How to Handle Weight Loss Stalls

If you spend any amount of time on the various low-carb boards and egroups, the one type of post that tends to come up over and over again, is in regards to the speed of weight loss. Generally these people are those who've lost a lot of weight on Induction, but are now in a weight loss pause, and the pause has scared them.

Typically, they're depressed, whiny, analytically frustrated because they are losing weight as quickly as they believe they should. Or as quickly as they did in the beginning. Or as quickly as someone else is losing.

Now there's a lot of information on the web about what might be causing the plateau or stall, and what one can do about it physically to try and change the situation. But let's be honest here. The answers conflict and results from trying all of those things vary so greatly from person to person, that in the meantime, it can flat out drive you crazy enough to just give up on the whole diet thing.

So what's a person to DO while they're experimenting with upping/lowering protein, upping/lowering carbs, upping/lowering calories, drinking more water, or trying out a new plan?

The first thing to do is to take a breath, step back just a pace, and accept the fact that most people who complain they are stalled, really aren't. Why? Because the body doesn't like shrinking fat cells, it doesn't like all of the yo-yo stuff we do to it, and it especially doesn't like the dehydration and water loss we've inflicted upon it by forcing it to call upon our liver glycogen reserves.

So it fills the fat cells with water to compensate. Not permanently, but sometimes for a long enough time to make us freak out a bit. Long enough to make us believe that we are never going to reach our weight loss goal. That we're never going to be able to become anything close to normal. Whatever we define that to be.

That makes the problem not really one of initiating fat loss as much as it makes the problem one of motivation, because most folks who are freaking out about their weight loss plateau are generally doing so after not having lost any weight for a mere 3 days, or perhaps a week. They think back to the amount of weight they lost during Induction, and want to know why that rate of loss isn't continuing. What's wrong with them...what's wrong with the diet...if it's not going to work, they might as well eat carbs.

Okay. I can understand where their head is at. I really can. As I've been at this diet thing for over 3 years now, and I'm still just a little more than halfway to goal. And while I can't relate to freaking out after 3 days or a week, I can relate to the notion that if this thing isn't going to work, I might as well eat carbs. Because the truth is, I've done that. I've actually tried that approach.

But you know what?

What stops me each and every time, after a few pounds gain, is the reality that I really, Really, REALLY do not want to go back to who and what I was before. I don't want to go back to weighing 256.5 lbs, and wearing size 3x's. I don't want to go back to the Neuropathy that was so bad I couldn't walk 2 steps without putting on my good, solid tennis. I don't want to live with the heart palpitations, the high blood pressure, and the irratic blood glucose levels the doctor keeps insisting is a fluke.

So I do a fast 180-degree turn, and come back.

I come back each and every time I stray because even though low-carb is no longer working for me, and raises my blood glucose levels to pre-diabetic levels, it helps me from undoing everything I've achieved so far. Real honest to goodness fat loss. It allows me to walk around my house in my stocking feet without having to wear shoes every waking minute of the day. And it helps me make more nutritious choices, like all of the veggies I otherwise wouldn't eat.

I suppose in the position I'm standing in right now, it would be easy to chuck it all for something else. But I can't help but ask myself what's the worse thing that could happen to me if I stayed at the weight I am right now? If all of my future twists and turns don't pan out, and don't get me moving downwards ever again, would that really be so bad?

Probably not--not when you consider what the alternative to that actually is. Is it better to live out the rest of my life on some type of doable low-carb maintenance plan as a size 14, or on a high carb plan that reaps me a size 26?

Okay. So I'll take the doable low-carb maintenance plan as a size 14.

But...I don't know that I've made myself a HAPPY lifestyle choice by doing that. Maybe because I haven't yet found that maintenance level of good health that will net me something more sustainable than pre-diabetic glucose levels. And maybe it's because I haven't yet thoroughly explored all of the possible alternatives. All of the maintenance possibilities that will grant health along with my current size.

I do plan to do that when my current situation betters a bit, like drastically lowering my omega 6 intake, (which I think is why I'm beginning to lose heart with the South Beach Diet), and become more dedicated to eliminating fructose from my diet, since I have to read each and every label anyways due to the gluten intolerance. Experiment with a few healthy carbs like brown rice and sweet potatoes, rather than high carb, high fat desserts.

However, I'm not so sure that focusing on food, even healthy food, is really the best choice when one has been stalled for a couple of years now. 

I'm beginning to think that the answer, the real answer, centers around gratitude. Because I really am grateful to Dr. Atkins and Dr. Eades who have made possible what I've been able to accomplish so far. I really am grateful to Lyle McDonald for helping me understand thermodynamics and leptin and how all of that pertains and is applicable in the context of fat loss. I really am grateful to Dr. Agatson of South Beach, and the author's of the Sugar Busters diet (can't remember their names right now), for giving me a different way of approaching food and carbs without all of that counting that can get so obsessive.

And now I'm really grateful to Matt Stone of 180-Degree Health who's writings that I have read to date have given me a new sense of hope. While he tends to be quite controversial and totally anti-lowcarb, and maybe even a bit crazy in his beliefs, he does give one pause for thought on so many issues low carbers are generally not willing to even look at. Let alone experiment with. Like over-consumption of omega 6, high cortisol levels, and a depressed metabolism.

All things I'll be looking into in the near future.

But for now...I'd also like to say that I'm very grateful for all of the people on the various boards and egroups who have highly influenced me in my journey to date. My readers who ask me hard questions, and make me rethink my current positions. Because throughout all of this, I've come to understand that our journey to health isn't something we do by ourselves. Not really.

Even though we each have to take the actual steps, our journey to health is a collective, inter-mingling effort. And as such, it takes us all to make that happen.