2 weeks in 2 lbs up

[samfish]

My deficits are usually between 600-700 calories.   Even if I was off slightly on measurements, it's not enough to be gaining weight.  I've done weight watchers before, I know how to measure foods.   I've lost weight before and it's never been this hard.   I'm now vacilating between being obsessed and not giving a S%$*.   I can't hit a plateau before I even lose a lb.

It's possible stress, it's possibly lack of sleep, but I have a job, husband and two kids.   Stress is unavoidable.

I started running, no wmy knee is messed up and will have to rehab it before I get going again.

Guess I'm just here to complain, but it has to come out somewhere.

[Snowflakepdx]

Building muscle will help you lose weight faster. Combine a faster metabolism with you ability to stick to a calorie restricted plan and you'll be fine.
Exercise will help you with the stress too!

[jbird715]

Try doing stairs for your knee. It seems to be easier than running and doesnt cause your knee to hurt. Also, I know how you feel. Its frusterating to be watching what you eat and still cant loose the weight. Ive been fluctuating between 5 and 7 lbs and cant seem to get over the hurdle to loosing more. Keep your hopes up though because you can do it.

[Heybales]

Sure - water weight.

You started doing an exercise that needs more carbs in the muscles, that stores with attached water.

Now, usually starting a diet you actually get a loss of that, but starting diet and starting exercise, your body improvement from exercise won over your diet. Congrats on that at least.

Now, that being said, unless you really ramped it up, and are also retaining water in muscle for repair, there is something else going on probably.

And no, it's not gaining enough muscle to balance out fat loss. Women on steroids doing progressive lifting program heavy would love to get a pound a week of muscle - ain't happening.

You mention you know how to measure foods. May have been the term you used and you meant weigh but you may have meant it.

Calories is based on weight, not volume. 9 calories per gram of fat, 4 for carbs/protein.

You need to weigh foods, measure liquids only. You even need to weigh prepackaged stuff, because that weight can be off, let alone the "about 2 servings" being a huge estimate when you measure volume.

So do another 2 weeks of measuring out your normal stuff, but then weigh it too, just to see how far off you might be.

Have the right foods, you could easily defeat a 600 cal deficit, or big chunk of it, with that inaccuracy.

And indeed, stress, lack of sleep, bad diet your body has trouble with, ect, all add to stress level. And diet is a stress on body too.

Too much stress will fight against fat/weight loss.

So control what you can - that may mean not taking as much of a deficit until you can lower those other stresses on body.

Another fact to consider, your non-moving calorie burn is based on a calculated BMR, based on gender, age, weight, height - and average ratio of fat to non-fat mass.

If past diets have burned off muscle mass, and unless you took reasonable deficit amount, ate enough protein, and did strength training, you likely burned off normal 20% muscle mass, that BMR figure is no longer correct - you burn less than average.

So you may be taking deficit off an inflated TDEE figure that Fitbit is coming up with.

That's why with yo-yo dieting it gets harder each time to lose, and easier to gain each time. Muscle mass loss with extreme deficits especially, but even decent ones can.

How much to lose this time around, perhaps 600-700 is too much deficit.

[MissKellili]

What sort of diet are you following?  A higher carb lower fat diet, although still often touted, can lead to weight gain because it triggers the glucose/insulin response (in mouse studies, mice that were eating such a diet WITH restricted calories gained weight compared to their counterparts that were eating a higher fat lower carb type diet).

[Heybales]

Possible to find that study where eating in a deficit caused actual fat gain?

Not just water weight gain.

[MissKellili]

Here is something that describes the study/ies: http://ilarjournal.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/3/4.full

Here's a summary of the research:

"In 1981, M.R.C. Greenwood reported that if she restricted the diet of an obese strain of rats known as Zucker rats (or fa/fa rats in the genetic termonology), and did it from birth onward, these rats would actually grow fatter by adulthood than their littermates who were allowed to eat to their hearts' content.  Clearly, the number of calories these rats consumed over the course of their life was not the critical factor in their obesity (unless we are prepared to argue that eating fewer calories induces greater obesity). What's more, as Greenwood reported, these semi-starved Zucker rats had 50 percent less muscle mass than genetically lean rats, and 30 percent less muscle mass than the Zucker rats that ate as much as they wanted. They, too, were sacrificing their muscles and organs to make fat."

Granted, genetic obesity was being studied.  However the hormones (primarily insulin) and other molecules such as glycerol phosphate (a product on carbohydrate metabolism) that promote fat deposition in genetic also become elevated in a high carbohydrate diet and act to "trap" the food energy in adipose tissue/fat cells instead of allowing it to be used by the body for energy.  High carb diets = higher insulin levels, molecules and enzymes responsible for fat deposition = weight gain.  

So, you can eat a lower calorie diet, but if the body is prefering via these processes to STORE the energy you're consuming (via these aforementioned enzymes, hormones, and molecules) and trap the energy in the fat cells (again, in the presence of high insulin, which is common even in a fasted state in those w/high carb diets) then the energy can't be used as readily.  So humans (and mice) can eat LESS but if our body is preferring to store instead of use, it really doesn't matter.  A person will gain weight in such a state.

From what I have been learning, weight gain is much more related to biochemical processes than strictly calroies in vs. calories out (although ultimately the latter idea is true but in the context of tight regulation by hormones and not in this free flowing way that's commonly conceived).

[Heybales]

Ahhh, the good ole Zucker rat, genetic flawed specially bred rat that exhibits traits well outside normal rat populations. "The fa mutation was discovered by Zucker and Zucker (1961, 1963) in crosses between Sherman and Merck stock M rats (13M strain). Animals homozygous for the fa allele became noticeably obese by 3 to 5 weeks of age, and by 14 weeks of age their body composition was over 40 percent lipid (Zucker and Antoniades, 1972). The obesity is inherited as a Mendelian recessive trait. Affected animals are hyperlipemic, hypercholesterolemic (Zucker and Zucker, 1962, 1963), and hyperinsulinemic (Zucker and Antoniades, 1972), and develop adipocyte hypertrophy and hyperplasia (Johnson et al., 1971)." And as such, it's not the response to eating that is examined, but how to make it thin again or stop the obesity as possible benefit to humans. "The Zucker fa/fa rat has proved to be an invaluable and extensively used resource for the investigation of numerous aspects of genetic obesity. Our knowledge and understanding of the etiology, pathology, and correlates of intractable obesity have benefited enormously during the last three decades from experimentation using this rat model of human obesity. Clearly, the Zucker fa/fa rat has been and is a model of great heuristic importance in this area of biomedical research." Of course, all this from the group standing behind and giving reasons for testing on animals. Not bringing that up as a point, except their viewpoint will be expressed as it's mighty useful. So the example these rats would bring would be if you have this genetic mutation, you'll have problems. And it would have started at birth and you would have been a huge mostly fat baby, and would know about it. While studies on animals can help narrow or point a direction for human studies, I'm not seeing any references to any kind of duplication or concern with the rats genetic issues, rather the ability to test solutions on those rats can then be used on obese humans in a study to see if the same good things work.

[Heybales]

In addition, this study seems to have found different than claimed regarding high carb eating even in these rats.

http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/52/2/277.full

"A salient finding of the present study was that obese fa/fa rats decreased their food consumption while receiving calories from systemic glucose infusion, despite the absence of leptin signaling. At first glance, their reduction in food intake appeared to be less pronounced than that of lean rats. However, this difference was directly related to the amount of calories provided, given that the rates of glucose infusion required to achieve the same level of glycemia as in lean rats were systematically lower in insulin-resistant obese rats. Irrespective of genotype, total caloric intake (i.e., calories from food plus glucose) remained within the same range as that measured in the basal state. Thus, when a supply of calories was experimentally imposed through the systemic route, lean and obese rats were capable of adjusting their food intake to meet their basal caloric requirements. This was further illustrated by the inverse relation between caloric intake from food and calories supplied by glucose. In a situation where ∼50% of the basal caloric intake was provided by glucose (i.e., HG-HI−infused obese rats and EuG-HI−infused lean rats values), rats reduced their food intake by half."

[MissKellili]

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply.  Just curious where you’ve heard of the Zucker rats before?

I think the major point is there are problems at a hormonal level that make these genetically obese rats fat in the first place (they are hyperinsulinemic, for instance - that develops in the womb) that is also found DEVELOPED in people who become obese through eating high carb diets.  High carb diets raise insulin, while protein and fat do not, or at least very minimally.  Insulin is the major fat-promoting hormone so if you have a whole bunch if it, you'll be more likely to put on fat, yes?

[MissKellili]

I'll look at this later - not sure what this implies and does seem to contradict other findings..

 Did the reduction in food intake correlate with a loss of weight?

I majored in nutrition in college and even in the standard textbooks it is taughts that a high carb diet, particular high in refined carbs, leads to fat deposition.

[Heybales]

Heard of them years and years ago when some big news first came out about using them to test a theory for obese people, later tested with humans.

May have been the leptin thing.

These rats are missing a receptor though, you might say part of the hormonal feed back loop is impossible for it to work at all. Not impaired, didn't get to that point, genetically gone.

So it is nowhere near where a person may get to. Closest would be type 1 diabetes, where the function is just not going to work no matter what.

Even type 2 has some response, and has shown some reversal, or at least easing of the symptoms.

Insulin turns off fat burning, while the foods you ate are dealt with. Liver and muscle stores of glucose are topped off. If there is excess after 3-5 hrs and your immediate energy needs didn't use it - then indeed stored as fat.

Protein is shuttled off to muscles and other uses for the amino acids, and again after 3-5 hrs if unneeded, gluconeogenesis to turn it in to glucose, and then dealt with from there.

Fat is the only thing that is not only used immediately if low level of exhertion during that 3-5 hrs, but also stored during that time.

Protein can actually raise insulin levels more than many carbs, and any big meal, no matter the ratio of carbs and protein and fat, will raise insulin too. Fat by itself doesn't.

So the diabetic problem is increased insulin levels because the body isn't responding to lower normal levels (they fried their receptors always making it high with high carb food and/or too much fat), and it stays elevated longer, possibly leading to low blood sugar while too much is taken out of blood and stored in liver and muscles, until the release of glucagon tempers it.

But you would have more serious side effects than just ease in storing fat, which wouldn't show up for many weeks, the other effects should be seen after every single meal.

[Heybales]

In a calorie surplus sure.

In a calorie deficit, unless some genetic condition exists like the rats, you'll never top off your glucose stores that are always at some level of depletetion.

The ability to actually store fat while in a true calorie deficit catabolic state takes some very specific things being done.

But even then, the balance of the day is still a deficit and you'll use that newly stored fat and more up.

The obese person has usually burned up a normal amount of muscle mass, such that their true maintenance is much less than calculated, meaning for them to be in a true deficit is difficult. Beyond the body slowing everything down making them more metabolically efficient.