Quote:
Originally Posted by AZDean
What would happen if this person didn't have her occasional binges? To me, her metabolism would stay low, just as it is already, but now she would have fewer calories on a weekly basis to live on and her weight would likely go down (given that she's maintaining at her current level of calories and her metabolism is already shut down).
Or, how could this person raise her metabolism? Is there any way to do it besides eating more?
Here, I don't know as I don't have any experience in this area, but it seems part of her problem was being sedentary.
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Well, I actually DO have experience in this area. When I was 310 lbs, before I went on a diabetic diet to control my low blood sugar, I was slowly gaining while eating less than I did during even the most focused phase of my LC weight los.
Because of difficulty exercising due to horrible low blood sugar crashing, I had gone into a spiral of ever diminishing activity and falling food intake levels to try to keep from gaining. My body temperature was actually below normal and I had auto immune diseases starting, further limiting my abililty to be active.
This all went away like a miracle when I went from low fat, healthy carb, whole foods eating to lower carb via a diabetic diet. But until then, my body was shutting down, eating it's own connective tissue, in severe pain and experiencing distructive levels of inflamation, and GAINING weight despite my best efforts to eat less and exercise more. And my best efforts then were NO DIFFERENT than my best efforts that made me successful, but my body was balanced precariously on a low energy in/low energy out state and I was not getting adequate food intake or nutrition to prevent my body's protective mechanisms of going into near hibernation mode and eating it's own connective tissue to compensate for insufficient protein and fat in my diet.
Doing everything I could, and 3 years of tons of medical care with 6 specialists DIDN"T WORK and I kept gaining.
I still view my weight gain then as calories in & calories out, but my body was shutting down, forcing weakness and inactivity, and trying to push itself to a near coma level of activity in response to not having the right type of nutrition. My attempts to be true to healthy low fat eating made it worse. No doctor realized this despite the fact that my albumin globulin ratio indicated malnutrition - that just didn't make sense to anyone when I weighed 310 lbs.
I'm the same person, about 7 years older now, no less sensible, and no different in my ability to balance my calories than I was then. The difference is that with low carb eating, I don't have constant blood sugar crashes so I don't have that one huge body driven variable to contend with.
One more thing, before I got really ill, I was about 270 lbs and riding my bike 25 miles per day, every day. I think the thing that triiggered my 3 years of medical hell was exercising like an athlete, eating healthy whole food carbs but too little protein and fat, and accidently sending my long term chronic low blood sugar problems escalating into debilitating low blood sugar problem. I can pull my bike riding log from 1987 and see how my daily exercise suddenly changed into a couple of days of shorter rides and then none as my dizziness and weakness started to prevent me from being able to ride.
I think most weight loss stalls are generally due to the simple fact that a smaller body needs less calories and diet isn't changed enough to compensate (whether through portion size changes or needing to cut back on occasional special meals). But that is not the case for everyone. I'm sure that the feeling of being chilled to the bone or low core body temperature is an indicator sign that the body if fighting to conserve energy and preserve fat stores. I can also recognize some slumpy body posture and muscle tone signs that I'm sure mean the same thing. There's probably a bunch of other signs as well, as well as a good number of triggers that can push a body into the downward spiral of body driven fat preservation.
That article of Diane's hit home in the way it described what it took for that one women to CRAWL out of a body shut down spiral. I never want to relive those years of having days where I was so weak that I had to crawl from the bedroom to the kitchen to get an orange to raise my blood sugar. Or of 10 minutes of weeding a garden resulting in arm muscle inflamation so sever it felt like both had been slammed in car doors.
I keep forgeting that one of the best LC benefits for me was the day I woke up, and was actually WARM and not in pain. It was like a miracle. Without LC sorting out my chronic health problems, I could not have moved into a cycle of eating more, being more active, building health and losing weight. It took more than "wanting it badly enough". It took finding the right puzzle pieces as well.
Lynda