Struggling to lose weight!

[caveinacave]

Hi everyone,

I am relatively new to Keto (been doing it for 2 months). I am doing it for weight loss, I don’t have any markers of disease. I am 26, F, 5’8 and am currently plateauing around 143-148 lbs (yes, my weight will fluctuate this much in a few days!).

Up until now I have been trying to fast as much as I can. The longest I did was 83 hours and
I got down to 143lbs. Since then (3 weeks ago) I have struggled to fast; I am hungry all the time and when I am eating I am ravenous and start to over eat.

Since then, my weight has been plateauing around the 145-148 mark and I’m really struggling to shift it. I’m worried my metabolism has slowed down or the EF has caused my body to experience too much of a calorie deficit and is holding on to its set weight.

What should I do? I still want to lose another 10lbs. Any advice would be much appreciated!

[powertrix]

Hey there!

At first, I too focused on using keto for weight loss. I had a target weight in mind that I wanted to be at. After a year and a half on keto, i’m still not there. But after the first few months, after seeing all my health markers get better, I shifted my focus to health instead of weight.

I was treating keto like every other diet I had tried before. “This is a diet that will make me lose weight! So long as I follow this rule set to the ‘T’ and push through it, I’ll be golden because look at all the other people who had success.”, is what I thought.

I was wrong. What I discovered is that every body is unique, the life it’s lived, the stresses it’s had to endure and how it’s adapted to cope with those stresses. Keto made me start doing something that I never had done in a diet before. I started to focus on my body signals and my body’s feelings as opposed to reading what others were experiencing. It made me experiment on myself and figure out what my own keto should look like, what makes me feel the best, what helps me stay in keto. This resulted in figuring out which sugar substitutes I can tolerate without getting cravings. Figured out that quest protein bars give me insulin spikes even though it says (5g net carbs).

With this revelation I was also met with Dr. Phinney’s video which he said:

New Keto Term: "Phinney" Weight

“I never tell anyone who asks me what they should weigh. 'Cos I don’t know. If you want my secret to the right goal - It’s the weight you can get to without too much of a struggle, and where you get there still have a life. And you have to find that out for yourself.”

And with that, I was freed. No more focusing on a certain weight that I had only set for myself because of society and TV. Now I just focus on what makes me happy. So weight loss with keto I would say is a side effect, a good one, don’t get me wrong. But keto’s true purpose was, for me, self discovery.

[Aqualeot]

Might just be hard for you to lose weight since you are already at an ideal weight for your age and height. Are you looking to improve body composition? If so, heavy lifting can be very helpful for gaining muscle and losing fat. But you probably won’t lose much weight since muscle is so dense compared to fat.