Why we stall

(Charles Keezer ) #21

Love reading your post @richard. I have been stalled at 205-208 for about three months now. I eat the same foods almost everyday; eggs, bacon, cheese and other fatty foods. My carbs are below 20g per day. I fast, although I don’t enjoy it because I like eating :slight_smile:
What are some tips for breaking the stall? Do I just keep going and eventually I should see the weight drop again?

#22

Although I’m at “normal” bodyweight now, I have broken stalls by fasting.

Sometimes that was just longer fasts such as doing 16:8 for most of the week and then adding a 24-36 hour fast and sometimes by fasting for up to 3 days for me. Other times when I didn’t feel like fasting, I would go Zero Carb (ZC), but the fasting usually worked better.

(Richard Morris) #23

A stall happens when our bodies defend against further weight loss. There could be a number of reasons why that happens. For me it’s insulin, I make a lot of it even when I don’t eat anything, and that underpins a higher % of body fat. I actually don’t care about body fat as I’m pretty close to the ideal BMI for longevity (according to the danish study) but I want to make less insulin because it is dangerous to be exposed to chronically.

So my strategies for lowering insulin are;

  • not eating things that cause me to make insulin - carbs and protein.
  • I need protein to maintain my body so I’m working out what the minimum I can get away with is
  • The longer I can keep insulin low, the more sensitive I become to it
  • The more sensitive I get the less insulin I make for the same challenge
  • Depleting muscle glycogen (endurance cycling) gives insulin somewhere to go
  • So I build and use my large muscles

One thing that apparently would help that I am not yet good at doing is getting 8 hours sleep regularly.

In the meantime I am in a safe place healthwise, my glucose remains tightly controlled, and my lipid markers all appear to be great, so I am mostly keeping calm and ketoing on.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #24

This is good stuff, Richard, I’m going to incorporate this into my mindset. Thanks for the info.

(Crow T. Robot) #25

Anyone had success with “fat fasting” for a stall? Basically take a shot of EVOO or coconut oil when you get hungry (or other healthy fat).

(Charles Keezer ) #26

I believe my issue may be with amount of protein. How do you increase fat without eating straight butter?! I literally cannot do that. Actually I will google high fat foods and go from there :slight_smile:

(Crow T. Robot) #27

I don’t know… maybe don’t eat it straight :smile: Most people like eating butter with other things. I for example like drenching my veggies in butter. Oh, man, broccoli covered in garlic butter is better than any dessert.

#28

Lot’s of oils for raising the fat content of meals, like olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, cooking in lard, cooking in bacon grease - er, I mean “bacon nectar”.

Some oils such as olive oil are better uncooked because heating tends to damage them and others are safer for higher temperatures.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #29

Fat bombs, I call them “keto vitamins.” I can’t eat straight butter, either, but these are delish.

#30

I could eat the butter straight if it was Kerrygold. It’s that good.

(Richard Morris) #31

A cultured butter is tasty … but yeah I get that problem. Most good french sauces are fat or oil emulsions - Mayonnaise (olive oil) , Hollandaise (butter), Bearnaise (butter) and are delicious on the right meat. You can also make up a herbed butter and put a disk of that on top of a meat dish if your kitchen skills don’t extend to making emulsions.

Cacao butter is an extremely good fat, melt it with a little cocoa powder and some sweetener and you have sugar free chocolate.

(Kathy L) #32

Sounds good, I’ll try that. One thing I’ve tried is melting 2T butter, adding cinnamon & stevia. YUM! :tongue:

(Michael Wallace Ellwood) #33

I’m not Richard, but a couple of thoughts:

I adore cheeses of all kinds, but I think traditionally low-carbers have sometimes found it to be a problem food, and I think it can be a problem for me sometimes. Although it’s high fat, it can have a fair amount of protein (e.g. 18-19% on a couple of cheeses I happen to have around), so you might accidentally push your proteins over the minimum necessary for your lean body mass.

Also I suspect there just might be something special about cheese which can cause insulin reactions in some people over and above what you’d expect for the protein count. It’s something you might experiment with.

Then there’s the bacon:

Are there any other meats you like? How about dropping the bacon for a while and trying beef and/or lamb?

Apart from the nitrates/nitrites (unless you make it yourself), I’m a bit iffy about pork in general, and specifically the pork fat. I have read two different writers whom I respect (experts in their fields) saying that they believe because of the modern way of feeding pigs, that pork fat is no longer as saturated as we might think. You might be getting a lot more polyunsaturated fat from it than you realise. The only way to be sure would be to have samples assayed. I don’t think we can necessarily rely on e.g. USDA figures, because they may be based on measurements taken decades ago when conditions were different.

I believe that in days gone by, pigs were fed “swill” which was usually very high carb in origin, e.g. rotten fruit. that was fine, because they stored it in their body as saturated (and some monounsaturated) fat, which is good for us to eat. But modern pig “feed” is different, and may produce a different mix of fat in the pig.

Beef cattle (and maybe lambs) are also often fed differently now, but they are both ruminants, and at least one of the writers believed that the long rumination process helped to “detoxify” what they had been eating, so that the fat they stored was still more or less the same as it had always been (i.e maybe nearly half monounsaturated fat, more than half saturated fat, maybe a tiny amount of polyunsaturated fat)

As I say, without an assay you can’t be sure, but because I happen to prefer beef and lamb to pork, I usually avoid it (except bacon or pork belly as a very occasional treat). It’s easy for me to avoid pork, and I’d rather not take the chance anyway.

Anyway, it might be worth ringing the changes with your meats a bit, so long as you keep your protein moderate, and fats fairly high, and of course, carbs low, and see how it goes. Good luck.

(Just been trying to break a stall myself actually. I guessed I had a lot of “hidden” carbs from the milk I was putting in tea and coffee, so cut it out. I think it may have helped. I also think cream is problematic for me, and I’d been overdoing that a bit).

(Barbara Greenwood) #34

Glad I’ve revisited this thread. I appear to be on a stall after 5 months of steady losing (varied from 6 to 13lb per month). I am currently 56lb down from my start (7.5 months)’ but:

9lb down on 3 months ago
5lb down on 2 months ago
1lb UP on 1 month ago (but 1.5lb down on 3 weeks ago)

IOW, I am bobbling around not going anywhere. And I’m still obese - BMI 35.something.

However, my bloodglucose is pretty great - dawn phenomenon bugs me, but my BG seldom goes above 7. In fact I barely get a rise worth mentioning out of a good keto meal.

Looks like I need to keep on keeping on and that insulin will eventually go down. I fast 16/8 most days and 24-36 hours once a week, but have difficulty going longer.

When you ask “how do you break a stall?” In some keto places, you get told to eat more fat. Believe me, I’m eating plenty of fat… and it just doesn’t make sense that adding more fat would make me lose more weight. As Ted Naiman says, if your body is already HF, all you need is the LC.

(Crow T. Robot) #35

I noticed this, too, and I’d really like to hear from someone who broke a stall this way. I mean, it’s one thing if you are replacing an insulinogenic food with fat; I can see how that might work, but just to “eat more fat” doesn’t make sense to me, either.

(Barbara Greenwood) #36

Absolutely - succinctly put.

Unless one is eating so little that the dreaded starvation mode/metabolic slowdown happens. But if you are eating to satiety, that shouldn’t happen.

Maybe that’s a question for another thread in the Show Me The Science section.

(Marshelle) #37

Adding you to my prayers that GOD our Healer will do for you what HE does for so many of us.
I am so proud of you for committing to doing your part prior to surgery Kudos on your prior weight loss victory!!! #keepthefaith:tada: :tada: :tada:

(Richard Morris) #38

Yes I was on a similar path and also not changing my weight. I was eating to satiety and only eating around 1500 kCal/day.

We recorded a podcast with Megan Ramos in Breckenridge (it’ll be out after the 2 we did with Dr Fettke @nofructose) and she suggested that maintenance is the time when we want to settle into a fixed pattern, not during weight loss. So she suggests changing things up.

When I left Australia I had been in a pattern of doing the same endurance cycle every week, eating about 150g of meat once a day with eggs, dairy, cruciferous vegetables, and nuts totaling about 1500 kCal/day - IF 20/4. That was all to satiety I felt great but not losing much weight. So that first night in the 2 dude lodge in Breckenridge I ate a quarter of the steak that everyone else ate.

While I was in the USA for 2 weeks I just started eating more … my last day was 4000 kcal. A big breakfast of bacon and eggs, and a cowboy ribeye that must have been 600g with about 100g of butter and then a big bowl of Carl’s chocolate mousse.

While in the USA I lost 2.5 kgs, and in the 3 days since I’ve gone back to my previous pattern and lost another 500g.

So that is one data point. If you ask me to explain the law of thermodynamics as observed in my body weight changes - I would say that my metabolic rate increased by moving to altitude and giving my body an abundance of calories and I am still coasting on that greater output.

I’ll give you another data point, in March @Brenda and @Donna both started an “ONLY eat meat for a month” challenge. Brenda recently posted she has been eating 2.5 lbs of meat a day, and has lost 4.5 lbs of weight in the first week. I think again she has goosed her metabolic rate by changing things up, and giving her body access to an abundance of calories.

I think Megan may have a point … try changing things up. Adding in fasting if you aren’t. Having a meat only week. I think the only thing that wouldn’t be helpful is eating short of satiety, because that will lower your MBR … which is ironically the commonsense approach to losing weight - ie: eating less.

(8 year Ketogenic Veteran) #39

6 pounds. I’ve lost 6 pounds @richard. But who’s counting. Lol :wink:

(Richard Morris) #40

See? Change shit up.

Your body wants to maintain a stasis … that’s it’s primary function. If you stick to a routine it’ll find it’s comfort point and stick there. It doesn’t care about what you look like in a bikini.