Hi everyone!
I don’t know if a thread like this already exists and if it does I am sorry.
I just wanted to ask you to share your tips and tricks to accelerate the weight loss, just what works for you personally – and I mean everything including special kinds of exercise, fasting intervals or supplements.
Thank you in advance and I hope you are having a great day
Hi Vallas_Elgar.
I have no tips to offer but my take on this is that I have learnt to work with my body rather than against it and slow steady loss suits me better than quick fix rapid loss which my body will react to and try to put back on.
A high protein, low calories keto diet (so far, with limited experience on it).
That is always a very good and healthy way to go indeed. Though I can’t seem to be able to be this calm, patient and conscientious for some reason.
Thanks! It didn’t work for me though. I tried to lower fat (and calories) and increase protein for the whole month in March this year trying to fight the plateau – nothing changed weight-wise unfortunately. But stalls are hardcore and it was just not enough I guess.
There are lots of good topics in here with advice on breaking stalls.
I haven’t really seen any that say do X to lose weight faster. That’s not how this works. Think of this WoE as a marathon, rather than a sprint. It’s not a quick fix (for the majority), but a long (life-long) process.
If you post what you’ve been eating, exercise, supplements, etc, we can help look at it for ways to tweak it. It also helps to know how long you’ve been eating this way, how long you’ve stalled, and basics on current weight, goal weight, age, etc.
It can take longer than 1 month. Amy Berger says that it is not a stall if it is shorter than 8 weeks.
Resistance training to build strength and lean muscle mass. More muscles means more capacity to burn energy.
Don’t snack. Time Restricted Feeding, Intermittent Fasting, Occasional longer fasts (1 to 3 days).
Patience, patience, patience!
So in short: due to some hormones going mad this summer I fell off the wagon (here is my thread about it - Fallen off the wagon, trying to get back again). For now I feel better was able to come back on keto. But the damage weight gain won’t go away at all. It just won’t and I don’t know why, maybe the hormones are not settled completely yet and that is a reason.
But I am a person whose motivation is absolutely dependent on success that can be seen or measured. I respond well to deadlines, numbers etc. That is why I was willingly following my macros to the point during the whole time on keto (since 10/2018), I do feel better this way and I absolutely need to see scale and measurement gains (or losses in this case).
And so I think you can imagine how the lack of progress at all makes me feel and what it does to my motivation. I just need to get it going somehow bc shocking as it is, but keto alone is not working at the moment for some reason.
I just read your thread about falling off the wagon. You mentioned you were going to the gyn and getting bloodwork done to check your hormones. What were the results of the hormone tests? Stress also plays a major role in hormones and weight loss. How about your sleep? Are you getting good sleep? So many things other than food can affect your weight loss/health goals. What does a typical day of eating look like? How do you feel after you eat?
Higher protein never works for me either, in fact it reduces my success on keto. I find a traditional high fat/moderate protein keto based heavily on meat and meat fat is what gives me the greatest success.
First off eating sweet things is a bad idea. Even non nutritive sweetners. They have several different effects on our biology where they can interfere with weight loss but the worst thing about them is how they keep you wanting to eat and prevent your inner carb-bear from ever really going into hibernation.
Second, when I want to stimulate faster losses I switch to OMAD. One meal every 24 hrs, with no other calories at at during the day.
If that is too hard try 16/8. If you find EFing easy enough do a 48-72 hr fast once per week. Nothing works better than that. I find EFing too hard though since I’m already fairly slim so I rarely attempt it.
Other things that work really well to help stimulate losses if you aren’t already doing them are avoiding nuts and seeds and dairy. Also don’t snack or eat any proccessed foods. And avoid any keto foods that try to imitate non keto foods especially if they use nut flours or dairy as a base.
Anyhow, except for the EFing, I do all of these things when I need to drop a few pounds that I’ve added on through a bit of slackness. When I do them all carefully and only eat whole meat and a small (or even zero) amount of vegetables I will lose weight pretty much every single day until I hit my maintenance weight, which is 104 lbs… I never stall (ever) if I do all of that. Not even for 4 days.
And I also think better insulin and glucose response. Some people liken muscle to an insulin sink (meaning it has the capacity to take in insulin).
I also have been varying fasting, mainly eating TMAD, but sometimes one (which I still find very difficult to do – it’s too many calories at once), and then try to throw in 36 hour fasts when I can, and multiple day fasts when I can.
Exactly the same for me. I like TMAD and various fasting periods for EF. I also choose to eat 3 meals for two resistance training days every 3 to 4 weeks to build some bulk.
Agree 100%.
Like you, sometimes I have to eat three meals after a workout. My workouts are basically lifting to failure twice a week. For instance, I’ll do as many pushups as I can do on flat ground, then elevate my feet and do as many as I can do, then elevate my body (on a bench or a movable platform) one-two levels and each time doing as many pushups as I can do. I take as little rest as possible for this. I do something similar for every exercise. I was doing HIIT afterwards, but this week only lifting.
Anyway, I find if I don’t eat enough after this workout, I have to eat later in the day. Yesterday, for instance, I waited a few hours, then had 4 eggs and the rest of the beef I had, which was only two smaller slices. I got hungry around 2-3pm and had two cans of sardines. Then I had dinner after picking up one of my kids, about 7:15 pm.
I also find that I can go through phases, sometimes not eating much, and other times eating a ton. Last weekend, I went jogging about 40 minutes, then did a ton of housework both days. On Sunday, I ate breakfast due to our going to bfast after church, then ate “dinner”. I kept eating and eating and eating, as if I could not get enough to eat for dinner. Then Monday, I ate much less.
A couple of thoughts here: First, insulin resistance can impede fat loss, and it may take some time to reverse, before the excess fat can come out of your adipose tissue again. It may be necessary to eat even less carbohydrate than 20 grams a day, or to eliminate carbohydrate altogether, in order to get things started again.
Second, restricting calories usually triggers the body to hold onto its reserves, in order to get you safely through the famine. Eating to satiety is a better strategy over the long term, because it ensures that you are giving your body enough food, but not too much. With your body setting the limit, not you predetermining some arbitrary target, you can be sure you are right on target.
Third, there is wide variability from person to person, but in general, moderate protein works best. Then you can fill in the missing calories and satisfy your hunger with fat, fat being the only macronutrient that has practically no effect on insulin secretion.
Fourth, as you probably remember from the first time around, people have been known to put on lean muscle and increase their bone density at the same time as they shed fat, and this confuses your scale into thinking nothing’s happening. It is possible to lose inches while total weight remains steady, so the more metrics by which you gauge your progress, the better. Put it this way: would you rather look as though you’d lost thirty pounds and stay the same weight, or lose the thirty pounds and not look any different?
I want aware of your previous post, so I apologise. To me it sounded like you were looking for a fast way to drop weight.
Having the link to your other thread was very helpful. I hope you find success!
The results of my blood work will come in about a month, it always takes as long here in Germany. But the gyn thinks my hormones are not that bad. Of course the period and pms trouble was caused by hormonal misbalance that happens for various reasons like new job, new partner, dramatically weather changes – which is my case exactly. It all began with a sudden heat wave that caused my BP attracts and it all went downhill from there.
I can’t deal with heat for as long as I can remember so it was a huge stress for me as it was and then those BP troubles came in causing even more distress to the body. And answering your question about the lifestyle – I work 6 days, more than 50 hours a week, and sleep 5-6 hours a day. So the gyn thinks my problem was caused by the stress/cortisol level more than anything, sugar binge being a huge indicator of the issue, because normally I don’t even like sweet stuff (pizza, pasta, McDonald in the other hand…). So she issued cortisol to be checked in the blood work as well.
And in the meantime I am trying to deal with the scale damage those binges had caused. Unfortunately without any success yet.
Thank you for the reply! You know I was duing OMAD from 11/18 till 06/19 and felt wonderful. Diary and co were never an issue for me; I love cheese and ate a lot of it the whole time. I stalled only being 700 grams away from my goal weight. So I guess fasting is a key and a thing for me.
No problem, I know how it looked without the whole story. And thank you again, because in any case a healthy mindset is a very important ingredient. It just has to be otherwise one will fail sooner or later.