I started the Keto diet on January 6, 2020. My starting weight was 193 and now I am at 178.4 and i am 5’1. Week after week I have been constantly loosing weight. I have been eating right, hitting all my macros correctly, and just now started to figure out how to eat enough calories (1200) and hit my macros (70%, 20%, 5%). Yesterday was a full month with being on keto and I have loss 15.4lbs within the month. I am excited but also annoyed, I work out 5-6 times a week with weight lifting and now eat 3 meals a day. I started with IF but ended up not 1.enjoying it, cause I always was hungry & 2. not eating enough calories. I am not sure what I am doing wrong here, I usually eat an avocado and some bacon in the morning along with bulletproof coffee, and then lunch is whatever I made for dinner the night before and obviously a light dinner since I work out at night. I am not sure if I am fat adapted or not, but I have noticed some of my pants and sleep pants are fitting better but I’m not seeing a scale difference. I have also been tracking my ketones and I am in ketosis but it fluctuates from mod. to large sometimes. All in all I am very frustrated.
Weight loss is stalled after 15lbs
Your only problem is that your expectations are not reasonable. You’re losing nearly 4 pounds a week. What exactly were you expecting?
Keep in mind that while exercise is healthy, it is no friend to weight loss. You’d probably lose weight more easily eating two meals a day and doing zero exercise. I’m not saying that that’s what you should do, everyone has their own priorities, but many people seem to think that lots of exercise will be helpful to weight loss when in reality it’s more likely to be slowing things down.
Again, I’m not saying not to exercise, it’s VERY good for you. But just that you should modify your weight loss expectations if you do a lot of it.
You have lost 15.4 lbs in a month. Hooray. Great Job!!
Your weight loss has not stalled. Your body is consolidating its losses before going on to lose more. Do not tweak the diet at this stage, just keep on doing what you were doing before and you will reach your natural weight.
This is a lifestyle change not a quick fix diet.
Sounds typical…
In the “Honeymoon Phase”, you drop a lot of water weight because as you enter ketosis, stored glycogen starts dwindling and releases the water that is bound to the glycogen.
It takes time to lose (or gain) a pound of fat (or muscle). Most short-term weight fluctuation is a simple change in water retention and digestive tract contents.
To quote myself: When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.
You’re a month in. You’ve lost significant weight, even if some/most was water - it’s gone. Now the loss that matters begins. Takes a lot longer than you might wish/hope and is not a linear process. Keto is a metabolic normalization diet. Excess weight is a symptom of metabolic disorder. As the metabolic disorder is slowly resolved, the symptoms of disorder will go away. Including weight.
You lost a lot of weight in a month… I don’t understand your problem especially that many of us have no real chance to lose so much weight in half a year…
What stall? You barely started. Maybe if you lose nothing in this month, you already could say it’s a stall but you lost weight like crazy… If you didn’t lose weight in one day or 2 or 10, it’s not a stall.
Good decision not to do IF if you can’t. If 1200 kcal was a challenge to you, it’s not a good idea to make your eating window smaller and probably eating even less. Do whatever feels/seems best.
And be very happy with your amazing weight loss.
The good news is that you probably lost 6lbs of fat and 9lbs of water. The bad news is that this level of fat loss (6lbs/month) is probably not sustainable for very long. The more you exercise, the more challenging your fat loss is going to be, and faster the fat will return when your diet ends.
Exercise builds muscle. It is rarely helpful for fat loss unless you are intentionally restricting calories. Intentionally restricting calories is a viable strategy if you are only trying to lose 5lbs, otherwise it’s extremely counterproductive. Every day you spend intentionally restricting calories, and not eating to satiety, you are basically compressing your metabolism like a spring to regain fat when your “diet” ends. The harder you push calories down despite being hungry, the faster the fat will come back when you’re done. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably already had that exact experience a half dozen times in your life.
If you are restricting calories while hungry, adding exercise is going to make things exponentially worse. It’s like being unsatisfied with how tightly your weight-rebound spring is coiled and reaching for a spanner wrench to add a bit of power to make sure you can’t button any pants you own by Christmas. Not a good idea.
If you love exercise, and can’t live without it, by all means keep doing it. Exercise is good for pretty much every part of your body. It’s kryponite for fat loss for the average person. If that’s a trade-off you’re willing to make, I think that’s an admirable decision; being skinny doesn’t mean being healthy.
If you want to balance long term fat loss with muscle gain/cardiovascular health, you may need to moderate the exercise a little bit and start eating to satiety.
That’s my 2 cents.
15 pounds in a little over a month is amazing! It took me 4 months to lose that. I would keep doing keto, keep exercise to a minimum at this point, and expect stalls from time to time. We didnt gain it all overnight and wont lose it that way either.
I can totally relate to the frustration of a stalled weight loss after seeing great progress! First off, congrats on your 15 lbs loss—such an awesome achievement! It sounds like you’re doing everything right with your workouts and keto macros. Sometimes, our bodies just need a little time to adjust, especially if you’re building muscle with weight lifting.