So Ive been on the ideal protein diet and was on it for 12 weeks and have lost 41#s which is good...However, i am going on vacation starting next friday and so decided that it was time to switch over from drinking shakes for breaky and lunch to actually eating meals so that my stomach can get used to eating full meals(ive suffered digestive issues in the past) ...The thing is...im used to the same ol same old menu every single day and i like control over my diet..it makes me feel better about myself...So the idea of walking into a grocery store or restraunt and ordering anything(except gluten and wheat products) seems crazy... Needless to say.. i did it today..

However.. the fear of gaining back all the weight i lost over the next two weeks is freaking me out and causing me anxiety..Someone tell me.. what is the average weight gain in 2 weeks for a normal person?

that really depends. even if you go hog wild, you will absolutely not gain back 41 lbs any time soon.

if you're keeping your meals healthy, you likely wont gain anything. are you using an alternative method like calorie counting now?

Well, it's up to you. If you eat in a controlled manner, I'd expect 2-4 pounds, max, that would be gone soon enough. But for me, at least, if I went crazy and ate huge amounts of rich food? I could put on 7-10 pounds in two weeks, easy. It's amazing what you can gorge on if you set your mind to it. And similarly, you can do remarkably well on vacation if you focus on staying on plan.

I won't even tell you what my 2 week record was. It's too embarassing (and I don't embarass easily and don't mind admitting to a 10 lb gain during TOM so you can rightly guess that it's far more than 10 lbs, like two or three times ten pounds... ok I guess I've said it without saying it).

I don't know what the average or normal gain is, because I don't think I've ever been average or normal.

Now even when I'm on vacation and not strictly limiting (or not limiting at all) what I eat, I still try to keep count, or at least journal. I find that if I "write before I bite," even if I'm not conting calories or exchanges - the act of writing makes me more conscious of what I'm eating, and less likely to go hog-wild.

I'm planning a week or longer trip to my family in Illinois this month, and they keep ridiculous amounts of food and junk food in the house. I always take some food with me, and had my cereal, protein shake or bar for breakfast and then I ate with them for the main meal, and would then snack on veggies and fruit (they do keep a lot of veggies and fruit in the house too, so it's not all bad).

If Mom didn't have a food scale, I would have taken mine with me. I might take mine anyway, because I could carry it in my purse and use it at restaurants (we always go out to eat at least a couple times when I visit). I know that most restaurant food is about 100 to 150 calories per ounce (the most it can contain is about 250 calories per ounce (and that's if it were pure fat)... so I just estimate 150 calories per ounce. (I can guesstimate weight pretty well without a scale, but the scale would make me feel better).

You're a big person so simply re-introducing carbs into your diet could cause a 8-10lb weight gain. This is not a fat gain, but a weight gain.

Regardless - I don't know what eating like a "normal" person means.

Calories matter.

was it an actual gain? or just water weight? i had no idea it could jump up that fast, that scares me, lol.

It definitely was not all water weight. I have no way to estimate how much was water gain, and how much was fat (I'm sure none of it was muscle). However, it took me about two months to get the weight off, so I'd guess that at least 2/3 of it was actual fat gain.

At the time, it was incredibly easy for me to eat 10,000 calories in a single day (which would account for about a two pound fat gain). Fourteen days of this kind of eating would come to about 28 lbs, which sounds about right.

Not everyone is a binge eater who can shovel in 10,000 - 20,000 calories, but at the time I could - easily. Heck, I can think of some buffet meals that probably topped 8,000 calories.

I could always gain it far, far, far faster than I could lose it. Which is how I could spend the vast majority of my life on a diet more often than not, and still make my way to almost 400 lbs.

It's very difficult to gauge the "upper limit" of gain without having some idea of a person's capacity for binge eating.

I watched a documentary not long ago and the title included a phrase something like "I'm eating 35,000 calories a day" or something like that - and it showed several people (all over 500 lbs) and what they were eating.

And all I could think was "I never ate THAT much, but even 1/3 of that (which I very much could eat) is still a crazy amount of food, coming to the equivalent of 3 lbs of weight gain per day.

I remember the documentary saying about one of the people, something like he or she is eating "enough calories to gain 8 lbs per day."


Because backsliding is so much easier than moving forward, I try to at least stick with my food journal, because if I write it down, I'm less likely to eat non-stop.

thats amazing! wow, you've really come far since then.

35,000? i cant even imagine what id do with that many calories.. does sound kinda fun to try though, haha.

Oh yes, my 7-10 pound figure was actual fat gain, not water weight. I can eat 5000 calories a day if I let myself and don't stop when I'm full, it's pretty awful. But a little vigilance, a little accountability, or even enjoying the junk but doing it only until you're satisfied and not stuffed - that can mitigate SO much damage.

I can gain up to eight pounds in two weeks, which is a lot for a 5'2 person.

The thing is that my "normal" routine consists of no physical acitvity and maybe hogging in 2500 calories. Now for me maintenance is at 1650, thus having a surplus of almost a 1000 a day and no added metabolism bonus from working out, the pounds pile on like crazy.

Simplest thing IMHO would be to figure out how many calories you eat on an average day on your protein diet, and eat the same amount of calories in other foods while you can't go on with said diet. Maybe add 300 calories or so for maintenance mode, so you wouldn't lose anything, but not gain either.

I think as long as you don't go overeating, and keep to reasonable amounts/caloric intake, there's no reason for you to gain, and any "gain" would likely be water weight, due to suddenly reintroducing carbs in a protein-heavy diet (I guess that's what the shakes are?), not due to actually putting on pounds of fat.

As for "how many pounds would a normal person gain in 2 weeks".. uh... no idea. I'd like to say "nothing", since eating normally would mean "eating just what you need, nothing more, nothing less"? If I remember well, a person on average would gain 1 lbs of fat for roughly every 3500 calories s/he eats over her maintenance level. If you do counting, you can probably figure out what the risks would be for you, and what to stick to to avoid any real, long-term gain.

More importantly, try not to get anxious about it. Anxiety itself tends to be a trigger for overeating for a lot of people, so it really wouldn't help...

Fun in theory, miserable in practice, because even though I never got close to 35,000 calories, the third to half that I did manage was pretty miserable.

My cue to stop eating wasn't hunger ending, it was pain beginning. And even though I'd quit when the pain started, I was usually in for more severe pain later.

I can't tell you how many times I felt so miserable after a meal that I'd feel that I probably should go to the emergency room, but I was just too embarassed to admit that I'd eaten myself sick.

I haven't eaten to the point of pain in probably ten to fifteen years (though to think that most of my life I did so AT LEAST once a week, it's pretty scary), but the potential is always there and I have to remember that.


It's not just grossly obese folks who can eat like this either. There are normal weight and even thin folk who can binge this way. I've always wondered about the tiny, asian "competitive eaters" like Sonya Thomas who weighs 105 lbs. In the hot dog challenge she won, she ate 40 hotdogs which would be around 12,000 calories.

http://www.ifoce.com/rankings.php?action=detail&sn=20


I know the competitive eaters don't eat like this every day (though many "train" by eating grapes and other high-volume lower calorie foods to keep their stomaches elastic enough to hold the crazy amounts of food).

I don't follow competitive eating, but when I see it on tv accidentally, I end up watching it like a train wrek (or Maury Povich show). Ironically most of the asian competitive eaters are very tiny, and the Amercans are often hugely fat, and I wonder whether they eat differently when they're not competing, or whether the asian competitors just have insanely high metabolisms. It's also ironic that it's usually the tiny asians who win the competitions.

I think "aren't they hungry all the time, with their stomachs so stretched out?"

And when I catch myself thinking "how can they do that to themselves," I have to remind myself that I did that to myself voluntarily (and no prizes were involved).

What's crazy isn't that I got to nearly 400 lbs, it's how I didn't get bigger. And that I now have found the key to controlling hunger, and my metabolism has tanked to the point that the calorie level it takes to maintain my weight is the calorie level I would routinely lose 6 - 8 lbs per week on consistently (not just the first week).

My appetite has decreased to fraction of what it was, unfortunately my metabolism has decreased even more than the hunger.

In a way it's funny, and I can even appreciate the humor most of the time (I've always had a dark, gallows sense of humor, even and perhaps especially when I'm the victim).

When the choice is laugh or cry, you might as well laugh.

I once gained 10 pounds over a 2-week holiday, and it wasn't water weight. My friend and I ate at all-you-can-eat buffets almost every night and I showed no restraint. If you don't want to gain, you have to watch what you eat, whether by counting calories or simply moderating your portions.

F.

Wow, Port! I just wanted to pop in and congratulate you on the 41! That is wonderful...I remember what you went through before that!

Hang in there. Worst comes to worst, you know how to get back on the wagon when you get back. I went to Mexico for a week with all buffet-style foods
and gained about 3 pounds. I guess I didn't go completely nuts, but I didn't really restrain. We were doing some active things, though, walking around ruin sites and swimming. We found the buffet breakfasts were enough to sustain us through the afternoon .

For me, it's not about the 2 weeks when I'm off plan. I find it MUCH harder to get back on plan. Two weeks becomes a month, becomes 3, becomes a year....

How much weight can you gain back in a year?

All that to say for me it's a slippery slope going off plan.