Health & Family Biggest Loser Winter 2017

I made some changes in the last week - decided to try cutting out dairy for a while. The lactose heavy stuff at least, so no milk, cream and especially no icecream. I'll still eat cheese and use butter in my cooking.

I'm already feeling better for it - energy levels are up, my snoring has improved so I'm sleeping better, I even had enough energy for a 5 hour bike ride on Sunday evening (nearly 70km - my longest ever!).

I weighed myself Sunday morning (before my ride), I was down 0.9kg from the previous Monday (111.6kg). Then I weighed myself again Monday morning (after my ride) and I was down a further 0.9kg! (110.7kg) So 1.8kg lost for the week, which I'm pretty happy about.

11/09/2017 - weight: 110.7kg - waist: 116.0cm

 

Interesting week. After the previous week's big losses, I packed on a few kg at the beginning of last week, but have successfully lost it all again by the end of the week. I now know what I did wrong - and I'm confident I can avoid that again.

18/09/2017 - weight: 110.8kg - waist: 116cm



The chart doesn't tell the whole story - after being 110.7kg last Monday, I weighed in at 114kg on Wednesday and now back down to 110.8kg today!! So even though the chart shows I've gone backwards - I actually feel like I've made huge progress the past few days. Explanation here: My low carb weight loss journal (LCHF)

 

Looks like everyone else has given up now that winter is over - I'm finally making good progress now, so I'll keep documenting for a bit.

25/09/2017 - weight: 109.0kg - waist: 115cm



Pretty happy with a 1.8kg drop for the week. Waist has started to shrink again too.

More details here.

 

That'd do it!

 

Perhaps you need to try going really low carb for a while to see if that helps? I know if I have some carbs, like dessert on Wednesday night, it can take a few days to get back to where I was.

I've had to go pretty hard core to break through my plateau.

 

Right now I'd be eating under 5g of carbs most days - incidental carbs only. My butter cocoa has less than 1g, there's virtually nothing in the cheese / salami I eat. It would only be the vegetables I eat which have any carb content.

That being said - I am using Endura Optimizer when I go for longer bike rides - that has a heap of carbs in it (60g per serve I think), but I should easily burn that and more from the exercise, so I'm not overly concerned. I'm avoiding artificial sweeteners, so I'm not really interested in trying the low carb Endura product.

 

Yeah - I think it's likely that you're simply finding the equilibrium for your activity level - you may be able to lose more, but unless you either increase the amount of activity (and you're already doing quite a bit!), or keep even more tight control over the amount of carbs you eat - you may not be able to maintain it.

I've already come to the conclusion that even once I've reached a more "ideal" weight, I'm never going to be able to go back to eating many carbs - I think my body is so good at storing carbs as fat, I'm simply going to have to avoid them unless I'm also dramatically increasing my activity levels.

The problem with relying on activity levels to control weight is that it isn't necessarily sustainable. Injury, illness, work commitments, even just getting older (and longer recovery times) - makes it increasingly difficult to maintain higher levels of activity.

Another factor is how much fat do you typically eat? I know I've read of some people over-doing the fat and ending up consuming more calories than they need.

At the end of the day - you may need to find something other than weight to focus on. I don't think it's particularly healthy to get fixated on a number on the scales. Goals are fine - but if you're having to push yourself really hard to achieve something you don't necessarily need to achieve, I think you have to wonder if it is really worth it?

Do you consider yourself otherwise healthy? Is you waist-to-height ratio well under 0.5? Have you had a full medical check done recently?

I think "strong" is a much better goal than "light" - especially for women (and even more so the older you get).

 

Hate to tell you this, but you're not a teenager anymore

That being said - I'm also aiming to get back to something approaching a photo I have of myself shortly after I started uni at age 17 (grey hairs and wrinkles notwithstanding).

Yup - as a general health indicator it shows that you are much more likely to be "healthy" than if your ratio was above 0.5

 

@Kinnon Bell - have a read through the Cholesterol Code » Reverse Engineering the Mystery website.

I'm not sure you exactly qualify as what they call a "Lean Mass Hyper-responder" (not overweight, but show high cholesterol on a ketogenic diet ... but your cholesterol levels aren't as high as the figures they are quoting) - as per Are you a Lean Mass Hyper-responder? » Cholesterol Code

... either way, there is some very interesting research being done into exactly how Cholesterol works in the body (noting that it operates completely differently on a low carb diet than it does on a higher carb diet!).

There haven't been any definitive conclusions yet - but the general consensus so far is leaning towards discounting cholesterol as a significant indicator of heart related issues - it's much more likely either something else (inflammatory illness) or completely benign (just cholesterol doing what it is supposed to do).

Note that cholesterol is primarily an energy distribution system - that's it's prime function in the body. It could just be that you're very active while eating a ketogenic diet and so you naturally end up with more cholesterol in your system to transport triglycerides etc to the muscles.

It could also be that you have some other kind of inflammatory illness - is there a history of Coeliac disease in your family? I was reading about the link between Coeliac disease (which causes inflammation in the body) and cholesterol (where one of the functions of the cholesterol particles is to repair damaged cells, so it's quite likely that you will see more cholesterol as a response to inflammation in the body. There are plenty of other factors which cause inflammation in the body too.

I wouldn't give up on your way of eating just yet - it's clear from the results we're seeing from Dave Feldman's experiments that the current body of knowledge around Cholesterol in the body is woefully inadequate and needs to be reassessed.

 

Coeliac testing is known to show false negatives, so don't discount it completely - more advice / testing likely required.

The biggest problem is that if you're already eating low carb, you're naturally not going to eat much in the way of gluten - so there may not be enough gluten in your system to trigger a response for an accurate reading anyway. My understanding is that it's not necessarily an instant thing either - (ie it's not a case of "you eat bread, you then have a positive response") - it can take a while for the tests to become more conclusive.

My wife is currently gluten loading (I think a minimum of 2 slices of bread a day was the instruction) for a couple of months before she takes another test to see if she has coeliac (there is family history) - as she previously had a negative response but specialist wants a more definitive result to complete rule it out (or not).