I touched on this in another post, but I noticed it was really bad over the weekend while I was home. I generally do 16:8 fast on ketogenic. But noticed my snacking is getting terrible when I am at home. I think this is due to that setpoint factor where the body is trying to get my weight back up. That’s a theory that Dr. Jason Fung puts out there in the Obesity Code book.
I think what I’m going to try to do to solve this is the One meal a day fast on weekdays. Then when I am home, I need to really concentrate on using counter measures Apple Cider Vinegar, cinnamon in my coffee, and perhaps try some green tea.
I might be better off if I tried to a extended fast, but I have issues with spouse giving me a hard time like I’m damaging myself for fasting when I go over 2 days. Anyone have similar issue and or solutions?
I guess I could get away with water fasting on Saturdays perhaps, and then wife would see me eat again on Sunday. Just make it a routine to fast 1 day a week. That would take one day of snacking just off the table.
Ask your spouse for proof of his assertions and use this as an educational moment for them.
As to snacking: So what? Really, why are you concerned if the snacks are keto the only thing you are doing is keeping the insulin elevated and therefore not reversing your insulin resistance. It would be extremely difficult for you to go backwards. I go through periods of intense snacking…salami and mayonnaise rolled up, pork rinds and guacamole, beef sticks, butter & almond butter…whatever. I do this with the know ledge that “hey, I just want to friggin eat right now” could be stress, could be the weather could be and likely is this: I just did not eat sufficiently at mealtimes. In this case I just plan larger meals and the snacking often evaporates. Then I go into a fast of 36 to 120 hours and KCKO.
From my understanding, your set point or body set weight isnt fixed, its dependent on your insulin resistance. so with time as you lower your insulin resistance and your body becomes more fat adapted and efficient then your set point will reduce.
I think in terms of snacking esp when spending the day at home has more factors than just hormones making you hungry. you have to consider other factors. from a psychological view, we have a part of our brain that thinks with logic (truths and facts) lets call this the human brain and a part of the brain that thinks with emotions (emotional eating) lets call this your chimp, and the part of the brain that thinks with emotions is stronger and more dominant. so for eg: you decide you want to cut carbs or snacking, thats a logical process that you put togther based on truths and facts, but if you break down and eat anyway, thats your emotional brain taking control of your actions. Although you cant change the way your emotional brain works, you can manage it. in terms of staying home the best thing to do is make sure there are no tempting foods accessible, and plenty of healthy alternatives available incase you just have to have something. (this is based on a fantastic book called the chimp paradox - its not a diet book) @richard any thoughts?
i often wonder about this query because ive lost weight to the point of which im healthy, but wondering if i wanted to become lean enough to have a 6pack for eg, will i be fighting against my bodies need to increase body weight in order to reach the set point?? how can i work with my body to reach a lean goal weight.
I’m struggling lately too. I am stuck in the OMAD rut but I am pretty much at my goal weight. But my blood glucose levels still spike easily (Never type 2 but got close). So I am still trying to get them lower and more regular. I have added exercise to my life in the last month specifically weight training. Nothing hardcore. But the hunger has increased with it. I am eating more, but now the weight is also increasing! I feel like my body is confused. But I will continue to play around and try to get my body to understand its lower set point.
Wow - that ended up being off topic. Sorry - too early for me.
Maybe or maybe you are like me and it’s a mental thing. If I am home and slightly bored I want to eat. If you are aware of that you can take steps to counteract this.
For example I grab my big water bottle and go back to try to learn to code.
There is a difference between hunger driving you to a meal, and boredom/opportunistic eating driving you to snack.
I believe the former is a signal we should take care to listen to and respond to - that is the body saying if we don’t eat I will find some cost savings for you and an alternate source of energy to get you by in the short term, but you’ll pay a long term cost for that.
The second is more of your chimp brain idea - hey there’s food - we eat food - let’s do that.
I disagree with some very clever scientists who have come up with this set point idea. Their hypothesis is above a certain set point our bodies start increasing metabolic rate to reduce weight, and below it we start slowing metabolic rate to conserve energy so we put it back on.
I think there is a simpler explanation and that is that we increase and decrease energy based on what is at hand … and not all of the energy from our body fat is part of the calculus.
I believe I can use Kevin Halls Biggest loser experiment to falsify their hypothesis.
If set point theory were correct, when you put people on a calorie restricting TV show they lose weight and their metabolic rate should slow to cause them to put it all back on - and when they have put it all back on their metabolic rate should increase back up to their starting point.
So what Kevin Hall found was people joined the show with a resting metabolic rate of 2607 kCal/day, they ran on treadmills 18 hours a day and ate low fat diet food for 13 weeks and lost all the abnormal weight and their resting metabolic rates dropped to 1996 kCal.
So that follows the set point theory. He checked back in with them 6 years later and they put on all their weight back again which is what happens when you calorie restrict. If set point theory was correct their MBR should be back over 2403 kCal. It was 1903 kCal.
They had gained back most of the weight, but their “Calories Out” was still kneecapped.
So how to explain this. Kevin Hall can’t … and he is one of the smartest guys at the NIH.
Everyone assumed that the contestants went home and stopped exercising, and started eating like gluttons when the TV cameras were off. But what if that wasn’t true?
Well we don’t know what they were eating. Their RQ tells us what they were getting energy from. If it’s 1.0 they are burning glucose, 7.0 fat. They are burning a little more fat at the end of the competition, but at the 6 year point they are burning less fat than BEFORE the competition. But at least they weren’t eating ice cream - they were eating a pretty protein forward diet.
Look at their Physical Activity. There’s a clue. Before the competition they were doing 5.6 kCals worth of additional activity for every kg of body weight every day. At the end of the competition they were doing 10 … but remember they now weighed less. They’d gone from 148 kg to 90 kg … so they hadn’t doubled their activity. Maybe they’d increased it 20%.
Now look at their activity at the 6 year point. Their weight had ballooned up to 131 (from 90) and their activity had stayed at 10 kCal/kg/day … that is a significant increase in extra activity - funny that Dr Hall missed that.
So the question I would ask is what explains the observation.
IMO there is a factor that is preventing access to stored energy for the immediate energy calculus of the body. And the extra activity, the extra demand on energy is dipping into the resting metabolic rate instead of taking energy from storage.
The answer for that factor preventing the body accessing energy is on Table 2.
Starting triglycerides were 128 they were awash with energy because their adipose was insulin resistant and was just outflowing energy instead of storing it, Insulin was high so they couldn’t use much of that fat for energy, but HOMA:IR tells us they were 2.5 times as insulin resistant as a reference man (35 yo without metabolic disease).
At the end of the comp, their trigs were down to 57, great number it meant they were using them almost as fast as they could be released into circulation. Fasting Insulin had dropped to 3.9 which is also great that is what happens when you run the system at an energy deficit … it lowers insulin’s inhibition. And you can see that in the HOMA:IR they were on average MORE insulin sensitive than a reference man. But the problem is this isn’t a system at rest, it is under severe duress and desperately lowering insulin transitionally to make up the immediate energy deficit - there will be a long term price to pay for that short term result. (too long to go into it here, but there is a story to be told in the change of their fat free mass and fat mass)
Now look at them 6 years later, trigs are 92 indicating that Adipose appears to not quite have reached it’s limit and become insulin resistant. Fasting Insulin is however over 12. Insulin sensitive adipose and high insulin = rapid weight gain WHILE not contributing adipose energy to immediate energy calculus.
And their 6 year HOMA:IR - they are now 3.6x as insulin resistant as a reference man. That number there should scare the hell out of any doctor associated with the show who is concerned for their malpractice premiums.
That is why they gained weight AND decreased metabolic rate … because their feet were STILL on the calorie restriction accelerator while the car was falling apart under them.
I’d like to see story of the insulin in a separate explanation! It makes sense that the body was able to reduce insulin to 3.9 out of necessity (to get fat stores burning with such a caloric deficit). This seems to also be the same thing that happened with the Newcastle experiment, where patients 12 weeks into an 800-caloried diet (a large caloric deficit), not only reversed diabetes in 12 weeks, but also because highly insulin responsive. The real question is whether there is a way to keep the insulin at the low level that was achieved. Or, maybe even better, is there an alternative way to get insulin that low without a caloric deficit. Ketogenic eating and fasting don’t seem to accomplish that level of insulin reduction.
I can gain 6 pounds in less than 36 hours. With no fasting I “dropped” four pounds. I weigh myself immediately upon getting out of bed every day to have a consistent baseline. All your weekend means more than likely was you stored extra glycogen. I have as yet seen if there is a limit on how much adipose we can create in 48 hours.
Not saying there isn’t one.
What I am stressing is that if your snacking keto snacks it would be really difficult unless you snacked every hour on the hour and never let that insulin die down a bit.
It just makes so much sense when you put it like that.
absolutley!
So lets accept ‘set point’ will reduce as weight is lost, and as insulin resistance goes down. your body reaches a healthy ideal weight. your body will always want to hold onto a little bit of fat, im sure the % of BF depends on the person lets say in the case of joe bloggs this is 17%-19%. i beleive insulin reistance and satiety signals are key! but listening to these signals and having lowerd insulin resistance means your body will remain maintaining this ‘ideal’ weight (right/wrong?). Therefore to get down to joe’s goal weight of 12% BF we (A) must quantify food and stop eating before our natrual signals tell us to and get the deficit from our fat stores?, or (B) simply fast? something doesnt quite make sene here…
I have similar spousal issues. Makes me feel a bit like I have an eating disorder in that I hide the fact that I’m not eating. No real solution other than continuing to offer evidence that I’m not hurting myself and making sure I don’t look like hell or giving any indication that anything could be off. Like God forbid I had a headache; I’d definitely keep that to myself as the response would be that I need to eat lol.
Yup … Leptin signals the appetite region of the brain that adipose tissue is full of energy. That massive drop is an adaptive response to the starvation. They must have been hungry for those entire 6 years all while gaining all their weight back, and doing MORE exercise. Poor bastards!
Insulin overrides Leptin and stuffs adipose with more energy until it becomes resistant.
Yet look at the people on this forum who have been keto for as long. I have been keto for 4 years on April 20th and I have kept it off, avoided hunger, gained fat free mass, while losing some 100lbs of fat mass.
We’re a population of 10s of thousands of unicorns.
Now I wonder how the results would have been if they had merely made one change during the 30 weeks: a ketogenic diet. With no other variables changed (e.g., calorie restriction, exercise levels), I have two thoughts:
(1) Would the contestants have continued a ketogenic diet after the program completed its initial 30 weeks?
(2) What would the results have been 6 years later, especially for those who remain ketogenic?
I don’t know if the study included it or not but the NYTimes article has interviews with many of the former contestants and to a person they all told the same story… we cut exercise back to ‘only’ a couple of hours a day and ate a reasonable diet from a calorie POV and the weight came right back. Poor bastards indeed!
The only guy who kept the weight off maintained the brutal regime and made money speaking about it.
Still the apparent evidence here in this forum of all the people who have lost a significant amount (say more than 30lbs) and kept it off for many years says something about what Kevin Hall doesn’t understand about weight loss.
It’s a little hard to tell but the one who actually lost after 6 years was Erinn Egbert - a full time care giver (sorry - not the motivational speaker). she seems to be still calorie restricting and working out hard, fighting a 550 cal reduction in BMR.
The one who seems to have tried ketogenic (though I couldn’t confirm it) may be Tracey Yukich who claims to ‘eat clean and has cut out all sugar’ - but she has put on about 45 lbs since the end of the show (better than most) but has the lowest recorded BMR deficit of 200kcal/day.
Cahill, the motivational speaker bombed and put back most of the weight. Algaier the preacher is above starting weight (450 lbs)
Rudy Pauls put most of it back (80%, 150 lbs) but then had WLS and got much back off (-100lbs).
Amanda Arlauskas is only 12 lbs above final weight but she has a 600 calorie a day deficit and works as a trainer to keep it off in a constant struggle.
Meanwhile, l have been low carbing > keto for the past few decades (and now trying zero carb).
In 2001 I was very very obese and diagnosed with a lot of weird hormonal ‘stuff’ and went to stay somewhere (rural Greece) that gave me v little choice of food. Low calorie, low protein, medium fat. Lost around 60 pounds in 5 months. Only exercise was daily yoga throughout the whole 5 months (nothing sweaty).
Came home, went straight back on low carb and gained about 14 pounds but kept the other 45 pounds off for the last 15 years. Some fluctuation, always connected with carb intake, not calories, or exercise.
Sorry - not a clue about what my calorie deficit would be, 18 years after losing that weight…
Nowadays I just walk two small dogs daily.
Am currently the lowest weight for 30 odd years (though still obese), and my main goal is to not gain.
Weight loss would be nice, and if I drop a pound now and then I am delighted. But the main thing is knowing how and why I am where I am, and keeping control of my blood sugar via diet not meds.
Knowing how not to gain, and how to eat to suit my body is a wonderful thing.
Well that confirms my bias … But it also supports Dr Ludwigs Harvard study which found the metabolic slow down is a lot lower for people on a low carb diet.
all while gaining all their weight back, and doing MORE exercise. Poor bastards!
… But it also supports Dr Ludwigs Harvard study which found the metabolic slow down is a lot lower for people on a low carb diet.