Why Do stalls happen in weight loss By Terry "Why Guy" Elkins
Has your weight loss stalled, peaked, and puttered out? Have you reached a point in your diet where the scale just won’t budge no matter how hard you try, even though you know you are doing everything right? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably so frustrated you’re ready to chuck your diet and scale out the window—I almost did. But if I would have given up, and not taken the time to learn why these things happened, I never would have broken my 8-month stall, and gone on to nearly reach my goal of losing 100 lbs. As of this writing, I’ve lost 94 lbs.
This blog post is a culmination of my journey to figure out why stalls happen, and what can be done to get the weight loss moving again. I had originally posted this information on the Atkins forum on a thread titled, Why do Stalls Happen: What I’ve learned. The thread became very popular, but it also became very long, and was soon embedded with so many comments that the post grew to over 240 pages. It wasn’t long before I got numerous requests from people to condense this information into one easy to understand post without comments. The original thread got so discombobulated that only the very brave, and perhaps foolish, took the time to sift through the post to get to the heart of the information. Thus, because of the requests I’ve had, I’ve decided to posts this thread on my blog, but not in its entirety. Therefore, if something seems missing in my blog post—it is, I left out the comments. Consequently, some of the information might seem out of place, and repeated often. In editing this, I did my best to keep the flavor of the thread without changing it much. But it is my hopes that you will find this information readable, and as useful as the many others who have used these techniques to break their stalls have—including myself.
While reading this I hope that you will take into consideration the nature of this writing. It was not meant to be an academic paper on why stalls happen, or even, a how to article that you might find in numerous books or pages on the web. Instead, this was a post born out of the quest for knowledge, and shared from my heart with friends. I wrote it in a relaxed style, as if I were having a private conversation with friends. So, what you will find in reading this is that I didn’t give much thought to the etiquettes of writing, grammar, style, or references to sources. And while I, in no way, shape, or form plagiarized my words, and tried to mention sources where it was appropriate, I may have inadvertently not given credit for some source material. This was never my intention, but after reading and gathering notes from tons of sources it became hard to separate others words from my own. In fact, most of what’s written was just me thinking aloud and referring to the few notes I bothered to take down. It is my hopes that I am forgiven for this error in judgment.
I will be breaking this very long thread into several posts, with each post building on the previous post’s knowledge. I do so, in hopes that those who don’t need certain information can click on the links that pertain to them, and skip the information they don’t need. I also do this because being such a long post, it can be a long read in one sitting, and I thought it would be easier on the reader to read in bits and pieces. So please look for the other post in this series on Why do Stalls Happen? I apologize for the inconvenience.
Warning: Brevity is not my strong suit. But, what I lack in brevity I make up for in simplicity, and ease of understanding.
What you are about to read is my quest for understanding of why stalls happen. While most of this topic will be referring to the Atkins Diet that I have been on, it is still relevant to anybody on any diet. When I first started Atkins, I was quite successful, I lost 70 lbs the first 8 months on the plan, but then the weight loss stalled for the next 8 months. During this time I didn’t lose any weight, and would go up and down the same 5 lbs. This became very frustrating, and I was on the verge of quitting. However, I was lucky, I had the Atkins forum members, my support system, who refused to let me quit. In addition, Colette Heimowitz, Atkins nutritionist, helped save me from myself. She helped me come up with a plan, tweak my program, and explained to me about stalls, plateaus, and set points. With her guidance, I was soon losing again, but I wasn’t satisfied with knowing how to make changes, I wanted to know why stalls happen. Thus, the journey began. I spent several weeks pouring through books, and countless web pages on this subject; the problem was I could never find a definitive answer in one place. Therefore, I had to piece the puzzle together, and as I did, I gained a clearer understanding about why the body eventually refuses to let the weight go, and how to get things moving again. This puzzle is by no means complete; there are numerous medical reasons for a weight loss stall that I won’t be going into. Instead, I will be focusing on how set points affect us mentally and physically. In addition, I’ll be talking about the importance of knowing your Basal Metabolic Rate, (BMR), and the role these numbers play in helping reach your goals. Also, I’ll be talking a lot about starvation mode on the body, and why eating less is not always the right solution when it comes to losing weight. In addition, I’ll show how hunger and compensatory behaviors sabotage our diet. Finally, I’ll provide 25 tips and strategies that I used to help break my stall.
Before I begin the thread posted on the Atkins forum, I want to define an official stall, or plateau. According to the book, The New Atkins For A New You, “the definition of a plateau is when you lose nothing—nadda—despite doing everything right, for at least four weeks.” In addition, you are only officially stalled if:
You haven't altered your exercise regimen or made any other significant lifestyle
change.
You’re not taking any new medications (including hormone therapy) that may be interfering with weight loss.
You can honestly say you’ve adhered to all aspects of the program.
Your clothes are not fitting looser, and have not lost inches.
I met all these criteria and was way beyond officially stalled—I was going for a record. This is where my thread on the Atkins forum begins.
Why do stalls happen? I could give a simple answer, but as many of you know that’s not my style. In studying why stalls happen I’ve been doing a lot of research on set points, starvation mode, ketosis, hunger, and the causes of cravings, as well as compensatory behaviors, and thought I’d share some of my findings with those who are interested. What I’ve decided to do is a kind of thinking aloud, letting you in to the inner workings of my thought processes. (I know, scary)
Before I begin, I would like to say, most people don’t need to worry about this information on Atkins. Atkins is set up as an easy program to follow, but for those who struggle, or just want some more information on why stalls happen they might find this information useful.
My Atkins journey started on January 2, 2009. Things went great for the first 8 months; I lost 70 lbs, and then nothing the next 8 months, with no loss in weight or inches, meeting all the criteria of an official plateau. What bothered me was I knew I was in ketosis, but I wasn’t losing weight. And taking into consideration that I was eating the same food toward the end of my program as I was in the beginning, I should have been. Or so I thought.
So, I asked myself, how can a person be in ketosis, and still not lose weight? To understand this I needed to understand what ketosis is.
The food we eat provides the fuel used by our bodies for everyday activities; it also provides the raw materials to help replenish the body. The three main types of fuel for the body are carbohydrates, fats, and protein. (I’m leaving out Alcohol here intentionally, which when consumed becomes the bodies fuel of choice). Typically, carbohydrates, the body’s first fuel of choice, and are used within a few hours of eating; when the engine is running on low, the body sends out hunger signals to replenish our energy stores every few hours. They are converted to glucose, stored in the cell walls, and are drawn upon when energy needs demand them. If not used they’re turned to fat. Fat’s primary role is to store energy, and when our primary source of fuel runs out, (carbs), our body turns to this stored energy for fuel. The third fuel, protein, is primarily used to build and replenish body materials, such as our organs, tissues, and muscles. On Atkins, our job is to deplete the body’s first fuel, carbs/glycogen, and turn our body’s into fat burning machines, either using stored fat, or dietary fat as fuel. This is a ketogenic state, also called, ketosis.
According to Sugarbane, Low Carb Living for Life, “In the absence of substantial carbohydrates your body will burn any fat you digest before it touches your body fat. So if you are eating a moderate to high fat diet (even if it is still low carb) then you are going to test positive for ketosis.” However, the New Atkins book says that we are not using either or, but rather a blend of dietary fat and stored fat. But if you are not losing weight after a long period, it is obvious you are not burning more stored fat than you are putting back into the body. Thus, you are technically in ketosis, but it's not from using your body's fat. The only thing ketosis really tells you is that you aren't taking in too many carbs. Thus, you could turn ketones testing strip all shades of purple, but they will not tell you if you are doing Atkins correctly, losing stored fat, or whether or not you are losing weight. They can only tell you that your body is using fat for fuel instead of carbs/glycogen.
Note: A ketogenic diet gets 80 percent of its calories from fat. However, some of our energy does come from protein and the cannibalization of our muscles. As we cannibalize our muscles, we can also repair those muscles through adequate protein intake. Add in a little exercise and there will be no significant muscle loss on the Atkins diet, as with other diets.
So, back to the original question, how can you be in ketosis and not lose weight? The answer is obvious, if you don’t have carbs/glycogen in your system, and your body is burning fat for fuel in the form of dietary fat, or stored fat, you are in ketosis. This explained how I could be in ketosis, and not tap into stored fat, but didn’t explain why I was no longer losing weight.
Note: This is why restricting your carb intake further than needed to past the point of ketosis is not going to do much good. When you restrict those few precious carbs that you are getting, you’re taking away vital nutrients. If you go down 5 net carbs, and are eating 50 fewer calories, those calories are not going to make magically put you deeper into ketosis and get you more weight loss. The only reason to go down in carbs is if you are metabolically resistant, or you suspect you are not in ketosis.
My next question was, why am I eating the same foods I was in beginning of my diet, but not losing weight now? Did something happen to my metabolism, did it slow down, and if so, why?
When I answered this, it lead me to researching BMR’s, set points, starvation mode, and the mechanism of hunger in a healthy person, along with compensatory behaviors. I also had to look at what a metabolism is, and how it works.
One of the reasons for my stall had to do with the reduction of my BMR as I went from 260 lbs to 190 lbs. My BMR had slowed significantly, from 2,300, to approximately 1,800, the same amount of calories I was eating when I started Atkins, and the same amount I was eating when I had stalled. Since my BMR had slowed, and I did not adjust my calorie consumption, I had no weight loss. This would have been true, if not for the fact that I was active; therefore, on top of my 1,800 calorie BMR, I was burning an additional 1000 calories from activities, which should have resulted in a 2 lb loss a week. This wasn’t happening, so something had to have screwed up my metabolism. But what, what happened to those 1,000 calories I should have been burning? Did I go into starvation mode, reach a set point, or, did something else happen? Or perhaps it was a combination of things?
To understand these questions I had to understand what a metabolism does.
Metabolism is the amount of energy (calories) your body burns to maintain itself. Whether you are eating, drinking, sleeping, cleaning etc, your body is constantly burning calories to keep you going. It’s affected by your body composition, and the amount of muscle you have versus the amount of fat. Muscle uses more calories to maintain itself than fat. People who are more muscular, (and have a lower percentage of body fat), have a higher metabolism than those who are less muscular. For example, let's say you have two people who are the exact same height and weight. One exercises on a regular basis with weights, and has a low percentage of body fat. The other never exercises, and has a higher percentage of body fat. The first person who exercises will have a higher metabolism than the second person will, because the extra muscle will burn more energy. If you want to have a higher metabolism, you have to have a higher body mass, or, increase your activity level. But we don’t want that mass to be fat. Ideally, we would add more muscle. The problem with dieting, and this is on any diet you are on, you lose muscle mass. It is true that you don’t lose as much muscle mass on Atkins, but you will lose some nonetheless.
So, to answer the question, did something happen to my metabolism, did it slow down, and if so why? The answer is clear; the very act of losing weight caused me to slow down my metabolism. Not only had I lost mass due to fat loss, but I had lost muscle as well.
It was at this point the picture was starting to become clearer, but this was only part of the puzzle, there were other contributing factors to my weight loss stall. I knew I had engaged in some self-sabotaging behaviors, and so I asked myself why. My research led me to understanding the mechanism of hunger, and the role it plays in helping controlling our weight.
Did something happen to my hunger mechanism?
The next contributing component to my own weight loss stall was hunger and cravings. Before I explain what happened, let me explain a little bit about the way hunger is supposed to work. Hunger is the body’s way of getting us to consume more calories, replenish our energy supply, and regulate weight. If I were at my ideal weight, and had a healthy metabolism, on the days I burned off more calories I should be hungrier than on the days I did nothing. This seems obvious, and it explains why some days after you have worked out, or had a particularly grueling day you often feel ravenous. You have used up more of your body’s energy supply, and the body is desperately trying to replace those supplies.
One way of looking at it is through an analogy of a car. If you had a 10 gallon tank, and you used 3 gallons, you wouldn’t put in more than those three gallons, you’d put in the exact amount you needed that day. If you use more, you would put in more. In an ideal world, our bodies would work the same way, if we burned off 1,000 calories, we would eat 1,000. If we needed more, we’d eat more. Unfortunately, bodies aren’t designed that way, and that’s why we have fat reserves. The problem is, since most of us never learned to listen to our body, we have made our fat reserves larger, and now our bodies and our metabolism are malfunctioning. In essence, we have gone from a 10-gallon tank, and if you are like me, added a 20-gallon reserve.
Back to the question, what happened to my hunger mechanism? In answering this question, I had to look at set points, and starvation mode.
Set points, and starvation mode, are two entirely different mechanisms. But they both have the same effect—they slow down the metabolism. True starvation mode is rare on Atkins. This is because we are still eating plenty of food, and getting our calorie and nutrient needs met—or are supposed to be anyway. But the body does adapt and slow down, thus, we sometimes experience what you might call semi-starvation mode, or conservation mode if you prefer, which doesn’t have the same affects of full-blown starvation mode. On the other hand, set points happen regardless of the amount we eat. Set points will affect most people as the body tries to maintain the status quo, and regulate a person’s weight at a point that the body has become accustomed to, much to the detriment of the dieters wants.
What is a set point?
According to the set-point theory, there is a control system built into every person dictating how much fat he or she should carry; a kind of thermostat for body fat. Some individuals have a high setting and others a low one. According to this theory, body fat percentage and bodyweight is a matter of internal controls that are set differently in different people, and thought to be controlled by the genes.
In an overweight person, this set point will slowly raise higher and higher until it becomes very difficult to lose weight. Many of us already know about set points. When we were gaining weight each of us probably had set points, or weight plateaus, where we maintained for substantial periods, but periodically this number crept up slowly. When the body is trying to maintain its set point, it will either turn up the metabolism, or slow it down to compensate for the energy you have burned. If too much energy’s burned, it will lower the metabolism. If too little is burned, it will increase the metabolism, and increase or decrease hunger accordingly, to keep you from going above or below a certain weight. This is why you often lose a few pounds, reach a goal, and you suddenly find yourself eating everything in sight, and immediately putting back on the lost pounds. And, why so many people get discouraged and quit dieting, thinking it is their lack of will power, when in reality, it is the body trying to maintain homeostasis, and its set point. This set point mechanism is meant to keep weight constant, presumably because the unconscious mind has more accurate information about the body’s fat stores than the conscious mind can obtain.
Set point theory definitely explains what happened to my hunger mechanism, and why I didn’t know I wasn’t eating the same calories I thought I was. The body was fooling my conscious mind. It was desperate to maintain the status quo and keep my weight steady at my set point of 190 lbs.
Remember when I said that I was eating the same things at the beginning of my program, as I was when I stalled. This is not entirely true. In fact, I’m not sure. I just assumed I was. I wasn’t tracking every day, and when I was, yes, I was eating 1,800 calories, but not the same 1,800 calories as I was in the beginning of my Atkins journey. I had added many more products to my daily intake. Such as, heavy whipping cream, more diet soda, and a few other things that were still Atkins friendly, but not what I had originally been eating. My ratios were still the same as before, but this was definitely not the same food. The only way the body, and my hunger mechanism, could do this was change my cravings for foods that it knew would keep me from losing weight. In addition, it fooled me into thinking it was ok not to keep track of my food every day. I was sure I had it down pat, but I was wrong. By not doing so, there could have been days that I ate 2,000 calories or more without really being aware of it. Thus, adding back any pounds that I may have lost on the days I was a little stricter with my tracking.
Before I go on, I wanted to share with you some insights into what I discovered about my set point range. In my experience, a set point range usually falls into a 5-8 lb range. I’ve had five set points climbing the weight loss ladder to obesity, and have hit all five coming back down that ladder. For example, one such set point was when I hit 193 lbs, this being the low end of a 5 lb range, and 198 being the high end. Whenever I reached the high end of that range, my motivation to lose weight would increase. I became more diligent in my tracking, my energy would increase, and my appetite became suppressed. It wouldn’t be long before my weight would go back down. As I reached the low end of my set point of 193 lbs, my metabolism would slow down, I’d become sluggish, lethargic, depressed, and I would constantly think about food. It was at this point that I would stop tracking my food, and start packing on the pounds. Only in the middle range did I take no action, I would spend much of my time in this range worrying about my weight.
I now understood what happened to my hunger mechanism due to set points and why my metabolism had slowed down, but this didn’t explain what happens to those extra calories I’m no longer burning. If I’m no longer burning those extra calories where did they go, and how did this slowing down of my metabolism affect my body?
Quick digression: You are lucky you are not inside of my head. See how one question leads to another, it drives me bonkers.
I want you to imagine a city in California whose power supply is limited. What do they do when the supply is limited? They have rolling black outs to conserve energy, and keep the extra energy they do have stored for future use. They may know a heat wave is coming, and want to be prepared in the event of an emergency. The body works the same way, our stored fat is our reserve energy and the body wants to hold onto that stored energy in case of an emergency. Even though we have been good Atkins dieters, our bodies still don’t trust us yet, so when it hits a set point and slows down, it is really preparing for the future, based on what we have taught it with our eating habits in the past. In my case, by eating so few calories in the past, I barely took care of my vital functions, such as breathing, digestion, blood circulation, etc, and taught my body to begin shutting down systems. Much in the same way a city does. When a city has a rolling black out, power is not shut down to vital functions of the city like hospitals, police departments, or the many businesses the city needs to stay functioning. No, only some areas go without power. Since my set point had gone down to only use the calories I was eating, 1,800, and not tap into energy reserves/fat stores, some areas of the body had to go without power. When this happened to me, I experienced lethargy, sore muscles, headaches, depression, foggy thinking, ravenous hunger, and a host of other symptoms. This explains why many people on diets feel tired all the time, and eventually crave foods that will bring their energy level up, and it explains why dieting is such hard work. It’s exhausting on the body.
I had my answer to what happened to my metabolism, it slowed down and experienced rolling black outs. It was time to move on to the next piece of the puzzle, starvation mode. In doing this research, I saw many similarities between set points, and starvation mode, in which I’ll share.
What is starvation mode?
Starvation mode, as most people understand it is when the body mechanism that controls our metabolism slows down, much in the same way set point theory explains it. The difference is, in the case of starvation mode, the slowing of the metabolism is due to the restriction of calories beyond what the body needs to take care of its vital functions. Whereas, set point theory is more about the body staying in a state of homeostasis, or comfort, due to genetic and environmental factors.
You would think that if eating 500 less is good, then eating 1,000 calories must be better, and the quicker the body will take fat out of storage. This is not true, when we deprive our body of calories, and vital nutrients for too long, it signals the body that there is an emergency coming, and it needs to conserve energy. It does this by slowing down the metabolic rate, which we know causes rolling black outs, this is known as starvation mode, or metabolic adaptation. This reduction in the metabolic rate can be as much as 40%. This can be as many as 400-800 fewer calories being burned a day for some people. This adaptive reduction in resting metabolic rate is the way the body defends itself against further loss of energy stores. When a diet done right, such as Atkins, we should burn just enough calories to tap into our energy stores, and still leave the body plenty of fuel for taking care of its vital functions. We do this by losing no more than 1-2 lbs a week
Remember, the body will only release its fat stores if it knows there is plenty of nutritious food coming into the body. If we go beyond burning more calories than we should, we risk turning the body into a fat storage machine that will run on less energy, and begin to turn everything we eat into fat. When this happens, the body will start getting its fuel sources from wherever it can. It may even begin cannibalizing itself, burning the body’s protein for fuel; which really means it is eating away its own muscle tissue. Since your muscle and lean organ tissues are the real calorie burners in your body, the more of it you lose, the less you can eat without gaining weight. You will now have a lower BMR due to the lack of muscle mass in your body. This also explains why people who lose weight with semi-starvation diets almost inevitably regain all their weight, and why, when they return to normal eating levels—it doesn’t come back as muscle or organ tissue, it comes back as fat.
The good news is that while on Atkins we should never go into starvation mode, we get plenty of nutrition through our veggies, and our calorie intake, so true starvation mode never kicks in. Thus, we retain much of our lean muscle mass. But for those who choose to go below their starvation threshold, or don’t know it, they run the risk of becoming fat storing machines that cannibalize their own bodies.
Knowing this information, I had to ask, what is the starvation threshold, and is it different for everybody?
Atkins does a great job when they tell women they shouldn’t go below 1,500 calories, and men shouldn’t go below 1,800 calories. For most people, these numbers are going to keep them from going into starvation mode. Does this mean for women it is 1,500, and for men 1,800? Does this mean if you go below these numbers day in and day out you will automatically go into starvation mode? No, there are many factors to take into consideration when deciding what a person’s starvation threshold is. Things like body size, age, gender, general health, genes, and activity level. This is why it’s important to understand your own body, and what your personal threshold is.
The starvation mode threshold is 50% of what the body requires to meet its energy needs. In a person who has a metabolism set at 2,000 calories, this would mean consuming 1,000 calories a day. When cutting calories this drastically, you run the risk of going into starvation mode, as the men in the Minnesota study did. The primary objective of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment was to study the physical and psychological effects of prolonged famine-like semi-starvation on healthy men. Their calories were originally set at 3,200, and later reduced to 1,560, which was half of their bodies’ needs. They also had to maintain a regular physical activity schedule, which increased their energy expenditure even further. This resulted in the starvation mode affect.
Therefore, if you want to keep from going into starvation mode, you can’t have a defect of more than half of your body’s total needs. However, it is generally accepted that we should not reduce our calories needs by much more than 500 calories a day. I’ve seen numbers for this vary, with some saying no more than 700, and others, up to a 1,000 if you are severely obese. To understand your own needs, you need to take your total energy (calories) need, which includes your BMR and your energy expenditure from lifestyle activities, and deduct the total energy eaten. If the deficit is between 500 and 700, you're probably fine, but if the deficit is over 1,000, you may be in for trouble.
For example, my BMR says I need approximately 1,800 hundred calories to run my body, and after adding calories burned from my daily activities, had a total burn rate of 3,000 calories. If I subtract what I eat in a day, 1,800 calories from my energy expenditure I come up with 1,200 calories deficit. This was an unhealthy rate of loss, and more than likely put me near starvation mode levels. At the very least my body was experiencing rolling black outs to conserve energy.
Note: I’ll explain more on how you can find your own burn rate, BMR levels, and find your starvation level threshold in the section entitled. “Fixing a broken metabolism”.
Knowing what I know about starvation modes and set points, as well as BMR, and daily energy expenditures, I next needed to know just how exercise affected my BMR and my metabolism. I was already burning more calories than I was eating, could exercise be doing more harm than good?
There is no doubt exercise is good for the health, but how good it is for weight loss really depends on how much we do. We could do too much and sabotage our own efforts in many ways, but if we find the right balance between exercise and nutrition, we will obtain optimal health, and a healthy weight loss that can be easily maintained. One of the greatest benefits of exercise for those trying to maintain their weight is the increase in metabolism and BMR due to increased muscle mass. On top of this, if you are trying to maintain your weight, for every calorie you burn because of the extra muscle mass, you could eat one more calorie, and if you love food as much as I do this is great news.
But how does exercise benefit those who want to lose weight?
A recent study, published by Plos One, tracked many women. One group was asked to work out, and the other was asked not to exercise at all. None of the women were asked to change their eating habits. What they found was surprising. All of the women lost 2-5 lbs; even the women who were not asked to exercise.
Why did this happen? You would think that the women who exercised would have lost more weight. What they found happened, was that those who engaged in exercise also engaged in compensatory behaviors. They found these women had increased hunger, and fatigue that negated the benefits of burning more through exercise. Does this sound familiar, it does me, it sounds like set point adaptation kicking in.
What caused these compensatory behaviors? If you remember what happens to the body when it reaches a set point, or is comfortable at a particular weight, it will do everything it can to fight back and maintain the status quo. Remember, these women were not focusing on their food, only their exercise. But the women who exercised unintentionally left their bodies hunger mechanism wide open, thus, they ate more. If they ate more, there would be no body weight loss, and the body would remain in homeostasis. On top of this, I believe they may have been suffering from rolling black outs as well; which would explain their fatigue. The body was doing everything it could to make sure they would not change their weight.
This same thing has happened to me, my energy levels had gone down, and my motivation to exercise had decreased as well. However, I’m still exercising, especially knowing what I know now about how the body tries to sabotage my effort. I’m not falling for any of those old tricks. If I were to listen to my body completely I’d not get up off the couch.
Note: I have recently started calling this trickster of the mind who sabotages my weight loss efforts “The Set Point Monster”.
This newest information on self-sabotaging and compensatory behaviors leads me to believe that you can’t believe everything you think. How many times have you sabotaged your own efforts when you dedicated yourself to exercise? Did you lose your energy, your motivation, and convince yourself this isn’t what you really wanted? Did you schedule time to exercise, but found you were always making excuses, or filling up your schedule with other things to do? Such as, wash the dog, work in the yard, go to the library, visit your aunt Mildred, or did you say things like, “it’s too cold outside to go for a walk.” In some cases, you may even cause yourself an injury unconsciously; pulling a muscle, causing a sprain, or twisting a tendon. I wonder how much of this behavior was your body trying to maintain its set point by sabotaging your efforts. If any of these things have happened to you, it’s probably an attack by the Set Point Monster.
Other drawbacks to exercise.
One of the biggest drawbacks to too much exercise is that we can throw our body into starvation mode if our calorie deficit becomes greater than it should be. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people on the Atkins forum say, “I’m stalled, and doing everything right”. Then they say they are eating 1,500 calories a day, doing cardio for an hour, and strength training 5 days a week. This is nuts, they are burning way more calories than they are taking in, and putting themselves at risk for serious health issues, not the least of which is stalled weight loss.
For example, let’s say you have a energy expenditure of 2,000 calories a day. You cut back 500 calories, and only eat 1,500. This should give you a healthy rate of loss of 1 lb per week. However, you decide to work out like crazy, doing hours of weight training and cardio, burning an extra 1,000 calories a day. You’ve now raised your deficit to 1,500 calories a day, which only leaves the body 500 calories to take care of vital functions. From what you’ve learned so far, you can see this is not healthy; you are at risk of going into starvation mode. There is no way you are getting the proper number of nutrients or meeting the body’s energy needs. It won’t be long before the body slows down and causes more rolling black outs.
The true benefit of exercise is not that you can lose weight while doing it; it should be that you can exercise and burn calories without having to cut your calories to the point that you are not eating enough to satisfy you, or your bodies needs. Exercise and diet should be a balance between cutting calories, and burning calories through exercise—an either or proposition, not both! If you are going to burn 1,000 calories from exercise, you better feed the body more fuel to keep your deficit from becoming too great.
Another drawback, for those only doing cardio, if they do too much, is that they can have a loss of muscle mass. Take a runner for example, they are skinny, and their muscle mass is not as great as a person who adds in weight training, therefore, their BMR is going to be less than a person with a healthy balance of muscle mass. Again, each person must find the right balance for his or her body. This does not mean you should not exercise, but you should be aware of how exercise affects the body and changes your energy needs, and adjust accordingly. For those exercising, and have reached a stall, this is something to seriously consider. Remember, if you exercise smartly, increase you lean muscle mass, and increase your BMR, it can help reach your weight loss goals, but over doing it can do more harm than good.
Now that I’ve thrown all this information out there, I’ll talk a little about how I broke my stall, give some tips on how you can break through set points, and keep from going into starvation mode. At this point most of what I’m going to say is going to be somewhat obvious because I’ve already covered it somewhere in the tome I’ve been writing.
Remember, I had the longest stall on record; I had lost 70 lbs, and then nothing for 8 months. I kept doing what I knew how to do, or thought I knew how to do, and still wasn’t seeing results. I thought I was doing everything right, but as I mentioned before I eventually learned that what I was doing wasn’t anywhere near reality.
I was still eating 1,800 calories a day, and maintaining my net carbs at 25, but I wasn’t losing. It wasn’t until I got frustrated and talked to Colette Heimowitz, (an Angel in disguise), that I was able to understand what I was doing wrong. Colette talked to me a little bit about set points, and made me understand how my body was fighting to stay at a weight that it was comfortable maintaining. (Everything we’ve been talking about). This didn’t make sense to me at the time, but now it does.
We looked at my food, and discovered there were still options to try before trying anything drastic. Here is what I did.
I maintained my 1,800 calories.
I cut my carbs down to 15, just to make sure I was in ketosis and to jumpstart my fat burning machine. This level of carbs only lasted about 10 days before I moved them back up.
She suggested I cut my artificial sweeteners down from to 3—I was eating 6.
She suggested I cut my Diet Pepsi out completely for a while. And I hated her for that.
She suggested I give up all products and treats and replaced them with real food. Somehow, I had managed to change my original eating habits to my new and improved version of 1,800 hundred calories a day, this included heavy whipping cream in large quantities, and at least one Atkins product a day. This accounted for almost 400 calories or more in my daily intake of fuel. While my fat/protein/carb ratios and calorie counts remained the same as before, this was nowhere near how I was eating originally.
When I first made these changes I was amazed at how much actual real food I was stuffing myself with, I had to add butter and olive oil back into my diet, which I had taken out to make room for the junk.
The other thing I did was make sure I tracked every bite that went into my mouth. As I said earlier, I had stop tracking as much as I should, and was only doing spot checks. This means I could have been eating more than my 1,800 calories, or even less, which may have put me into starvation mode. I’m not quite sure. Pair this with the fact that my body was fooling me telling me the things I was eating was ok, and the same as before, and I had a recipe for a disaster, and that manifested in the longest stall on record. Within a few short days of making these changes, I began dropping the weight, and within a week, I had lost 4 lbs.
This break in my stall was exhilarating, but I still wasn’t satisfied, I took all the information that I had learned, that you are reading now, and continued to make changes to my dietary needs, making sure to avoid starvation mode, and becoming aware of the Set Point Monster’s evil ways. In the eight months since breaking my stall, I’ve lost 34 lbs, and am nearly at my goal weight of 160 lbs, with only 6 lbs left to go.
Before I go on, I want to recap a few things about set point and starvation mode.
True starvation mode happens when we reduce our calories by 50%. However, just because we aren’t in starvation mode doesn’t mean we are not on our way. Each time we take in fewer calories than we burn, our bodies go into survival mode, and starts shutting down systems. It’s important to note here that as long as we are dieting our bodies will never be running at peak performance, and we will never have our full vitality. The closer we get to that 50% the more systems we shut down. So, even though on Atkins we don’t usually reduce our calories sufficiently enough to cause system failure, if we follow minimum guidelines, we are always on our way.
Important note: This is why it is of vital importance we take our recommended vitamins supplements. vitamins help keep us running closer to peak performance than our diet alone can provide. The fact of the matter is, when dieting we can’t hope to provide the body with all its nutrient demands. Yes, the body will get some of its nutrients from stored fat, but the nutrients in fat cannot take care of the all the body’s needs. Fat, is only able to store fat-soluble vitamins, such as, A, D, E and K. So please keep this in mind the next time you are tempted to skip your daily dose of vitamins.
I’d like to take you on a journey of just what happens as you reduce your calorie intake, and the body stops running at peak performance.
Using the rolling black out analogy, let’s say your body needs 3,000 calories to run at peak performance. You reduce calories by 250, and maybe your lose a little sheen to your hair, your skin becomes dry, and your nails become brittle (residential homes); this is hardly noticeable, only incontinent, so you tally on. You reduce by 500 and small businesses start closing down. Your body starts feeling a little sluggish, you get bags under your eyes, and you look tired, but you are losing weight, so you deal with it. You then reduce calories by 750, you’ve lost some weight, but your metabolism starts creaking and groaning, it now shuts down major businesses, and you start experiencing nausea, light headiness, indigestion, and at this point you may become hungry all the time as your body starts craving more nutrition. Then you decide to reduce by another 1,000 calories and vital city departments lose power. The police and sanitation department are now closed. Your immune system lowered, and you are now experience problems with your intestines. You become constipated, or get diarrhea, and you start retaining water because the city sewer has switched off. Next, your metabolism starts slowing even further, you stop losing weight, and you even start seeing small water weight gains. You become discouraged, but you haven’t given up. You now reduce another 500 calories, reaching your 50% starvation threshold, and all hell breaks loose. Hospitals begin to close, the state declares a national emergency, and the reserves are called in to save you from yourself. At this point you start losing even more muscle, further slowing down your metabolism; the state starts hording all energy, water, and fat reserves. But you are seeing results, so you keep going. You reduce again, and again, and soon find yourself in the hospital as your body slowly eats away at itself and you become sick. But you are now skinny, and happy. That is until you can no longer control your hunger and you quit dieting, that is, if you don’t die first. When this happens, you have lost the battle, your diet has failed, and your hunger is once again out of control. Just as it had been when you gained all your weight.
Let’s look at what happens when hunger gets out of control, and how this contributes to yo-yo dieting, and weight gain.
I mentioned some of the signs and symptoms of starvation mode earlier, such as muscle loss, fatigue, headaches, (rolling black outs). But the one thing that sets starvation mode apart from set points, and metabolic adaptation is hunger. I’m not talking about a little hunger, or a few cravings, I’m talking ravenous I’d- eat-your-dog-type-hunger. This hunger is primal, and the urge to seek out food is so strong you will forgo reason, and all other forms of moral control to get even a little nutrition into your body—and yes, including sex.
For example, at one time, in the south, there were people known as clay eaters. These people would eat dirt just to get some of the vitamins and minerals that were missing from their diet. And we’ve all heard stories of people who were starving eating their dead, or people who ate maggots, worms, and other insects to survive. I recently saw a show on the Discovery Channel of a man lost at sea on a small boat who had plenty of fish, but he was slowly wasting away because the fish wasn’t giving him all the nutrients he needed to survive. Once he was thrown into starvation mode his body naturally knew what to do, he soon began eating parts of the fish that he wouldn’t before because it was to disgusting. He ate the eyes, the scales, and even the intestines; all of which provided him with enough vital nutrients to survive his ordeal. In fact, not only did he eat these things, they actually tasted delicious. His body needed him to eat the whole fish so it fooled him by changing his sense of taste so that what he was eating tasted like a culinary delight. This urge to eat became so strong in the men in the men of the Minnesota study that when the study was done, and they once again had access to food, many of them ate until they puked, and then would ask for more.
The reason I mention this food seeking behavior is I want you to be aware why most diets eventually fail. When many people go on diets, they are so deprived of food that their body is screaming at them to eat, eat all it can. For a short period, we can control these urges, but after a little time passes, and our drive and will wanes, we often give into our hunger and gorge ourselves on any and everything in sight. We will often do this until we regain all of our lost weight, and even add on some extra pounds. This is the bodies way of making sure that next time you do something stupid like starving yourself it will be prepared with more fat reserves.
Can you now see why starving yourself on any diet is so bad for you, and how the very thing you are doing to lose weight is actually sabotaging your efforts? I also hope you can see that your failure on your diet is not your fault. You are neither weak, nor lazy; the very act of dieting the wrong way and trying to go to fast is what is sabotaging your efforts. This is why it is crucial to pick a diet plan, like Atkins, that controls your hunger, but still allows you to eat food above starvation levels. It is also crucial that you lose weight at a moderately slow pace to keep those primal urges from turning you into a mindless zombie who will eat the neighbor’s children given the chance.
Now I want to turn back to set points for a bit.
According to Dr. George Blackburn, author of the book, Breaking Through your Set Points, set points can be caused by environmental and genetic factors, and are usually identified by long periods of neither gaining nor losing. You can identify your set point by looking through your past as you were gaining or losing weight. Even the Atkins book tells you to pick a weight goal that you can identify from your past that you easily maintained. According to Dr. George Blackburn for those who didn’t get caught in the trap of yo-yo dieting, their set point was set by the age of 18. So this would be a good place to start looking for your body set point, and your goal weight.
What I’m going to do from here on out is talk about the strategies that can be used to help you break your stall, which are some of the same strategies I used to break mine.
The first thing we’ll be fixing is a broken metabolism due to starvation mode. This is the logical place to start because it’s the easiest thing to fix.
If a person suspects they are in starvation mode this is simple to correct. All you need do is eat more food, and if you lose weight, you were in starvation mode. You can use the formula that I talked about earlier and find out what your daily calorie expenditure is, and adjust your food intake from there. A good rule of thumb is not to go below 20% of your calories expenditure or, 30% for those with a lot of body fat to use. For example, if your daily calorie expenditure is 2,500, and you cut back 20% of your fuel needs, this would equal 500 fewer calories a day eaten, so you would eat 2,000 calories and lose 1 lb a week.
If you are not sure of what your numbers are there are many websites that are good for tracking your calories eaten, and activity levels. Personally, I use a Bodybugg to track my calorie expenditures, and I love it, it takes the guesswork out of knowing how many calories I burn a day. If someone were to offer me 10,000 dollars to give up the Bodybugg for life I wouldn’t take it, it has changed my life. I understand many people can’t afford it, and this is why I recommend Fitday, and Fatsecret, both of which are free. For a quick reference, you can use this calculation tool to get a rough estimate of your needs.
These numbers are pretty reliable, however, what these numbers won’t tell you are what your personal metabolic rate is now, it only tells you what your potential metabolic rate could be if you were healthy. As most of us know, through years of yo-yo dieting our metabolism are far from healthy, most of us have damaged them to the point that our numbers don’t even come close to our potential. The good news is that we can repair that damage. For example, my metabolic rate is, or was, due to dieting 1,800. I was neither gaining nor losing, so this was my metabolic rate, that’s far from my potential of 3,400 a day that it could be. If my metabolism was truly this, I could expect to lose almost 3-4 pounds a week. Note: As of this writing my metabolism is healed and my metabolism has reached its full potential.
How do you find out what your metabolic rate is right now? It’s simple, track your food intake for a while, if you are eating 2,000 calories a day, and losing 1 lb a week, which is 500 calories a day, then your metabolic rate is 2,500 calories. If you are consuming 1,000 calories a day and neither gaining or losing, then that’s what your metabolic rate is. That’s it; it’s that easy.
So, how do we reach our full potential?
To come out of starvation mode safely you should do so slowly, and this is going to take some time, but if you are in this for the long haul this shouldn’t be a problem. If you are looking for quick weight loss then you are asking for trouble in the end. If you take the time to re-set your metabolism now, you will be more successful in the long run.
First, you need to increase your calories slowly, perhaps by 100-200 a day. Remember, the body doesn’t react well to change, it causes stress on the body, the more stress, the harder it is to re-set your metabolism. When reducing calories too much we cause the body to go into survival mode, and the same holds true of putting more calories back into your diet. Once you put your body into survival mode and cause stress, its first response is always going to be to store more fat. The reason the body wants to store more fat should be obvious by now, it doesn’t trust you to take care of the body’s daily needs, so it’s first reaction is going to prepare for your next starvation type diet, and it does this by putting on extra fat. What you need to do is regain the body’s trust. You do this by being consistent, and giving it all it needs on a daily basis. Once this happens the initial weight gain should stabilize, and then you can once again adjust your diet downward to begin a healthy weight loss.
We all know what happens if you start to walk on a sprained ankle to soon, sure, you can walk, but there is always that feeling of being weak, the only way to heal that ankle is by babying it, and giving it the time and rest it needs to reach its full potential. The same holds true for the body. How much time will depend on the individual, and you will know you are there when you get close to your potential according to the numbers you came up with earlier.
I was scared to death when I began adding in more calories the first few days. I was stuck in the old mindset of more calories equals more weight gain, and initially this was true. In fact, I added on a few pounds the first couple of days, mostly due to the increased food consumption. Remember, as we increase our food intake, we are going to increase our water weight. Carbs hold 3x’s their weight in water, and protein holds 4x’s, add in some other factors about water retention, and a gain in weight should be expected.
Important! Remember when coming out of starvation mode, you must be aware of the ravenous hunger that I talked about earlier, it’s this mechanism that we have to worry about when escaping starvation mode. If you let it overtake you, you will pack on the pounds; that’s what the body naturally wants to do. Therefore, it’s important to stay in control, and have a plan that includes slowly increasing your food intake, and continuing smart choices.
But how do we stay in control?
We do so by tracking all of our food, and activities, and we don’t let hunger guide us. We set goals, and stick to our plan no matter what. We don’t let hunger and cravings lead to binges, and we take full benefit of being on Atkins. Remember, we have a powerful tool on Atkins; it’s called the Atkins edge. Use it to control your hunger, add fats into your diet, and keep those carbs low until you get your hunger back under control. If we are patient, and control our eating habits, we can correct the damage done from going into starvation mode. That’s it, you now know how to come out of starvation mode quickly and reset your sluggish metabolism. You need only eat more food, and do it in a controlled manner.
Resetting a set point is much more difficult, and it requires the one thing that many of us don’t have—time. Well, actually, we have time, but the one thing many of us lack is patience.
According to Dr. Blackburn, “If you want to lose weight — and lose it for good — follow the 10% rule. Try to lower your body weight by that percentage and then stop losing for a while. Fight instead to keep off just that amount. So if you weigh 180 pounds, aim to lose 18 pounds in the next three to six months. If you weigh 220, your goal might be to drop 22 pounds. Stay at that level for at least six months to give your body a chance to adjust to its new, lower "set point.” If you lose weight in this fashion, and do it in a healthy manner, you are less likely to be stuck at any one set point until you reach your final set point, which is your goal weight. Blackburn says our original set point was established around the age of 18, but you may have a better idea of what your original set point is, so that’s the goal I would use.
The one thing you would need to do following this theory is reduce your calories in a healthy manner, and once you reached your 10% goal, stop losing, and raise your calorie intake level as high as you can, you must stay there for 6 months. So, if you were reducing your calories by 500 a day, and lost 1 lb a week and reached your goal weight, then you would add those calories back in to maintain your weight. However, according to set point theory our body will fight to maintain that weight, so if you were to add back even more calories than this your body would raise its metabolic rate to keep you at your set point weight. Thus, you could find yourself eating more than you did before. Once you maintain this weight for 6 months, in theory, your metabolism would be revved up to a new level, and once you started dieting again you would need only reduce your calories by what you did before and being the weight loss journey once again. This would keep your metabolism set high, and keep your metabolism from adapting.
I think his research is sound, however, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a 500 lb person, or anyone for that matter, to spend years slowly taking off the weight to avoid hitting a set point. From the research I’ve done, there are other techniques to help break a stall or plateau, and blast through a set point. I’ll touch on some of these techniques shortly.
My next post on compensatory behaviors is going to be the key to losing weight and keeping it off. I’ve touched on this earlier, but I’ll go into more detail and hopefully you’ll see just how powerful knowing this one bit of information can be in helping you keep off the diet roller coaster.
There are many strategies to help us keep the pounds off, and break free from any stall, but first, we must understand how compensatory behaviors sabotage most diets.
Important: The one thing that stalls and set points have in common is metabolic adaptation. What we need to understand is that metabolic adaptation doesn’t just happen without our help. A metabolism just doesn’t go up or down; we have to engage in some type of behavior that causes that metabolism to change. The behaviors that I’m referring to are what I talked about earlier; they are compensatory behaviors, which we can also refer to as self-sabotage. These compensatory behaviors can be conscious or unconscious, and can lead us to do all manner of things that go against our ultimate goal of losing weight. When we engage in these behaviors, it is our body’s way of fooling the mind to adjust our behavior so the body can get its needs met. It’s as if the body and mind have their own agenda, and they are constantly at war, with the victor often being our biology. When our biology wins, our diets are doomed. This is why most diets fail; we’ve never learned to get control of our own biology.
What are these compensatory behaviors, and how can we overcome our biology?
According to the Robertson Research Institute, a “compensatory behavior is a behavior a person engages in because the brain wants to feel differently than it does. For example, if a person is very depressed they may seek to engage in increasingly exciting behaviors (promiscuity, gambling) to counter their depressed state.” To make this more relatable to a dieter, a dieter may decide to lose weight by cutting calories, which throws the body into a state of stress. Remember, the body doesn’t like change; it wants to remain in homeostasis. So, to compensate for your dieting efforts it gives you cravings for chocolate chip cookies. These compensatory behaviors may produce behavior that is out of character for you, or even unhealthy.
I’ve talked about compensatory behaviors earlier, when I asked, “How many times have you sabotaged your own efforts when you dedicated yourself to exercise?” Did you lose your energy, your motivation, and convince yourself this isn’t what you really wanted? I’ll repeat this information here in case you forgot. Did you schedule time to exercise, but found you were always making excuses, or filling up your schedule with other things to do? Such as, wash the dog, work in the yard, go to the library, visit your Aunt Mildred, etc. In some cases, you may even cause yourself an injury unconsciously. Other behaviors may include, skipping breakfast, or being less diligent in tracking your food. Or you can do something as simple as leave your lunch bucket on the counter. There can also be a lot of emotional baggage that comes with self-sabotage, things that might make you feel worthless and ashamed, and full of self-doubt. You may start believing you are destined to be fat, or you are not worthy of being skinny. Or, perhaps you are afraid of what people might think of you. These are not all inclusive, I’m sure you have your own list of compensatory behaviors. But I hope I made my point, your compensatory behaviors take control of your mind, make you stray from your goals, and eventually give up on your diet, and your dreams of being thin.
As I’ve said, most of us lack the patience to make a diet work; we want quick results and don’t care if we have to cut corners to do so. However, the body knows you well. It knows how to push just the right buttons, and the one thing it does better than you is wait. It knows that you have quit diets before, so, all it need do is stall your weight loss, and you will eventually quit. For some people this is a week, others a month, and for some, like me, its eight months. This is why patience is so important. If I would have quit at the eight month mark I would not have broke my stall, and my biology would have won. As Ross Perot said, “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.” If you don’t give up, and you practice patience you can win the battle of mind and body. You are only one yard from a touchdown. I never gave up, and I scored the game winning touchdown, and so can you.
I want to give you an example of how our body can trick us into making poor choices; how many times have you eaten something non-Atkins, an Oreo, a bit of pasta, or a handful of chips, only to get angry with yourself later. You say things like, “I knew better, but I did it anyway.” You scream, “Why, why, why, did I do that?” Well, now you know. It was your body tricking you into making poor decisions; it more than likely did this by switching off the reasoning center of the brain that keeps you in conscious control, weakening your will power. Once this happens all bets are off, and it’s eat-a-bag-of-Oreos-time.
So, when I referred to us being participants in our own metabolic adaptation, I was referring to our compensatory behavior. Yes, some things are out of our control. However, every choice, whether conscious or unconscious, is a battle waging within as your body tries to restore homeostasis. In essence, you become the puppet to a body that is now the puppet master. And this is where diets fail, unless you learn to stay in conscious control.
I know you are probably wondering why compensatory behaviors are so important and how it relates to a stall. The quick of it is this, when we get to a set point, plateau, or stall, it is usually our own self-sabotage, or compensatory behavior that keeps you stalled, as I hope I have shown you. Before you go screaming at me that it’s not your fault, and you’ve done everything right, I challenge you to look at your own behaviors, and see if I may be right. I admit, sometimes stalls just happen, but the point I want to make here is that there is no one to blame, so you can stop beating yourselves up, this is all a matter of biology. But through an understanding of biology, you can learn to stay in control.
Win the battle of biology.
To win the battle of biology, and become your own puppet master, you must first become aware of all your compensatory behaviors. Keep a journal, and every time you engage in a behavior that even slightly sabotages your effort write it down. I don’t expect you to stop doing what you are doing every time, this would impossible, but you can do your best. Sometimes identifying these behaviors are hard to do when we are under the influence of The Set Point Monster. But you will eventually regain your sanity, and when you do, you can analyze what happened. Hopefully in time you will recognize the signs and be able to stop the compensatory behaviors before they get out of hand.
The second thing you can do is make sure you are doing Atkins properly. That means eating your fat. Fat not only helps keep us fueled, it helps control our hunger. This is where we have an advantage over others. With our hunger kept in check, it’s easier to resist most cravings, and if cravings do strike, you can usually fight them with a fatty Atkins meal. This usually works for me. It’s hard to eat junk when you are stuffed to the gills with 2,400 nutritious Atkins friendly calories.
Third, make sure you are tracking your activities and everything you eat. This tracking is going to become your new hunger mechanism. You are not going to wait for your body to tell you when to eat, or what to eat, if you wait for hunger to kick in it is too late. Let tracking and planning be your guide and you will have a much better chance at beating The Set Point Monster.
Fourth, constantly update your goals and stay hungry for success. I know you’ve experienced the thrill of reaching a goal, only to have your enthusiasm wane once you’ve reached it. When this happens, you give your biology a chance to slip in and take over, and many times, you won’t get that control back until you’ve gained much of your weight back and become disgusted with yourself. This is why you must set new goals, and stay focused and enthused.
Fifth, get a weight loss buddy; if you have a buddy this person can help keep you in control when you become out of control, in essence, they become your puppet master temporarily, and can help you fight The Set Point Monster. Please be gentle with them. What would be great is if you can build a support system of friends and family that you trust to help you reach your goals. The more people that are watching you succeed the more aware you will be of what you are doing, thus, the more conscious control you will have. This is why I love the Atkins forum; it helps keep me in conscious control.
Finally, know your numbers, as we discussed earlier, don’t guess at your BMR and calories burned, guessing will only get you into trouble. And don’t forget to adjust those numbers as you lose weight. If you rely on guessing, your compensatory behaviors will fool you every time. They did me.
Let’s look at how these tools are applied in real life.
Someone asked me recently how the people on the Biggest Loser lose all that weight in such a short period without going into starvation mode. Well, the answer is they can’t. The fact of the matter is you can’t lose that much weight, as quickly as they do, without going into starvation mode. But they seem to do it; they blast through stalls, set points, and even starvation mode, even when their bodies are screaming at them to stop.
How?
They use all the tools I’ve outlined above, overcoming all their biological functions that scream at them to stop doing what they are doing. I’m going to analyze their weight loss, and show you the correlation between what I’ve been showing you and what they are doing.
On the Biggest Loser, everyone is obese; they’ve ruined their metabolism. Most of them wouldn’t be able to lose this weight without help, they have proven this and time again as they yo-yo dieted their way to obesity. The show is their last resort. Fear of death, coupled with a 250,000 dollar cash price, is a powerful motivator, both of which help keep them in conscious control. However, this isn’t all that is going on.
From what I understand, the contestants on the show eat only 1200 and must burn 6000 calories a day. With a 4,800 calories deficit, it is obvious they are in starvation mode. The first thing to understand about their starvation mode type diet is they are not doing it alone, they are under constant supervision, and if they run into trouble they have the resources to help them. Nobody I know has these types of resources. In addition, the food they eat is probably the most nutrient dense food that can be provided, and I’m assuming they take loads of vitamins and minerals to offset their vitamin deficiencies. However, this still wouldn’t be enough to keep them from starvation mode. No matter what they do, they are going to be under their starvation threshold.
Since they are in starvation mode, their bodies are doing certain things to keep them from punishing themselves; their bodies are in full-blown survival mode. I’m sure their bodies are screaming at them to eat, and their hunger and cravings must be overwhelming. I also assume that their bodies are shutting down systems, and creating rolling black outs. Gillian and Bob are torturing them daily, and I’m sure their bodies are screaming at them to stop exercising, causing extreme fatigue, lethargy, and weakness, but they manage to push past it all. With all this going on inside of them it’s amazing that they can exert any conscious control at all. Well, the fact of the matter is they don’t, not exactly. Most people could not maintain this type of conscious control for long without help.
Let’s look at the tools they are using and compare them to my list.
First, do they engage in self-sabotaging behavior? Of course, you see this all the time as they yell, puke, cry, pout, throw things, scream bloody murder, and threaten to quit, as their biology/bodies are pushing them to stop. Some even get hurt, which forces them to slow down. During food challenges, many of them eat all the junk offered, just to win a prize. All of these things could be categorized as compensatory behaviors. So, are they keeping track of these behaviors? You betcha, it’s called T.V. And let’s not forget they have Gillian and Bob to remind them every time they engage in one of these behaviors.
Second, while I can’t say they are eating fat, or doing Atkins to keep their hunger in check, I can guarantee their hunger is kept in check a little, just by the mere fact they are being scrutinized by Gillian and Bob, and most of America. However, I do believe they don’t have the advantage we do on Atkins. If these people were not on T.V. and didn’t have so many people watching their every move, I’m sure they would eat one another given half a chance.
Third, are they tracking all they eat and all their activities? Yes, they have the body bug system to track it all.
Fourth, do they have goals, and constantly adjust those goals? Yes, they have powerful incentives; it is a show after all, where the grand prize is 250,000 dollars. Also, most of them are thoroughly disgusted with themselves; otherwise, they wouldn’t put themselves through so much agony. If someone offered you 250, 000 dollars to lose weight, how successful do you think you would be?
Fifth, do they have a buddy and a support system? Yes, in the form of Gillian, Bob, America, their family, and each other. That’s a lot of outside influence to help keep their compensatory behaviors and biology in check.
Finally, do they know their numbers? Once again, the answer is yes.
It’s obvious from analyzing what they are doing they are following the same plan I’ve outlined for you. You don’t need a television show to help you do all these things. In fact, I’m sure they don’t even realize they are engaging in these behaviors. However, what you have going for you is that you know how these compensatory behaviors can sabotage your efforts, and you can make conscious choices to overcome your biology.
Now that I’ve explained the importance of compensatory behaviors, I hope you understand why I spent so much time on this, and why I said this was the key to breaking though your plateaus, stalls, and set points. If you can get control of these, you will blast through any set point, plateau, or stall in no time.
Now, to wrap this up we’ll look at all the rest of the things you can do to break your stalls.
The 25 Most Important things you can do to break your weight loss stall.
This is all I’ve learned about breaking stalls and plateaus; I hope it has enlightened you a little. I know it has me. I know I made promises to you when I started this, telling you I’d help you learn how to breakthrough your stalls, I hope I have not disappointed you. If you’ve been helped by this information, I’d love to hear from you.
“Most people who succeed in the face of seemingly impossible conditions are people who simply don't know how to quit.” (Robert Schuller)
Eat well my friends, Terry Elkins (Whyguy)
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Has your weight loss stalled, peaked, and puttered out? Have you reached a point in your diet where the scale just won’t budge no matter how hard you try, even though you know you are doing everything right? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably so frustrated you’re ready to chuck your diet and scale out the window—I almost did. But if I would have given up, and not taken the time to learn why these things happened, I never would have broken my 8-month stall, and gone on to nearly reach my goal of losing 100 lbs. As of this writing, I’ve lost 94 lbs.
This blog post is a culmination of my journey to figure out why stalls happen, and what can be done to get the weight loss moving again. I had originally posted this information on the Atkins forum on a thread titled, Why do Stalls Happen: What I’ve learned. The thread became very popular, but it also became very long, and was soon embedded with so many comments that the post grew to over 240 pages. It wasn’t long before I got numerous requests from people to condense this information into one easy to understand post without comments. The original thread got so discombobulated that only the very brave, and perhaps foolish, took the time to sift through the post to get to the heart of the information. Thus, because of the requests I’ve had, I’ve decided to posts this thread on my blog, but not in its entirety. Therefore, if something seems missing in my blog post—it is, I left out the comments. Consequently, some of the information might seem out of place, and repeated often. In editing this, I did my best to keep the flavor of the thread without changing it much. But it is my hopes that you will find this information readable, and as useful as the many others who have used these techniques to break their stalls have—including myself.
While reading this I hope that you will take into consideration the nature of this writing. It was not meant to be an academic paper on why stalls happen, or even, a how to article that you might find in numerous books or pages on the web. Instead, this was a post born out of the quest for knowledge, and shared from my heart with friends. I wrote it in a relaxed style, as if I were having a private conversation with friends. So, what you will find in reading this is that I didn’t give much thought to the etiquettes of writing, grammar, style, or references to sources. And while I, in no way, shape, or form plagiarized my words, and tried to mention sources where it was appropriate, I may have inadvertently not given credit for some source material. This was never my intention, but after reading and gathering notes from tons of sources it became hard to separate others words from my own. In fact, most of what’s written was just me thinking aloud and referring to the few notes I bothered to take down. It is my hopes that I am forgiven for this error in judgment.
I will be breaking this very long thread into several posts, with each post building on the previous post’s knowledge. I do so, in hopes that those who don’t need certain information can click on the links that pertain to them, and skip the information they don’t need. I also do this because being such a long post, it can be a long read in one sitting, and I thought it would be easier on the reader to read in bits and pieces. So please look for the other post in this series on Why do Stalls Happen? I apologize for the inconvenience.
Warning: Brevity is not my strong suit. But, what I lack in brevity I make up for in simplicity, and ease of understanding.
What you are about to read is my quest for understanding of why stalls happen. While most of this topic will be referring to the Atkins Diet that I have been on, it is still relevant to anybody on any diet. When I first started Atkins, I was quite successful, I lost 70 lbs the first 8 months on the plan, but then the weight loss stalled for the next 8 months. During this time I didn’t lose any weight, and would go up and down the same 5 lbs. This became very frustrating, and I was on the verge of quitting. However, I was lucky, I had the Atkins forum members, my support system, who refused to let me quit. In addition, Colette Heimowitz, Atkins nutritionist, helped save me from myself. She helped me come up with a plan, tweak my program, and explained to me about stalls, plateaus, and set points. With her guidance, I was soon losing again, but I wasn’t satisfied with knowing how to make changes, I wanted to know why stalls happen. Thus, the journey began. I spent several weeks pouring through books, and countless web pages on this subject; the problem was I could never find a definitive answer in one place. Therefore, I had to piece the puzzle together, and as I did, I gained a clearer understanding about why the body eventually refuses to let the weight go, and how to get things moving again. This puzzle is by no means complete; there are numerous medical reasons for a weight loss stall that I won’t be going into. Instead, I will be focusing on how set points affect us mentally and physically. In addition, I’ll be talking about the importance of knowing your Basal Metabolic Rate, (BMR), and the role these numbers play in helping reach your goals. Also, I’ll be talking a lot about starvation mode on the body, and why eating less is not always the right solution when it comes to losing weight. In addition, I’ll show how hunger and compensatory behaviors sabotage our diet. Finally, I’ll provide 25 tips and strategies that I used to help break my stall.
Before I begin the thread posted on the Atkins forum, I want to define an official stall, or plateau. According to the book, The New Atkins For A New You, “the definition of a plateau is when you lose nothing—nadda—despite doing everything right, for at least four weeks.” In addition, you are only officially stalled if:
You haven't altered your exercise regimen or made any other significant lifestyle
change.
You’re not taking any new medications (including hormone therapy) that may be interfering with weight loss.
You can honestly say you’ve adhered to all aspects of the program.
Your clothes are not fitting looser, and have not lost inches.
I met all these criteria and was way beyond officially stalled—I was going for a record. This is where my thread on the Atkins forum begins.
Why do stalls happen? I could give a simple answer, but as many of you know that’s not my style. In studying why stalls happen I’ve been doing a lot of research on set points, starvation mode, ketosis, hunger, and the causes of cravings, as well as compensatory behaviors, and thought I’d share some of my findings with those who are interested. What I’ve decided to do is a kind of thinking aloud, letting you in to the inner workings of my thought processes. (I know, scary)
Before I begin, I would like to say, most people don’t need to worry about this information on Atkins. Atkins is set up as an easy program to follow, but for those who struggle, or just want some more information on why stalls happen they might find this information useful.
My Atkins journey started on January 2, 2009. Things went great for the first 8 months; I lost 70 lbs, and then nothing the next 8 months, with no loss in weight or inches, meeting all the criteria of an official plateau. What bothered me was I knew I was in ketosis, but I wasn’t losing weight. And taking into consideration that I was eating the same food toward the end of my program as I was in the beginning, I should have been. Or so I thought.
So, I asked myself, how can a person be in ketosis, and still not lose weight? To understand this I needed to understand what ketosis is.
The food we eat provides the fuel used by our bodies for everyday activities; it also provides the raw materials to help replenish the body. The three main types of fuel for the body are carbohydrates, fats, and protein. (I’m leaving out Alcohol here intentionally, which when consumed becomes the bodies fuel of choice). Typically, carbohydrates, the body’s first fuel of choice, and are used within a few hours of eating; when the engine is running on low, the body sends out hunger signals to replenish our energy stores every few hours. They are converted to glucose, stored in the cell walls, and are drawn upon when energy needs demand them. If not used they’re turned to fat. Fat’s primary role is to store energy, and when our primary source of fuel runs out, (carbs), our body turns to this stored energy for fuel. The third fuel, protein, is primarily used to build and replenish body materials, such as our organs, tissues, and muscles. On Atkins, our job is to deplete the body’s first fuel, carbs/glycogen, and turn our body’s into fat burning machines, either using stored fat, or dietary fat as fuel. This is a ketogenic state, also called, ketosis.
According to Sugarbane, Low Carb Living for Life, “In the absence of substantial carbohydrates your body will burn any fat you digest before it touches your body fat. So if you are eating a moderate to high fat diet (even if it is still low carb) then you are going to test positive for ketosis.” However, the New Atkins book says that we are not using either or, but rather a blend of dietary fat and stored fat. But if you are not losing weight after a long period, it is obvious you are not burning more stored fat than you are putting back into the body. Thus, you are technically in ketosis, but it's not from using your body's fat. The only thing ketosis really tells you is that you aren't taking in too many carbs. Thus, you could turn ketones testing strip all shades of purple, but they will not tell you if you are doing Atkins correctly, losing stored fat, or whether or not you are losing weight. They can only tell you that your body is using fat for fuel instead of carbs/glycogen.
Note: A ketogenic diet gets 80 percent of its calories from fat. However, some of our energy does come from protein and the cannibalization of our muscles. As we cannibalize our muscles, we can also repair those muscles through adequate protein intake. Add in a little exercise and there will be no significant muscle loss on the Atkins diet, as with other diets.
So, back to the original question, how can you be in ketosis and not lose weight? The answer is obvious, if you don’t have carbs/glycogen in your system, and your body is burning fat for fuel in the form of dietary fat, or stored fat, you are in ketosis. This explained how I could be in ketosis, and not tap into stored fat, but didn’t explain why I was no longer losing weight.
Note: This is why restricting your carb intake further than needed to past the point of ketosis is not going to do much good. When you restrict those few precious carbs that you are getting, you’re taking away vital nutrients. If you go down 5 net carbs, and are eating 50 fewer calories, those calories are not going to make magically put you deeper into ketosis and get you more weight loss. The only reason to go down in carbs is if you are metabolically resistant, or you suspect you are not in ketosis.
My next question was, why am I eating the same foods I was in beginning of my diet, but not losing weight now? Did something happen to my metabolism, did it slow down, and if so, why?
When I answered this, it lead me to researching BMR’s, set points, starvation mode, and the mechanism of hunger in a healthy person, along with compensatory behaviors. I also had to look at what a metabolism is, and how it works.
One of the reasons for my stall had to do with the reduction of my BMR as I went from 260 lbs to 190 lbs. My BMR had slowed significantly, from 2,300, to approximately 1,800, the same amount of calories I was eating when I started Atkins, and the same amount I was eating when I had stalled. Since my BMR had slowed, and I did not adjust my calorie consumption, I had no weight loss. This would have been true, if not for the fact that I was active; therefore, on top of my 1,800 calorie BMR, I was burning an additional 1000 calories from activities, which should have resulted in a 2 lb loss a week. This wasn’t happening, so something had to have screwed up my metabolism. But what, what happened to those 1,000 calories I should have been burning? Did I go into starvation mode, reach a set point, or, did something else happen? Or perhaps it was a combination of things?
To understand these questions I had to understand what a metabolism does.
Metabolism is the amount of energy (calories) your body burns to maintain itself. Whether you are eating, drinking, sleeping, cleaning etc, your body is constantly burning calories to keep you going. It’s affected by your body composition, and the amount of muscle you have versus the amount of fat. Muscle uses more calories to maintain itself than fat. People who are more muscular, (and have a lower percentage of body fat), have a higher metabolism than those who are less muscular. For example, let's say you have two people who are the exact same height and weight. One exercises on a regular basis with weights, and has a low percentage of body fat. The other never exercises, and has a higher percentage of body fat. The first person who exercises will have a higher metabolism than the second person will, because the extra muscle will burn more energy. If you want to have a higher metabolism, you have to have a higher body mass, or, increase your activity level. But we don’t want that mass to be fat. Ideally, we would add more muscle. The problem with dieting, and this is on any diet you are on, you lose muscle mass. It is true that you don’t lose as much muscle mass on Atkins, but you will lose some nonetheless.
So, to answer the question, did something happen to my metabolism, did it slow down, and if so why? The answer is clear; the very act of losing weight caused me to slow down my metabolism. Not only had I lost mass due to fat loss, but I had lost muscle as well.
It was at this point the picture was starting to become clearer, but this was only part of the puzzle, there were other contributing factors to my weight loss stall. I knew I had engaged in some self-sabotaging behaviors, and so I asked myself why. My research led me to understanding the mechanism of hunger, and the role it plays in helping controlling our weight.
Did something happen to my hunger mechanism?
The next contributing component to my own weight loss stall was hunger and cravings. Before I explain what happened, let me explain a little bit about the way hunger is supposed to work. Hunger is the body’s way of getting us to consume more calories, replenish our energy supply, and regulate weight. If I were at my ideal weight, and had a healthy metabolism, on the days I burned off more calories I should be hungrier than on the days I did nothing. This seems obvious, and it explains why some days after you have worked out, or had a particularly grueling day you often feel ravenous. You have used up more of your body’s energy supply, and the body is desperately trying to replace those supplies.
One way of looking at it is through an analogy of a car. If you had a 10 gallon tank, and you used 3 gallons, you wouldn’t put in more than those three gallons, you’d put in the exact amount you needed that day. If you use more, you would put in more. In an ideal world, our bodies would work the same way, if we burned off 1,000 calories, we would eat 1,000. If we needed more, we’d eat more. Unfortunately, bodies aren’t designed that way, and that’s why we have fat reserves. The problem is, since most of us never learned to listen to our body, we have made our fat reserves larger, and now our bodies and our metabolism are malfunctioning. In essence, we have gone from a 10-gallon tank, and if you are like me, added a 20-gallon reserve.
Back to the question, what happened to my hunger mechanism? In answering this question, I had to look at set points, and starvation mode.
Set points, and starvation mode, are two entirely different mechanisms. But they both have the same effect—they slow down the metabolism. True starvation mode is rare on Atkins. This is because we are still eating plenty of food, and getting our calorie and nutrient needs met—or are supposed to be anyway. But the body does adapt and slow down, thus, we sometimes experience what you might call semi-starvation mode, or conservation mode if you prefer, which doesn’t have the same affects of full-blown starvation mode. On the other hand, set points happen regardless of the amount we eat. Set points will affect most people as the body tries to maintain the status quo, and regulate a person’s weight at a point that the body has become accustomed to, much to the detriment of the dieters wants.
What is a set point?
According to the set-point theory, there is a control system built into every person dictating how much fat he or she should carry; a kind of thermostat for body fat. Some individuals have a high setting and others a low one. According to this theory, body fat percentage and bodyweight is a matter of internal controls that are set differently in different people, and thought to be controlled by the genes.
In an overweight person, this set point will slowly raise higher and higher until it becomes very difficult to lose weight. Many of us already know about set points. When we were gaining weight each of us probably had set points, or weight plateaus, where we maintained for substantial periods, but periodically this number crept up slowly. When the body is trying to maintain its set point, it will either turn up the metabolism, or slow it down to compensate for the energy you have burned. If too much energy’s burned, it will lower the metabolism. If too little is burned, it will increase the metabolism, and increase or decrease hunger accordingly, to keep you from going above or below a certain weight. This is why you often lose a few pounds, reach a goal, and you suddenly find yourself eating everything in sight, and immediately putting back on the lost pounds. And, why so many people get discouraged and quit dieting, thinking it is their lack of will power, when in reality, it is the body trying to maintain homeostasis, and its set point. This set point mechanism is meant to keep weight constant, presumably because the unconscious mind has more accurate information about the body’s fat stores than the conscious mind can obtain.
Set point theory definitely explains what happened to my hunger mechanism, and why I didn’t know I wasn’t eating the same calories I thought I was. The body was fooling my conscious mind. It was desperate to maintain the status quo and keep my weight steady at my set point of 190 lbs.
Remember when I said that I was eating the same things at the beginning of my program, as I was when I stalled. This is not entirely true. In fact, I’m not sure. I just assumed I was. I wasn’t tracking every day, and when I was, yes, I was eating 1,800 calories, but not the same 1,800 calories as I was in the beginning of my Atkins journey. I had added many more products to my daily intake. Such as, heavy whipping cream, more diet soda, and a few other things that were still Atkins friendly, but not what I had originally been eating. My ratios were still the same as before, but this was definitely not the same food. The only way the body, and my hunger mechanism, could do this was change my cravings for foods that it knew would keep me from losing weight. In addition, it fooled me into thinking it was ok not to keep track of my food every day. I was sure I had it down pat, but I was wrong. By not doing so, there could have been days that I ate 2,000 calories or more without really being aware of it. Thus, adding back any pounds that I may have lost on the days I was a little stricter with my tracking.
Before I go on, I wanted to share with you some insights into what I discovered about my set point range. In my experience, a set point range usually falls into a 5-8 lb range. I’ve had five set points climbing the weight loss ladder to obesity, and have hit all five coming back down that ladder. For example, one such set point was when I hit 193 lbs, this being the low end of a 5 lb range, and 198 being the high end. Whenever I reached the high end of that range, my motivation to lose weight would increase. I became more diligent in my tracking, my energy would increase, and my appetite became suppressed. It wouldn’t be long before my weight would go back down. As I reached the low end of my set point of 193 lbs, my metabolism would slow down, I’d become sluggish, lethargic, depressed, and I would constantly think about food. It was at this point that I would stop tracking my food, and start packing on the pounds. Only in the middle range did I take no action, I would spend much of my time in this range worrying about my weight.
I now understood what happened to my hunger mechanism due to set points and why my metabolism had slowed down, but this didn’t explain what happens to those extra calories I’m no longer burning. If I’m no longer burning those extra calories where did they go, and how did this slowing down of my metabolism affect my body?
Quick digression: You are lucky you are not inside of my head. See how one question leads to another, it drives me bonkers.
I want you to imagine a city in California whose power supply is limited. What do they do when the supply is limited? They have rolling black outs to conserve energy, and keep the extra energy they do have stored for future use. They may know a heat wave is coming, and want to be prepared in the event of an emergency. The body works the same way, our stored fat is our reserve energy and the body wants to hold onto that stored energy in case of an emergency. Even though we have been good Atkins dieters, our bodies still don’t trust us yet, so when it hits a set point and slows down, it is really preparing for the future, based on what we have taught it with our eating habits in the past. In my case, by eating so few calories in the past, I barely took care of my vital functions, such as breathing, digestion, blood circulation, etc, and taught my body to begin shutting down systems. Much in the same way a city does. When a city has a rolling black out, power is not shut down to vital functions of the city like hospitals, police departments, or the many businesses the city needs to stay functioning. No, only some areas go without power. Since my set point had gone down to only use the calories I was eating, 1,800, and not tap into energy reserves/fat stores, some areas of the body had to go without power. When this happened to me, I experienced lethargy, sore muscles, headaches, depression, foggy thinking, ravenous hunger, and a host of other symptoms. This explains why many people on diets feel tired all the time, and eventually crave foods that will bring their energy level up, and it explains why dieting is such hard work. It’s exhausting on the body.
I had my answer to what happened to my metabolism, it slowed down and experienced rolling black outs. It was time to move on to the next piece of the puzzle, starvation mode. In doing this research, I saw many similarities between set points, and starvation mode, in which I’ll share.
What is starvation mode?
Starvation mode, as most people understand it is when the body mechanism that controls our metabolism slows down, much in the same way set point theory explains it. The difference is, in the case of starvation mode, the slowing of the metabolism is due to the restriction of calories beyond what the body needs to take care of its vital functions. Whereas, set point theory is more about the body staying in a state of homeostasis, or comfort, due to genetic and environmental factors.
You would think that if eating 500 less is good, then eating 1,000 calories must be better, and the quicker the body will take fat out of storage. This is not true, when we deprive our body of calories, and vital nutrients for too long, it signals the body that there is an emergency coming, and it needs to conserve energy. It does this by slowing down the metabolic rate, which we know causes rolling black outs, this is known as starvation mode, or metabolic adaptation. This reduction in the metabolic rate can be as much as 40%. This can be as many as 400-800 fewer calories being burned a day for some people. This adaptive reduction in resting metabolic rate is the way the body defends itself against further loss of energy stores. When a diet done right, such as Atkins, we should burn just enough calories to tap into our energy stores, and still leave the body plenty of fuel for taking care of its vital functions. We do this by losing no more than 1-2 lbs a week
Remember, the body will only release its fat stores if it knows there is plenty of nutritious food coming into the body. If we go beyond burning more calories than we should, we risk turning the body into a fat storage machine that will run on less energy, and begin to turn everything we eat into fat. When this happens, the body will start getting its fuel sources from wherever it can. It may even begin cannibalizing itself, burning the body’s protein for fuel; which really means it is eating away its own muscle tissue. Since your muscle and lean organ tissues are the real calorie burners in your body, the more of it you lose, the less you can eat without gaining weight. You will now have a lower BMR due to the lack of muscle mass in your body. This also explains why people who lose weight with semi-starvation diets almost inevitably regain all their weight, and why, when they return to normal eating levels—it doesn’t come back as muscle or organ tissue, it comes back as fat.
The good news is that while on Atkins we should never go into starvation mode, we get plenty of nutrition through our veggies, and our calorie intake, so true starvation mode never kicks in. Thus, we retain much of our lean muscle mass. But for those who choose to go below their starvation threshold, or don’t know it, they run the risk of becoming fat storing machines that cannibalize their own bodies.
Knowing this information, I had to ask, what is the starvation threshold, and is it different for everybody?
Atkins does a great job when they tell women they shouldn’t go below 1,500 calories, and men shouldn’t go below 1,800 calories. For most people, these numbers are going to keep them from going into starvation mode. Does this mean for women it is 1,500, and for men 1,800? Does this mean if you go below these numbers day in and day out you will automatically go into starvation mode? No, there are many factors to take into consideration when deciding what a person’s starvation threshold is. Things like body size, age, gender, general health, genes, and activity level. This is why it’s important to understand your own body, and what your personal threshold is.
The starvation mode threshold is 50% of what the body requires to meet its energy needs. In a person who has a metabolism set at 2,000 calories, this would mean consuming 1,000 calories a day. When cutting calories this drastically, you run the risk of going into starvation mode, as the men in the Minnesota study did. The primary objective of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment was to study the physical and psychological effects of prolonged famine-like semi-starvation on healthy men. Their calories were originally set at 3,200, and later reduced to 1,560, which was half of their bodies’ needs. They also had to maintain a regular physical activity schedule, which increased their energy expenditure even further. This resulted in the starvation mode affect.
Therefore, if you want to keep from going into starvation mode, you can’t have a defect of more than half of your body’s total needs. However, it is generally accepted that we should not reduce our calories needs by much more than 500 calories a day. I’ve seen numbers for this vary, with some saying no more than 700, and others, up to a 1,000 if you are severely obese. To understand your own needs, you need to take your total energy (calories) need, which includes your BMR and your energy expenditure from lifestyle activities, and deduct the total energy eaten. If the deficit is between 500 and 700, you're probably fine, but if the deficit is over 1,000, you may be in for trouble.
For example, my BMR says I need approximately 1,800 hundred calories to run my body, and after adding calories burned from my daily activities, had a total burn rate of 3,000 calories. If I subtract what I eat in a day, 1,800 calories from my energy expenditure I come up with 1,200 calories deficit. This was an unhealthy rate of loss, and more than likely put me near starvation mode levels. At the very least my body was experiencing rolling black outs to conserve energy.
Note: I’ll explain more on how you can find your own burn rate, BMR levels, and find your starvation level threshold in the section entitled. “Fixing a broken metabolism”.
Knowing what I know about starvation modes and set points, as well as BMR, and daily energy expenditures, I next needed to know just how exercise affected my BMR and my metabolism. I was already burning more calories than I was eating, could exercise be doing more harm than good?
There is no doubt exercise is good for the health, but how good it is for weight loss really depends on how much we do. We could do too much and sabotage our own efforts in many ways, but if we find the right balance between exercise and nutrition, we will obtain optimal health, and a healthy weight loss that can be easily maintained. One of the greatest benefits of exercise for those trying to maintain their weight is the increase in metabolism and BMR due to increased muscle mass. On top of this, if you are trying to maintain your weight, for every calorie you burn because of the extra muscle mass, you could eat one more calorie, and if you love food as much as I do this is great news.
But how does exercise benefit those who want to lose weight?
A recent study, published by Plos One, tracked many women. One group was asked to work out, and the other was asked not to exercise at all. None of the women were asked to change their eating habits. What they found was surprising. All of the women lost 2-5 lbs; even the women who were not asked to exercise.
Why did this happen? You would think that the women who exercised would have lost more weight. What they found happened, was that those who engaged in exercise also engaged in compensatory behaviors. They found these women had increased hunger, and fatigue that negated the benefits of burning more through exercise. Does this sound familiar, it does me, it sounds like set point adaptation kicking in.
What caused these compensatory behaviors? If you remember what happens to the body when it reaches a set point, or is comfortable at a particular weight, it will do everything it can to fight back and maintain the status quo. Remember, these women were not focusing on their food, only their exercise. But the women who exercised unintentionally left their bodies hunger mechanism wide open, thus, they ate more. If they ate more, there would be no body weight loss, and the body would remain in homeostasis. On top of this, I believe they may have been suffering from rolling black outs as well; which would explain their fatigue. The body was doing everything it could to make sure they would not change their weight.
This same thing has happened to me, my energy levels had gone down, and my motivation to exercise had decreased as well. However, I’m still exercising, especially knowing what I know now about how the body tries to sabotage my effort. I’m not falling for any of those old tricks. If I were to listen to my body completely I’d not get up off the couch.
Note: I have recently started calling this trickster of the mind who sabotages my weight loss efforts “The Set Point Monster”.
This newest information on self-sabotaging and compensatory behaviors leads me to believe that you can’t believe everything you think. How many times have you sabotaged your own efforts when you dedicated yourself to exercise? Did you lose your energy, your motivation, and convince yourself this isn’t what you really wanted? Did you schedule time to exercise, but found you were always making excuses, or filling up your schedule with other things to do? Such as, wash the dog, work in the yard, go to the library, visit your aunt Mildred, or did you say things like, “it’s too cold outside to go for a walk.” In some cases, you may even cause yourself an injury unconsciously; pulling a muscle, causing a sprain, or twisting a tendon. I wonder how much of this behavior was your body trying to maintain its set point by sabotaging your efforts. If any of these things have happened to you, it’s probably an attack by the Set Point Monster.
Other drawbacks to exercise.
One of the biggest drawbacks to too much exercise is that we can throw our body into starvation mode if our calorie deficit becomes greater than it should be. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people on the Atkins forum say, “I’m stalled, and doing everything right”. Then they say they are eating 1,500 calories a day, doing cardio for an hour, and strength training 5 days a week. This is nuts, they are burning way more calories than they are taking in, and putting themselves at risk for serious health issues, not the least of which is stalled weight loss.
For example, let’s say you have a energy expenditure of 2,000 calories a day. You cut back 500 calories, and only eat 1,500. This should give you a healthy rate of loss of 1 lb per week. However, you decide to work out like crazy, doing hours of weight training and cardio, burning an extra 1,000 calories a day. You’ve now raised your deficit to 1,500 calories a day, which only leaves the body 500 calories to take care of vital functions. From what you’ve learned so far, you can see this is not healthy; you are at risk of going into starvation mode. There is no way you are getting the proper number of nutrients or meeting the body’s energy needs. It won’t be long before the body slows down and causes more rolling black outs.
The true benefit of exercise is not that you can lose weight while doing it; it should be that you can exercise and burn calories without having to cut your calories to the point that you are not eating enough to satisfy you, or your bodies needs. Exercise and diet should be a balance between cutting calories, and burning calories through exercise—an either or proposition, not both! If you are going to burn 1,000 calories from exercise, you better feed the body more fuel to keep your deficit from becoming too great.
Another drawback, for those only doing cardio, if they do too much, is that they can have a loss of muscle mass. Take a runner for example, they are skinny, and their muscle mass is not as great as a person who adds in weight training, therefore, their BMR is going to be less than a person with a healthy balance of muscle mass. Again, each person must find the right balance for his or her body. This does not mean you should not exercise, but you should be aware of how exercise affects the body and changes your energy needs, and adjust accordingly. For those exercising, and have reached a stall, this is something to seriously consider. Remember, if you exercise smartly, increase you lean muscle mass, and increase your BMR, it can help reach your weight loss goals, but over doing it can do more harm than good.
Now that I’ve thrown all this information out there, I’ll talk a little about how I broke my stall, give some tips on how you can break through set points, and keep from going into starvation mode. At this point most of what I’m going to say is going to be somewhat obvious because I’ve already covered it somewhere in the tome I’ve been writing.
Remember, I had the longest stall on record; I had lost 70 lbs, and then nothing for 8 months. I kept doing what I knew how to do, or thought I knew how to do, and still wasn’t seeing results. I thought I was doing everything right, but as I mentioned before I eventually learned that what I was doing wasn’t anywhere near reality.
I was still eating 1,800 calories a day, and maintaining my net carbs at 25, but I wasn’t losing. It wasn’t until I got frustrated and talked to Colette Heimowitz, (an Angel in disguise), that I was able to understand what I was doing wrong. Colette talked to me a little bit about set points, and made me understand how my body was fighting to stay at a weight that it was comfortable maintaining. (Everything we’ve been talking about). This didn’t make sense to me at the time, but now it does.
We looked at my food, and discovered there were still options to try before trying anything drastic. Here is what I did.
I maintained my 1,800 calories.
I cut my carbs down to 15, just to make sure I was in ketosis and to jumpstart my fat burning machine. This level of carbs only lasted about 10 days before I moved them back up.
She suggested I cut my artificial sweeteners down from to 3—I was eating 6.
She suggested I cut my Diet Pepsi out completely for a while. And I hated her for that.
She suggested I give up all products and treats and replaced them with real food. Somehow, I had managed to change my original eating habits to my new and improved version of 1,800 hundred calories a day, this included heavy whipping cream in large quantities, and at least one Atkins product a day. This accounted for almost 400 calories or more in my daily intake of fuel. While my fat/protein/carb ratios and calorie counts remained the same as before, this was nowhere near how I was eating originally.
When I first made these changes I was amazed at how much actual real food I was stuffing myself with, I had to add butter and olive oil back into my diet, which I had taken out to make room for the junk.
The other thing I did was make sure I tracked every bite that went into my mouth. As I said earlier, I had stop tracking as much as I should, and was only doing spot checks. This means I could have been eating more than my 1,800 calories, or even less, which may have put me into starvation mode. I’m not quite sure. Pair this with the fact that my body was fooling me telling me the things I was eating was ok, and the same as before, and I had a recipe for a disaster, and that manifested in the longest stall on record. Within a few short days of making these changes, I began dropping the weight, and within a week, I had lost 4 lbs.
This break in my stall was exhilarating, but I still wasn’t satisfied, I took all the information that I had learned, that you are reading now, and continued to make changes to my dietary needs, making sure to avoid starvation mode, and becoming aware of the Set Point Monster’s evil ways. In the eight months since breaking my stall, I’ve lost 34 lbs, and am nearly at my goal weight of 160 lbs, with only 6 lbs left to go.
Before I go on, I want to recap a few things about set point and starvation mode.
True starvation mode happens when we reduce our calories by 50%. However, just because we aren’t in starvation mode doesn’t mean we are not on our way. Each time we take in fewer calories than we burn, our bodies go into survival mode, and starts shutting down systems. It’s important to note here that as long as we are dieting our bodies will never be running at peak performance, and we will never have our full vitality. The closer we get to that 50% the more systems we shut down. So, even though on Atkins we don’t usually reduce our calories sufficiently enough to cause system failure, if we follow minimum guidelines, we are always on our way.
Important note: This is why it is of vital importance we take our recommended vitamins supplements. vitamins help keep us running closer to peak performance than our diet alone can provide. The fact of the matter is, when dieting we can’t hope to provide the body with all its nutrient demands. Yes, the body will get some of its nutrients from stored fat, but the nutrients in fat cannot take care of the all the body’s needs. Fat, is only able to store fat-soluble vitamins, such as, A, D, E and K. So please keep this in mind the next time you are tempted to skip your daily dose of vitamins.
I’d like to take you on a journey of just what happens as you reduce your calorie intake, and the body stops running at peak performance.
Using the rolling black out analogy, let’s say your body needs 3,000 calories to run at peak performance. You reduce calories by 250, and maybe your lose a little sheen to your hair, your skin becomes dry, and your nails become brittle (residential homes); this is hardly noticeable, only incontinent, so you tally on. You reduce by 500 and small businesses start closing down. Your body starts feeling a little sluggish, you get bags under your eyes, and you look tired, but you are losing weight, so you deal with it. You then reduce calories by 750, you’ve lost some weight, but your metabolism starts creaking and groaning, it now shuts down major businesses, and you start experiencing nausea, light headiness, indigestion, and at this point you may become hungry all the time as your body starts craving more nutrition. Then you decide to reduce by another 1,000 calories and vital city departments lose power. The police and sanitation department are now closed. Your immune system lowered, and you are now experience problems with your intestines. You become constipated, or get diarrhea, and you start retaining water because the city sewer has switched off. Next, your metabolism starts slowing even further, you stop losing weight, and you even start seeing small water weight gains. You become discouraged, but you haven’t given up. You now reduce another 500 calories, reaching your 50% starvation threshold, and all hell breaks loose. Hospitals begin to close, the state declares a national emergency, and the reserves are called in to save you from yourself. At this point you start losing even more muscle, further slowing down your metabolism; the state starts hording all energy, water, and fat reserves. But you are seeing results, so you keep going. You reduce again, and again, and soon find yourself in the hospital as your body slowly eats away at itself and you become sick. But you are now skinny, and happy. That is until you can no longer control your hunger and you quit dieting, that is, if you don’t die first. When this happens, you have lost the battle, your diet has failed, and your hunger is once again out of control. Just as it had been when you gained all your weight.
Let’s look at what happens when hunger gets out of control, and how this contributes to yo-yo dieting, and weight gain.
I mentioned some of the signs and symptoms of starvation mode earlier, such as muscle loss, fatigue, headaches, (rolling black outs). But the one thing that sets starvation mode apart from set points, and metabolic adaptation is hunger. I’m not talking about a little hunger, or a few cravings, I’m talking ravenous I’d- eat-your-dog-type-hunger. This hunger is primal, and the urge to seek out food is so strong you will forgo reason, and all other forms of moral control to get even a little nutrition into your body—and yes, including sex.
For example, at one time, in the south, there were people known as clay eaters. These people would eat dirt just to get some of the vitamins and minerals that were missing from their diet. And we’ve all heard stories of people who were starving eating their dead, or people who ate maggots, worms, and other insects to survive. I recently saw a show on the Discovery Channel of a man lost at sea on a small boat who had plenty of fish, but he was slowly wasting away because the fish wasn’t giving him all the nutrients he needed to survive. Once he was thrown into starvation mode his body naturally knew what to do, he soon began eating parts of the fish that he wouldn’t before because it was to disgusting. He ate the eyes, the scales, and even the intestines; all of which provided him with enough vital nutrients to survive his ordeal. In fact, not only did he eat these things, they actually tasted delicious. His body needed him to eat the whole fish so it fooled him by changing his sense of taste so that what he was eating tasted like a culinary delight. This urge to eat became so strong in the men in the men of the Minnesota study that when the study was done, and they once again had access to food, many of them ate until they puked, and then would ask for more.
The reason I mention this food seeking behavior is I want you to be aware why most diets eventually fail. When many people go on diets, they are so deprived of food that their body is screaming at them to eat, eat all it can. For a short period, we can control these urges, but after a little time passes, and our drive and will wanes, we often give into our hunger and gorge ourselves on any and everything in sight. We will often do this until we regain all of our lost weight, and even add on some extra pounds. This is the bodies way of making sure that next time you do something stupid like starving yourself it will be prepared with more fat reserves.
Can you now see why starving yourself on any diet is so bad for you, and how the very thing you are doing to lose weight is actually sabotaging your efforts? I also hope you can see that your failure on your diet is not your fault. You are neither weak, nor lazy; the very act of dieting the wrong way and trying to go to fast is what is sabotaging your efforts. This is why it is crucial to pick a diet plan, like Atkins, that controls your hunger, but still allows you to eat food above starvation levels. It is also crucial that you lose weight at a moderately slow pace to keep those primal urges from turning you into a mindless zombie who will eat the neighbor’s children given the chance.
Now I want to turn back to set points for a bit.
According to Dr. George Blackburn, author of the book, Breaking Through your Set Points, set points can be caused by environmental and genetic factors, and are usually identified by long periods of neither gaining nor losing. You can identify your set point by looking through your past as you were gaining or losing weight. Even the Atkins book tells you to pick a weight goal that you can identify from your past that you easily maintained. According to Dr. George Blackburn for those who didn’t get caught in the trap of yo-yo dieting, their set point was set by the age of 18. So this would be a good place to start looking for your body set point, and your goal weight.
What I’m going to do from here on out is talk about the strategies that can be used to help you break your stall, which are some of the same strategies I used to break mine.
The first thing we’ll be fixing is a broken metabolism due to starvation mode. This is the logical place to start because it’s the easiest thing to fix.
If a person suspects they are in starvation mode this is simple to correct. All you need do is eat more food, and if you lose weight, you were in starvation mode. You can use the formula that I talked about earlier and find out what your daily calorie expenditure is, and adjust your food intake from there. A good rule of thumb is not to go below 20% of your calories expenditure or, 30% for those with a lot of body fat to use. For example, if your daily calorie expenditure is 2,500, and you cut back 20% of your fuel needs, this would equal 500 fewer calories a day eaten, so you would eat 2,000 calories and lose 1 lb a week.
If you are not sure of what your numbers are there are many websites that are good for tracking your calories eaten, and activity levels. Personally, I use a Bodybugg to track my calorie expenditures, and I love it, it takes the guesswork out of knowing how many calories I burn a day. If someone were to offer me 10,000 dollars to give up the Bodybugg for life I wouldn’t take it, it has changed my life. I understand many people can’t afford it, and this is why I recommend Fitday, and Fatsecret, both of which are free. For a quick reference, you can use this calculation tool to get a rough estimate of your needs.
These numbers are pretty reliable, however, what these numbers won’t tell you are what your personal metabolic rate is now, it only tells you what your potential metabolic rate could be if you were healthy. As most of us know, through years of yo-yo dieting our metabolism are far from healthy, most of us have damaged them to the point that our numbers don’t even come close to our potential. The good news is that we can repair that damage. For example, my metabolic rate is, or was, due to dieting 1,800. I was neither gaining nor losing, so this was my metabolic rate, that’s far from my potential of 3,400 a day that it could be. If my metabolism was truly this, I could expect to lose almost 3-4 pounds a week. Note: As of this writing my metabolism is healed and my metabolism has reached its full potential.
How do you find out what your metabolic rate is right now? It’s simple, track your food intake for a while, if you are eating 2,000 calories a day, and losing 1 lb a week, which is 500 calories a day, then your metabolic rate is 2,500 calories. If you are consuming 1,000 calories a day and neither gaining or losing, then that’s what your metabolic rate is. That’s it; it’s that easy.
So, how do we reach our full potential?
To come out of starvation mode safely you should do so slowly, and this is going to take some time, but if you are in this for the long haul this shouldn’t be a problem. If you are looking for quick weight loss then you are asking for trouble in the end. If you take the time to re-set your metabolism now, you will be more successful in the long run.
First, you need to increase your calories slowly, perhaps by 100-200 a day. Remember, the body doesn’t react well to change, it causes stress on the body, the more stress, the harder it is to re-set your metabolism. When reducing calories too much we cause the body to go into survival mode, and the same holds true of putting more calories back into your diet. Once you put your body into survival mode and cause stress, its first response is always going to be to store more fat. The reason the body wants to store more fat should be obvious by now, it doesn’t trust you to take care of the body’s daily needs, so it’s first reaction is going to prepare for your next starvation type diet, and it does this by putting on extra fat. What you need to do is regain the body’s trust. You do this by being consistent, and giving it all it needs on a daily basis. Once this happens the initial weight gain should stabilize, and then you can once again adjust your diet downward to begin a healthy weight loss.
We all know what happens if you start to walk on a sprained ankle to soon, sure, you can walk, but there is always that feeling of being weak, the only way to heal that ankle is by babying it, and giving it the time and rest it needs to reach its full potential. The same holds true for the body. How much time will depend on the individual, and you will know you are there when you get close to your potential according to the numbers you came up with earlier.
I was scared to death when I began adding in more calories the first few days. I was stuck in the old mindset of more calories equals more weight gain, and initially this was true. In fact, I added on a few pounds the first couple of days, mostly due to the increased food consumption. Remember, as we increase our food intake, we are going to increase our water weight. Carbs hold 3x’s their weight in water, and protein holds 4x’s, add in some other factors about water retention, and a gain in weight should be expected.
Important! Remember when coming out of starvation mode, you must be aware of the ravenous hunger that I talked about earlier, it’s this mechanism that we have to worry about when escaping starvation mode. If you let it overtake you, you will pack on the pounds; that’s what the body naturally wants to do. Therefore, it’s important to stay in control, and have a plan that includes slowly increasing your food intake, and continuing smart choices.
But how do we stay in control?
We do so by tracking all of our food, and activities, and we don’t let hunger guide us. We set goals, and stick to our plan no matter what. We don’t let hunger and cravings lead to binges, and we take full benefit of being on Atkins. Remember, we have a powerful tool on Atkins; it’s called the Atkins edge. Use it to control your hunger, add fats into your diet, and keep those carbs low until you get your hunger back under control. If we are patient, and control our eating habits, we can correct the damage done from going into starvation mode. That’s it, you now know how to come out of starvation mode quickly and reset your sluggish metabolism. You need only eat more food, and do it in a controlled manner.
Resetting a set point is much more difficult, and it requires the one thing that many of us don’t have—time. Well, actually, we have time, but the one thing many of us lack is patience.
According to Dr. Blackburn, “If you want to lose weight — and lose it for good — follow the 10% rule. Try to lower your body weight by that percentage and then stop losing for a while. Fight instead to keep off just that amount. So if you weigh 180 pounds, aim to lose 18 pounds in the next three to six months. If you weigh 220, your goal might be to drop 22 pounds. Stay at that level for at least six months to give your body a chance to adjust to its new, lower "set point.” If you lose weight in this fashion, and do it in a healthy manner, you are less likely to be stuck at any one set point until you reach your final set point, which is your goal weight. Blackburn says our original set point was established around the age of 18, but you may have a better idea of what your original set point is, so that’s the goal I would use.
The one thing you would need to do following this theory is reduce your calories in a healthy manner, and once you reached your 10% goal, stop losing, and raise your calorie intake level as high as you can, you must stay there for 6 months. So, if you were reducing your calories by 500 a day, and lost 1 lb a week and reached your goal weight, then you would add those calories back in to maintain your weight. However, according to set point theory our body will fight to maintain that weight, so if you were to add back even more calories than this your body would raise its metabolic rate to keep you at your set point weight. Thus, you could find yourself eating more than you did before. Once you maintain this weight for 6 months, in theory, your metabolism would be revved up to a new level, and once you started dieting again you would need only reduce your calories by what you did before and being the weight loss journey once again. This would keep your metabolism set high, and keep your metabolism from adapting.
I think his research is sound, however, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a 500 lb person, or anyone for that matter, to spend years slowly taking off the weight to avoid hitting a set point. From the research I’ve done, there are other techniques to help break a stall or plateau, and blast through a set point. I’ll touch on some of these techniques shortly.
My next post on compensatory behaviors is going to be the key to losing weight and keeping it off. I’ve touched on this earlier, but I’ll go into more detail and hopefully you’ll see just how powerful knowing this one bit of information can be in helping you keep off the diet roller coaster.
There are many strategies to help us keep the pounds off, and break free from any stall, but first, we must understand how compensatory behaviors sabotage most diets.
Important: The one thing that stalls and set points have in common is metabolic adaptation. What we need to understand is that metabolic adaptation doesn’t just happen without our help. A metabolism just doesn’t go up or down; we have to engage in some type of behavior that causes that metabolism to change. The behaviors that I’m referring to are what I talked about earlier; they are compensatory behaviors, which we can also refer to as self-sabotage. These compensatory behaviors can be conscious or unconscious, and can lead us to do all manner of things that go against our ultimate goal of losing weight. When we engage in these behaviors, it is our body’s way of fooling the mind to adjust our behavior so the body can get its needs met. It’s as if the body and mind have their own agenda, and they are constantly at war, with the victor often being our biology. When our biology wins, our diets are doomed. This is why most diets fail; we’ve never learned to get control of our own biology.
What are these compensatory behaviors, and how can we overcome our biology?
According to the Robertson Research Institute, a “compensatory behavior is a behavior a person engages in because the brain wants to feel differently than it does. For example, if a person is very depressed they may seek to engage in increasingly exciting behaviors (promiscuity, gambling) to counter their depressed state.” To make this more relatable to a dieter, a dieter may decide to lose weight by cutting calories, which throws the body into a state of stress. Remember, the body doesn’t like change; it wants to remain in homeostasis. So, to compensate for your dieting efforts it gives you cravings for chocolate chip cookies. These compensatory behaviors may produce behavior that is out of character for you, or even unhealthy.
I’ve talked about compensatory behaviors earlier, when I asked, “How many times have you sabotaged your own efforts when you dedicated yourself to exercise?” Did you lose your energy, your motivation, and convince yourself this isn’t what you really wanted? I’ll repeat this information here in case you forgot. Did you schedule time to exercise, but found you were always making excuses, or filling up your schedule with other things to do? Such as, wash the dog, work in the yard, go to the library, visit your Aunt Mildred, etc. In some cases, you may even cause yourself an injury unconsciously. Other behaviors may include, skipping breakfast, or being less diligent in tracking your food. Or you can do something as simple as leave your lunch bucket on the counter. There can also be a lot of emotional baggage that comes with self-sabotage, things that might make you feel worthless and ashamed, and full of self-doubt. You may start believing you are destined to be fat, or you are not worthy of being skinny. Or, perhaps you are afraid of what people might think of you. These are not all inclusive, I’m sure you have your own list of compensatory behaviors. But I hope I made my point, your compensatory behaviors take control of your mind, make you stray from your goals, and eventually give up on your diet, and your dreams of being thin.
As I’ve said, most of us lack the patience to make a diet work; we want quick results and don’t care if we have to cut corners to do so. However, the body knows you well. It knows how to push just the right buttons, and the one thing it does better than you is wait. It knows that you have quit diets before, so, all it need do is stall your weight loss, and you will eventually quit. For some people this is a week, others a month, and for some, like me, its eight months. This is why patience is so important. If I would have quit at the eight month mark I would not have broke my stall, and my biology would have won. As Ross Perot said, “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.” If you don’t give up, and you practice patience you can win the battle of mind and body. You are only one yard from a touchdown. I never gave up, and I scored the game winning touchdown, and so can you.
I want to give you an example of how our body can trick us into making poor choices; how many times have you eaten something non-Atkins, an Oreo, a bit of pasta, or a handful of chips, only to get angry with yourself later. You say things like, “I knew better, but I did it anyway.” You scream, “Why, why, why, did I do that?” Well, now you know. It was your body tricking you into making poor decisions; it more than likely did this by switching off the reasoning center of the brain that keeps you in conscious control, weakening your will power. Once this happens all bets are off, and it’s eat-a-bag-of-Oreos-time.
So, when I referred to us being participants in our own metabolic adaptation, I was referring to our compensatory behavior. Yes, some things are out of our control. However, every choice, whether conscious or unconscious, is a battle waging within as your body tries to restore homeostasis. In essence, you become the puppet to a body that is now the puppet master. And this is where diets fail, unless you learn to stay in conscious control.
I know you are probably wondering why compensatory behaviors are so important and how it relates to a stall. The quick of it is this, when we get to a set point, plateau, or stall, it is usually our own self-sabotage, or compensatory behavior that keeps you stalled, as I hope I have shown you. Before you go screaming at me that it’s not your fault, and you’ve done everything right, I challenge you to look at your own behaviors, and see if I may be right. I admit, sometimes stalls just happen, but the point I want to make here is that there is no one to blame, so you can stop beating yourselves up, this is all a matter of biology. But through an understanding of biology, you can learn to stay in control.
Win the battle of biology.
To win the battle of biology, and become your own puppet master, you must first become aware of all your compensatory behaviors. Keep a journal, and every time you engage in a behavior that even slightly sabotages your effort write it down. I don’t expect you to stop doing what you are doing every time, this would impossible, but you can do your best. Sometimes identifying these behaviors are hard to do when we are under the influence of The Set Point Monster. But you will eventually regain your sanity, and when you do, you can analyze what happened. Hopefully in time you will recognize the signs and be able to stop the compensatory behaviors before they get out of hand.
The second thing you can do is make sure you are doing Atkins properly. That means eating your fat. Fat not only helps keep us fueled, it helps control our hunger. This is where we have an advantage over others. With our hunger kept in check, it’s easier to resist most cravings, and if cravings do strike, you can usually fight them with a fatty Atkins meal. This usually works for me. It’s hard to eat junk when you are stuffed to the gills with 2,400 nutritious Atkins friendly calories.
Third, make sure you are tracking your activities and everything you eat. This tracking is going to become your new hunger mechanism. You are not going to wait for your body to tell you when to eat, or what to eat, if you wait for hunger to kick in it is too late. Let tracking and planning be your guide and you will have a much better chance at beating The Set Point Monster.
Fourth, constantly update your goals and stay hungry for success. I know you’ve experienced the thrill of reaching a goal, only to have your enthusiasm wane once you’ve reached it. When this happens, you give your biology a chance to slip in and take over, and many times, you won’t get that control back until you’ve gained much of your weight back and become disgusted with yourself. This is why you must set new goals, and stay focused and enthused.
Fifth, get a weight loss buddy; if you have a buddy this person can help keep you in control when you become out of control, in essence, they become your puppet master temporarily, and can help you fight The Set Point Monster. Please be gentle with them. What would be great is if you can build a support system of friends and family that you trust to help you reach your goals. The more people that are watching you succeed the more aware you will be of what you are doing, thus, the more conscious control you will have. This is why I love the Atkins forum; it helps keep me in conscious control.
Finally, know your numbers, as we discussed earlier, don’t guess at your BMR and calories burned, guessing will only get you into trouble. And don’t forget to adjust those numbers as you lose weight. If you rely on guessing, your compensatory behaviors will fool you every time. They did me.
Let’s look at how these tools are applied in real life.
Someone asked me recently how the people on the Biggest Loser lose all that weight in such a short period without going into starvation mode. Well, the answer is they can’t. The fact of the matter is you can’t lose that much weight, as quickly as they do, without going into starvation mode. But they seem to do it; they blast through stalls, set points, and even starvation mode, even when their bodies are screaming at them to stop.
How?
They use all the tools I’ve outlined above, overcoming all their biological functions that scream at them to stop doing what they are doing. I’m going to analyze their weight loss, and show you the correlation between what I’ve been showing you and what they are doing.
On the Biggest Loser, everyone is obese; they’ve ruined their metabolism. Most of them wouldn’t be able to lose this weight without help, they have proven this and time again as they yo-yo dieted their way to obesity. The show is their last resort. Fear of death, coupled with a 250,000 dollar cash price, is a powerful motivator, both of which help keep them in conscious control. However, this isn’t all that is going on.
From what I understand, the contestants on the show eat only 1200 and must burn 6000 calories a day. With a 4,800 calories deficit, it is obvious they are in starvation mode. The first thing to understand about their starvation mode type diet is they are not doing it alone, they are under constant supervision, and if they run into trouble they have the resources to help them. Nobody I know has these types of resources. In addition, the food they eat is probably the most nutrient dense food that can be provided, and I’m assuming they take loads of vitamins and minerals to offset their vitamin deficiencies. However, this still wouldn’t be enough to keep them from starvation mode. No matter what they do, they are going to be under their starvation threshold.
Since they are in starvation mode, their bodies are doing certain things to keep them from punishing themselves; their bodies are in full-blown survival mode. I’m sure their bodies are screaming at them to eat, and their hunger and cravings must be overwhelming. I also assume that their bodies are shutting down systems, and creating rolling black outs. Gillian and Bob are torturing them daily, and I’m sure their bodies are screaming at them to stop exercising, causing extreme fatigue, lethargy, and weakness, but they manage to push past it all. With all this going on inside of them it’s amazing that they can exert any conscious control at all. Well, the fact of the matter is they don’t, not exactly. Most people could not maintain this type of conscious control for long without help.
Let’s look at the tools they are using and compare them to my list.
First, do they engage in self-sabotaging behavior? Of course, you see this all the time as they yell, puke, cry, pout, throw things, scream bloody murder, and threaten to quit, as their biology/bodies are pushing them to stop. Some even get hurt, which forces them to slow down. During food challenges, many of them eat all the junk offered, just to win a prize. All of these things could be categorized as compensatory behaviors. So, are they keeping track of these behaviors? You betcha, it’s called T.V. And let’s not forget they have Gillian and Bob to remind them every time they engage in one of these behaviors.
Second, while I can’t say they are eating fat, or doing Atkins to keep their hunger in check, I can guarantee their hunger is kept in check a little, just by the mere fact they are being scrutinized by Gillian and Bob, and most of America. However, I do believe they don’t have the advantage we do on Atkins. If these people were not on T.V. and didn’t have so many people watching their every move, I’m sure they would eat one another given half a chance.
Third, are they tracking all they eat and all their activities? Yes, they have the body bug system to track it all.
Fourth, do they have goals, and constantly adjust those goals? Yes, they have powerful incentives; it is a show after all, where the grand prize is 250,000 dollars. Also, most of them are thoroughly disgusted with themselves; otherwise, they wouldn’t put themselves through so much agony. If someone offered you 250, 000 dollars to lose weight, how successful do you think you would be?
Fifth, do they have a buddy and a support system? Yes, in the form of Gillian, Bob, America, their family, and each other. That’s a lot of outside influence to help keep their compensatory behaviors and biology in check.
Finally, do they know their numbers? Once again, the answer is yes.
It’s obvious from analyzing what they are doing they are following the same plan I’ve outlined for you. You don’t need a television show to help you do all these things. In fact, I’m sure they don’t even realize they are engaging in these behaviors. However, what you have going for you is that you know how these compensatory behaviors can sabotage your efforts, and you can make conscious choices to overcome your biology.
Now that I’ve explained the importance of compensatory behaviors, I hope you understand why I spent so much time on this, and why I said this was the key to breaking though your plateaus, stalls, and set points. If you can get control of these, you will blast through any set point, plateau, or stall in no time.
Now, to wrap this up we’ll look at all the rest of the things you can do to break your stalls.
The 25 Most Important things you can do to break your weight loss stall.
- Make sure you are in a stall, as defined by Atkins, as I mentioned in the beginning of this series on Why Stalls Happen.
- Make sure you are not in starvation mode. If you are, get out of it. This one is of vital importance
- Make sure you understand set points, and the tricks The Set Point Monster plays on you.
- Increase your activity level. However, as we’ve discussed, it’s important not to do too much, which would create a larger calorie deficit that could throw you into starvation mode. Balance is the key. Also, we must not forget to increase calorie consumption to an acceptable level to compensate for excess calories burned.
- Increase your muscle mass by doing strength training. The more muscle you have the higher you BMR will be, and the more calories you will burn at rest. I must point out, that through all my research it is of a common consensus that muscle mass has little impact on BMR and metabolism. I tried to find information on how fast muscle grows, but couldn’t find much. But I found several sites that suggested we could only hope to gain 5 lbs a year. I’m not sure how true this is. However, it is of my opinion that even if muscle doesn’t burn as much calories at rest as many people believe, muscle strength and endurance does allow you to engage in more activities. The more activities you engage in the more calories you will burn.
- Increase your water consumption to stimulate lipolysis and clean your system of excess ketones.
- Avoid eating within 3 hours of bedtime. Especially avoid any foods that are higher in carbs as this can trigger insulin production, which in turn will inhibit fat burning while you are asleep.
- Find inventive ways to get your body moving. Tap your feet, stand, or pace while on the phone, take the stairs, and park the car further away when you go shopping. All of which will burn more calories.
- Get plenty of sleep, studies show that people who sleep less than 8 hours a night are more likely to be overweight. Also, when you are on a diet and experiencing rolling black outs sleep is very important to help give you the energy you need to get through the day. In addition, when we sleep this is the time the body repairs itself, grows new muscle, and resets all of our hormones and biological functions. Lack of sleep causes stress on the body, and as I’ll explain later stress can stop weight loss cold.
- Make sure you are counting all your carbs, and watch out for hidden carbs. You must track every bite you put into your mouth.
- If you are experiencing a stall, reduce you sweetener to no more than three.
- Eliminate all treats and products temporarily until you break your stall.
- Keep your protein sizes reasonable. Excess protein can be converted to glucose, which can throw you out of ketosis. You can check the Atkins book for recommended protein levels.
- Check your medications, Atkins recommends talking with your doctor to find out if any of your medications affect weight gain or can make it more difficult to lose. Some medications can alter appetite, metabolism, and water retention. If this is the case, work with your doctor to find possible substitutions.
- Find ways to reduce stress. Stress simulates starvation mode in many ways. Stress is the body’s fight or flight mechanism that when we are engaged in it, our body is on hyper alert. It is preparing to do battle, and when it is doing so it will go into fat storing mode to prepare for a battle that may never come. In addition, when our stress is finally released it has a lot of repair work to do from the damage stress can have on the body. To do this repair work it is going to trigger those primal urges to seek out food so that it can replenishes its food stores. Also, stress can make us hold water, which for any dieter can be mentally devastating when we step on the scale.
- Try zigzagging your calories, also known as cycling. To zigzag your calories adjust your calories throughout the week going up to your maximum and then dropping down to a safe weight loss level. This helps keep your body from adapting to any one set point. In essence, you are keeping the body confused, thus, it won’t adapt. This theory is very controversial, not because it doesn’t work, but there hasn’t been much scientific evidence researching it. However, just because there hasn’t been scientific research done, doesn’t mean this theory doesn’t work. On the contrary, I found many success stories that say this theory works. I really like this theory and use it all the time.
- Watch for food intolerances. According to low carb friends, in the article, Food Allergy & Intolerances, A significant percentage of low carbers report that over-consumption of cheese and dairy products will put them in a stall quicker than anything else will, even when the carbs are not "hidden" but are accounted for in the daily total. There is some suggestion it may be an intolerance or allergy to the casein protein in cow's milk dairy products. If you have been eating a lot of dairy foods lately, try cutting way back, or even eliminating altogether for a week or two, and see if this breaks the plateau. Food allergies and intolerances are difficult to pin down, but are known to trigger weight gain, fluid retention, sinus congestion, skin rashes, and digestive upsets, diarrhea etc. The most common food allergens are: wheat and wheat gluten, cow's milk, dairy products, corn, soy, and chicken egg whites. Again, try eliminating any or all of these from your diet for a few weeks. Then, add each food back gradually, and see if symptoms return and your weight stalls again. You may have to avoid the offending food permanently, although many people find that after a few months they may cautiously eat a small amount of the food once in a while, without adverse effect.”
- As a last resort, try a stall buster diet. There are several out there, including Dr. Atkins Fat fast. Others are, “The doctor’s quick weight loss diet, also known as Stillmans,” and there is the “meat fast.” I don’t know how safe these are, so I’d read up on each of these before I tried them. Warning: I do not recommend these, and neither does Akins. Please consult a physician before doing any fast.
- Make sure you are watching your sodium intake.
- Watch for food additives, you may be allergic to some of them. Check dyes in soft drinks.
- According to the New Atkins book, you can reduce your carb intake by 10 and keep doing so until you break your stall. I went down to 15, and this seemed to help, but I wasn’t there very long.
- It is of utmost important that you spread your meals throughout the day, eating a minimum of three times. I prefer 5 or 6 times myself. The body only has limited storage capacity in the body for immediate fuel in the body, when the capacity gets full, it stores all excess as fat. In an article written by Jim Kendela, for Men’s Health online, “Spacing your meals every 2 1/2 to three hours provides a number of metabolism-enhancing benefits...On a three-meals-a-day program, you risk fluctuating blood-sugar levels more than is ideal. The multiple-meal approach maintains steady blood-sugar levels...leading to stable insulin levels. Elevated insulin levels inhibit fat burning.... Since blood sugar remains relatively constant, you do not suffer from pangs of hunger, which often lead to bouts of overeating on a three-meals-a-day approach...When you follow the five- or six-a-day meal plan; your body processes macronutrients more efficiently and more quickly. One of the benefits of this improved efficiency is that fat has less time to stay in your system, so less of it is absorbed and stored, while the remainder is expelled (to put it politely).”
- Juggle your carb intake. In the same article written by Jim Kendall, of Men’s Health, he says, you need to “shock yourself. Since the body prefers homeostasis, it quickly adapts to processing the same number of carb calories each day. Remember, shock is the name of the game, whether you're training or dieting”... He goes on to say, “If you apply any formula for macronutrient intake too rigidly or consistently, your progress can stall, especially with regard to carb intake...In the early phase of a weight-loss plan, this approach works quite well, training the body to expect a certain amount of essential nutrients on a regular schedule for maximum benefit. But all good things have their downsides. The body is lazy: Once it has adapted to a pattern (achieved homeostasis), it will work just enough, no more, no less, to maintain that balance. To continue getting leaner, the body must not be allowed to become complacent. It has to be gently shocked into continued adaptation. That's why an efficient training program is altered ever so slightly on a regular basis. Your diet should likewise be altered.”
- Take a break from losing weight. Notice, I didn’t say Atkins, I said losing weight. Just take a break. Increase your calories up a bit until you are neither gaining, nor losing, and remain there for a few weeks, and then resume your journey.
- Before you give up, and say you've tried everything, go back to the information I provided and ask yourself, "Did I truly try everything," I bet you might have missed something.
In conclusion, I want to leave you with these words from Colette Heimowitz, if you do hit a plateau, “Remember two things: First, your body is not a machine. Nor is it a clone of anyone else’s body. It has its own system, its own agenda, and its own timetable. In the end, your body nearly always responds to sensible management by the person in charge. That’s you. But in the short run, your body may decide to go its own way, for its own reasons that we may not be able to understand. Don’t get mad at it—or yourself. It’s a good body or it wouldn’t have gotten you this far. Be patient; you can afford to outwait it.”
This is all I’ve learned about breaking stalls and plateaus; I hope it has enlightened you a little. I know it has me. I know I made promises to you when I started this, telling you I’d help you learn how to breakthrough your stalls, I hope I have not disappointed you. If you’ve been helped by this information, I’d love to hear from you.
“Most people who succeed in the face of seemingly impossible conditions are people who simply don't know how to quit.” (Robert Schuller)
Eat well my friends, Terry Elkins (Whyguy)
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