help with a stall/gain

the_gould

Member
Hi there folks

i used to be 33 stone i am down to 15 st 10 lbs i was down at 14 st 7 lbs but for some reason i have put a little bit on. i have stuck to almost no carbs a day - under 10 G a day and its all from veg and so on. i dont touch sugar or white flower .

i used to eat under 1500 cals and do gym for a hour a day 3 times a week. in essance with the workout i was only eating 700 cals a day . i am now eating about 1800 - 2000 cals a day

i just feel my body is rebelling and wanting to add weight. i mostly eat protein. Chicken - a protein shake first thing in the morning. and to be honest my day is almost all protein apart from the veg. could this be whats adding weight? too much protein ? any thoughts? i wanna get back down to 14 St dead .

i stopped treat/cheat days. should i have one day every so often where i just increase my carbs and calories just to kinda reset my metabolism??
 
Your gain is probably glycogen being replaced by your body, and that can weigh up to 6lbs. Anyone on a low carb regime will suffer from this from time to time, its not an actual weight gain as such, just your body restoring its 'instant energy' stores. Keep at what you are doing and it should start to come off again.
 
Your gain is probably glycogen being replaced by your body, and that can weigh up to 6lbs. Anyone on a low carb regime will suffer from this from time to time, its not an actual weight gain as such, just your body restoring its 'instant energy' stores. Keep at what you are doing and it should start to come off again.

but if i have not been touching carbs where is the body taking the Glycogen stores from??

does your body really do this on low carb??
 
This is my understanding, in a very rough nutshell of how it works.

When you eat, your body's first reaction is to convert the food into energy by converting it into glucose. This puts your blood glucose levels up. Your body then reacts to this by producing insulin, which in turn stores the excess glucose that you dont immediately need to use, as glycogen in your body's cells. Each glycogen molecule requires 4 water molecules to store it, so your body retains 4 times as much fluid as it does glycogen, and so this can contribute as much as 6lb in weight. So when you first go on a diet, you will get a great weight loss intially as you will lose that fluid when you use up the glycogen stores.

The glycogen is there to be used by your body as an instant energy reserve, and is also used up overnight as you sleep to keep your body ticking over. When you cut down on carbs your body's first reaction to this is to use the glycogen stores as instant energy as you need it, as it takes much longer for the body to process protein and fat into glucose for the body to use for energy.

On a long term low carb regime, at some point your body will start to restore the glycogen stores, which results in a stall in apparent weight loss. You will find that you are still losing fat, but your weight wont move for a while. When this happens it appears that the diet is no longer working and its easy to get discouraged, so the temptation is to go back to the old eating habits.

So you can see that when you hit a stall in weight loss, it is important to keep going with the diet, because you will eventually catch up and start to see a weight loss again.

Part of the reason of the success of low carb diets is that once your glycogen stores are used up, your body is forced to burn body fat to keep your energy stores going, and it does this by producing ketones which will burn fat. This is known as ketosis. You mention in your original post 'cheat/treat' days' and I assume by this that you are allowing some extra carbs on those days. This takes you out of ketosis and stops the fat burning process, so also results in slowing up the weight loss. It is important that if you are following a low carb regime, that you stick to it strictly in order to achieve and keep going with the fat burning process.
 
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