NO. Seriously. You need to eat more calories, and I strongly suggest that they come from fat.
Are you able to put away the scale for a bit? Lock it in a closet, give the key to someone you trust and tell them not to give you the key back for at least two months?
Because something will probably happen if you start feeding your body the amount of food it needs to survive. Yes. Survive. Right now you are eating at literally starvation levels.
Initially, you will gain. Your metabolism has slowed down so much that it's nearly dormant. And a day or two of at least 1500 calories will cause you to gain, as that extremely sluggish metabolism struggles to use those calories, instead of squirreling them away in fear of further deprivation.
But, after a bit (varies by individual, and I don't know the specifics for you) your body will relax enough to allow itself to use the calories and the nutrients that you give it, in the way they should be used. You'll build muscle that has wasted from lack of food, and, if you stay low carb and high fat, you'll burn fat that your body stored up because you were starving it.
Two months of not weighing yourself will allow you to not be, as you say, a slave to the scale. It will allow you to notice the changes in your body more dispassionately, and to gauge your activity, not on frantically trying to lose weight, but on feeling the good feelings that being active can give you.
Fast weight loss on any WOE tends to be more prevalent for those with higher levels of body fat. If you are muscular, you will lose less. If you are starving, you will lose, but at as slow a rate as your body can handle, because you are willfully slowing the metabolism.
For me, I lost 20 lbs in about a year, on moderate low carb and no grains--about 50 a day. Then I got stuck at 164. When I dropped carbs AND INCREASED FAT, I've now lost another 14 in about another year. I eat what I want, within my WOE, (Less than 20 total carbs/day) and take in, in two meals, probably between 1200-1500 calories a day. I'm 65. I'm not extremely active, having had a head injury and currently nursing a broken toe.
It's going to take you longer to lose this time as a function both of having less fat to lose, and being older. Not eating enough fat is deadly, when you want to lose fat, and don't have a whole lot of it available. It's having adequate fat to burn that allows your body to use protein for its normal uses, instead of turning it to glycogen in the liver with the process called gluconeogenesis.
Please, at least try some of the suggestions you've gotten here. Be willing to allow your body to heal from its deprivation before starting to lose. And much as I hate to say this, but it's all that got me to where I am, on the brink of the 140's: practice patience. Your body will lose at the rate that it will lose. You don't control the scale. Why let it control you?
|