I am positing on this forum because I am super frustrated with dieting right now.. In the past, when I wanted to lose weight, somewhat quickly, I've always done a low carb diet and it has worked perfectly. Until now. For some reason I can't seem to lose the typical amount of weight that I normally would on a low carb diet and I can't figure out why. I've been eating 10-15 carbs a day, which is what I always did in the past, but it's like I can't lose.. I'm staying where I am, just no weight loss.
The truth is I am going on vacation on Halloween and I really want to lose a significant amount of weight by then. I've been considering counting calories, but I don't know how much weight you typically lose a week doing that.
I realize quick weight loss is not the end all be all way to do things, but it's how they need to be done right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
Calorie counting is easy because you can figure out the calorie count of food.
3500 = 1 lbs of weight
But first, you need to figure out how much you're eating now. You need to keep track of your food.
The alternative, is to figure out how many calories you need to keep your weight right now. Depending on your weight, you may need 2500 a day to keep your body weight.
If so, you can lose weight by eating 2000 calories a day. If you do that, then you have a 500 calorie deficit:
2500 per day to maintain weight
2000 per day to lose weight
500 per day deficit (2500 - 2000 = 500)
500 x 7 days per week = 3500
3500 = 1 lbs of weight, you can lose 1 pound per week
If you reduce your calories to 1500, then you can lose 2 lbs per week.
But never go below 1200 unless you're really short/small boned because your body does need a minimum number of calories to function in a healthy manner.
The reality is that by crash dieting......... which is what it sounds like you're doing..... is going to screw up your metabolism and maybe that's why your body isn't responding to your extreme low-carb diet. If you just take a healthy perspective to your weight loss you may actually not only reach your goal weight, but actually STAY there.
It's not at all uncommon for a person's ability to experience quick weight loss to decline over time.
There are a lot of theories as to why this happens, including hormonal and metabolic issues such simple aging, hormonal changes, diabetes, thyroid issues, PCOS and insulin resistance, adrenal fatigue, metabolic response to repeated yoyo and crash dieting.
All I can say is that I spent 35 years "chasing the dragon." Chasing the dragon is a term that means a specific type of drug use, but is used more metaphorically refer to the elusive pursuit of the ultimate high, or the pursuit of the peak experience you've had in the early days of drug use.
As with many drugs, weight loss seems to follow that same pattern, especially with crash diets and rapid weight loss. Just as with drug use, each subsequent weight loss seems to be less rewarding than the preceding.
I've lost 11 lbs in a week twice in my life (and much smaller weights than I am now), and every diet I'm ever on gets compared to those 11 lbs.
Every diet seemed to erode my metabolism just a little more. Each diet required harder work, yet yielded smaller results.
Until here I am, unable to lose weight on a calorie level on which I once regularly lost 5 - 8 lbs per week (and not just the first few weeks).
As each diet required more work, and yielded smaller results, I grew more and more frustrated, and more and more desperate - choosing more and more extreme diets trying to recapture the elusive results of rapid weight loss. Sometimes I seemed to be succeeding, but never in the long term.
We all know that crash diets aren't particularly healthy, and we vow to do them only for a short time, just for the "jump start." But that's never what happens. The allure of rapid weight loss is just too great. It's the dieter's equivalent of the peak high. Even when I knew (for decades) that the crash dieting was lowering my metabolism, making weight loss harder and only eventually resulting in weight gain, it was still very difficult not to think "just one more, and then I'll quit. Then I'll diet responsibly."
You may never experience rapid weight loss again. Or you may experience it at the expense of your long-term weight maintenance or even health (I suspect that many of my health issues were not only caused by my obesity, but also by the stress of yoyo and crash dieting).
I had to learn that frustration wasn't inevitable - except when I decided that weight loss had to be fast to be successful. Rapid weight loss is the fluke, not the rule. Most people can't pull rapid weight loss for long. Starvation and crash diets catch up to you in one way or the other.
I sincerely and deeply believe that it's our culture's perceived "need" to see rapid weight loss, that is responsible for the horrendous failure rate of dieting. We set ourselves up for failure, by expecting results that just aren't possible in the long-term (and for some people aren't possible in the short-term, either) and then we send overt and implicit messages that losing weight slowly is no better than gaining weight, so when we feel that we've failed we don't even try to maintain the weight loss we've already achieved.
I'm experiencing long-term success (7 years and counting) for the first time, just be jealously guarding each pound I've lost. Seven years is a very long time to lose "only" 94 lbs. That's just a smidge more than a quarter pound loss per week (two of those years losing nothing, but each year yielding better results than the one before - disproving the theory that a person inevitably loses more in the beginning of weight loss - only if you do so by trying to make huge, life-overhauling changes).
I know my monologue here won't change your mind about rapid weight loss, at least not until you experience similar results to those I've described. Our culture is too addicted to the concept of rapid weight loss - to the point that we dismiss the importance of weight loss at slow speeds, or at any speed other than 1-3 lbs per week (which is uncommon except in the very early days of weight loss at any starting weight).
I am positing on this forum because I am super frustrated with dieting right now.. In the past, when I wanted to lose weight, somewhat quickly, I've always done a low carb diet and it has worked perfectly. Until now. For some reason I can't seem to lose the typical amount of weight that I normally would on a low carb diet and I can't figure out why. I've been eating 10-15 carbs a day, which is what I always did in the past, but it's like I can't lose.. I'm staying where I am, just no weight loss.
The truth is I am going on vacation on Halloween and I really want to lose a significant amount of weight by then. I've been considering counting calories, but I don't know how much weight you typically lose a week doing that.
I realize quick weight loss is not the end all be all way to do things, but it's how they need to be done right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
You are not going to want to hear this... No. They don't need to be done that way right now. Nor do they ever.
Who cares how much you lose a week as long as you actually change your way of eating forever? Think of it. No more "going on a diet" or "off the diet" ever again.
How many times do you want to lose a "significant" amount of weight really fast just to gain it all back again?
To be sure, it's not the fast part that is detrimental. Rather, it's the mentality that it MUST be fast or it's not good enough that is.
Frustrated!!!
