all carbs below 20g. We are all very different and need to find our own windows. But one universal truth is that most people must stay beneath 50g total carbs and below 20g net carbs. In the beginning stages when a lot of weight needs to be dropped your personal window really matters.

#20

Fantastic advice there @Just_Juju very much relevant to many people. Thank you!