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Old Tue, Nov-17-15, 05:28
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JEY100 JEY100 is online now
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Default TuitNutrition, Amy Berger, on The Truth about Weight Loss

Amy Berger has posted the first part of a short series on the Truth about Weight Loss, particularly with the pre/post-menopausal woman in mind.
Her blog is witty and smart ( though her writing has a tendency to go on and on). I'll post the next part when available. This section points out common patterns of weight loss, to be followed by several answers to the question, Why am I not losing weight on a low-carb diet? She'll also explore logical explanations for day-to-day multi-pound fluctuations in scale weight.


http://www.tuitnutrition.com/2015/1...-loss.html#more,

It starts...

Quote:
Much to the detriment of my sanity—and several of my brain cells—I’ve been lurking on weight loss forums, keto forums, LCHF sites, various Facebook groups, and other places where many participants are aiming for weight loss. I’ve been reading the comments, and…well, it’s a jungle out there, folks. A jungle of wishful thinking, unrealistic expectations, and a somewhat alarming degree of ignorance about how the human body works. This is not entirely surprising, though, and I can’t be too hard on people for their pie-in-the-sky notions about how weight loss happens. After all, when you read a “Friday Success Story” on Mark’s Daily Apple, featuring a 25-year old guy who woke up one day, realized the steady diet of pizza, beer, and Chinese takeout he’d been following since freshman year of college had landed him 40 pounds heavier, with heartburn, acne, and no libido, and he stumbles upon The Primal Blueprint and summarily loses those 40 pounds in about three months—even while still enjoying wine and a weekly “treat meal,” it’s very easy to be hypnotized into thinking it’s this quick & easy for everyone. And if it’s not this quick & easy for you, then you’re “doing it wrong.” If every pound—every ounce—is a struggle, even when you’re really, truly “doing everything right,” then it’s perfectly natural to feel like a failure. To feel demoralized. And if your nutritionist cares about you and wants to see you reach your goals, it’s perfectly natural for me him or her to be demoralized, too. I have been through this with several clients—to the point that I almost decided to quit altogether. However, after giving it a lot of thought, and racking my brain to think of what I could be doing differently to help these people, and why good diet recommendations and supplements proven to be effective weren’t working, here’s what I’ve realized:

The clients who fit this scenario—doing “everything right,” but not losing weight—have all been women. All of them. Most of them have been peri- or post-menopausal women, but some have been younger, like in their thirties. More importantly, all of them—all of them—were transitioning to a Paleo or LCHF diet after many years—sometimes decades—of undereating, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Specifically, they have been undereating fat and protein. Whether it’s women’s fashion magazines, mainstream news outlets, or even their doctors, something made these women so terrified to put actual foodstuffs into their bodies, that they have been subsisting, long-term, on 800-1200 calories per day, largely of non-fat and low-fat “edible food-like substances.” (Cereal, skim milk, fat-free yogurt, skinless chicken breasts, granola bars…you know the drill.)

The end result of this is that, sadly, these women’s resting metabolic rates are in the toilet. Through so many years of what basically amounts to starvation, they have likely lost a great deal of muscle, and certainly a significant amount of bone mass. (The physiology of fasting is different. Full-on fasting is not the same, metabolically speaking, as a very low-calorie diet, and the effects on “muscle sparing” are different . My posts are always already too long, so I’m gonna have to skip the details on this for now.)

This brings us to two issues:
How weight loss happens in the body
Why someone might not be losing weight, even on a well-planned Paleo, LCHF, or ketogenic diet

We’ll address the first issue here, and we’ll tackle the second one in a separate post. (Maybe two or three separate posts, as I’ve already started jotting down notes, and there’s a lot to cover. Not as much as for insulin, though, thank goodness!)
Article continues with graphs, etc.
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