My silly fear

emmie86

Angelic Fruitcake
Hi all well I still have a long way to go till my goal weight and when I reach it I fully understand that I can not return to old bad eating habits and want to eat heathy and exercise more. But I have this silly fear that as soon as I have worked up the steps and am on my own I will just keep gaining the weight back no matter how healthy I am. I was just wondering if there is any truth to my fear? should I expect to gain a bit of weight back after CD regardless of my more healthy eating habits? Thanks in advance Emma xxx
 
I think there is one absolute when it comes to maintaining your weight:

calories in must equal calories expended

If you eat fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight. If you keep those two numbers in balance, your weight will stabilize.

I think if you are committed to maintaining this healthy balance and eat accordingly, you'll maintain your weight. If you finish your diet and decide, "I'm free!" and start eating everything in sight, you'll rapidly regain what you've lost.

I don't believe that any one of us is doomed to regain the weight once we've lost it. We just have to realize that maintaining is going to be nothing more than a life-long extension of what we've been doing. Sure, there might be more treats and pleasurable foods involved, but we'll still have to work to maintain that balance.
 
Thanks Oinkstop I think it's just that I fear going from 415cal a day to 1800cal a day will cause a gain in weight no matter how much I am eating heathy as I have heard of people gaining 7lbs in a week after they first come offf CD and they haven't gone back to their old habits xxx
 
Thanks Oinkstop I think it's just that I fear going from 415cal a day to 1800cal a day will cause a gain in weight no matter how much I am eating heathy as I have heard of people gaining 7lbs in a week after they first come offf CD and they haven't gone back to their old habits xxx

I think that the most important part is that you slowly go from your 415 calories to a higher level. If you go from eating almost nothing to shoveling 1800 calories per day in your mouth, I would expect to see a gain.

Your body needed time to transition from regular eating to Sole Source, so you will need a similar transition going the other way. Increase your calories gradually, and follow the steps, so your body has a chance to re-start your metabolism.

I think you may have to experiment some as well. You may find, depending on your body size, metabolism and activity level, that 1800 calories per day might be too much.

I think when you get to the end it's normally to see fluctuations in your weight as you figure out what you need to do to keep your balance. The most important part is that you remain vigilant, and make adjustments as necessary.
 
I think there is one absolute when it comes to maintaining your weight:

calories in must equal calories expended

If you eat fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight. If you keep those two numbers in balance, your weight will stabilize.

I wanted to post something on this quote as I had the same discussion with a friend of mine who is a scientist. This is what she said..

This is actually bad science. It was the result of one experiment in the 60s or 70s in mice that showed that fewer calories and more exercise = weight loss.

THIS HAS NEVER EVER EVER BEEN REPRODUCED. Reproducibility is a key part of running scientific experiments. If you or someone else cannot reproduce the same experiment with the same result, it generally means that the original experiment is flawed. No one else has ever been able to show that eat less, move more means weight loss.

So the age old "eat less, move more" that on paper seems to make sense, actually has no basis in science. Yet (virtually) every doctor will tell you it is that simple. It isn't.

The body is far too clever for that. Exercising more makes you hungrier in order to encourage you to eat more. So increasing exercise generally leads to the intake of calories increasing to compensate for the calories expended during exercise - I'm referring to lab animals here - and in fact in many cases the animals eat slightly more calories than they would have done without the exercise so their overall intake of calories actually increases. This is a natural process, driven by our bodies, it's the same for humans, so for us to eat less and exercise more, we're actually denying nature.

If it was as simple as eat less, move more, then there wouldn't be a huge diet industry. We wouldn't keep going back to WW and SW and Rosemary Conley over and over again.
 
Thanks Oinkstop I think it's just that I fear going from 415cal a day to 1800cal a day will cause a gain in weight no matter how much I am eating heathy as I have heard of people gaining 7lbs in a week after they first come offf CD and they haven't gone back to their old habits xxx

Hiya,

One of my friends has been on LL and had reached a plateau. During her last 3 or so weeks, shed STS, lost 1lb, STS and was getting frustrated because she couldn't understand how, if she was on 500 calories a day, she wasn't losing.

Anyway, the following week she moved into Management, and reintroduced specific foods and lost 6.5lbs, she's got another 4 weeks to go in Management and has lost 11 lbs in total.

Her take on this is that her body is having to work to burn up the additional calories, and is adjusting to food, and this slow transition back to eating is stabilising her weight.

All I know is that when this point comes for me I'll be so glad I've got her as a friend!

xxx
 
I really think that you need to have an action plan for when you finish the program and you are out on your own.

There will always be situations where you may gain weight (i.e. Christmas, Holidays...) but if you know in advance how to approach and handle them. I am going to be weighing myself everyday when I first reach target to learn what my fluctuations in weight tend to be and with that information give myself a maximum weight at which i'd be comfortable. Once I hit that then there'll be no more playing around. It's time to lose it again.

Give yourself rules of certain situations so that you don't feel like you're losing control of your eating habits.
 
This is actually bad science. It was the result of one experiment in the 60s or 70s in mice that showed that fewer calories and more exercise = weight loss.

THIS HAS NEVER EVER EVER BEEN REPRODUCED. Reproducibility is a key part of running scientific experiments. If you or someone else cannot reproduce the same experiment with the same result, it generally means that the original experiment is flawed. No one else has ever been able to show that eat less, move more means weight loss.

Actually, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. There was a recent study done by the National Institutes of Health that showed that the type of diet selected almost doesn't matter, and that it's the total number of calories consumed that has the most effect on weight loss.

Now that being said, I think that the reason some people have such a hard time keeping at a healthy weight has very little to do with the calories in vs. calories out math, and more to do with the fact that people eat for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with biological need or hunger.

Our bodies evolved during times when food resources weren't as reliable as they are not, and people were much, much more active. As a result, our bodies were optimized to store fat so we'd have reserves during the lean times. These days, at least in most first-world countries, it's a rare thing that people starve because of drought, crop failure, or economic disasters. Cheap food is plentiful, and so are modern conveniences like washing machines, cars, and self-propelled lawn mowers, so we don't have to work as hard to make it through the day.

Going back to the original post, I think what's going to be important for you not to regain lots of weight when you stop using CD is to make the transition gradually, while you ramp up your activity levels as well.
 
The 7 pound gain is glycogen and water...if you introduce carbs too quickly then your body will store them straight away as energy...the gain isn't fat, it is purely energy ready for use, our bodies are good at storing stuff...
 
Hi!

If you do the steps up and slowly add more calories while doing the steps up you will be fine! :)

I did the steps up (slightly different steps than Cambridge UK but very similar) and am now in the process of slowly adding calories, seeing how much I can have etc. You won't instantly gain back all your weight when you have something unhealthy hon! It was my fear too but I haven't yet and I've eaten some unhealthy things already. You will be fine! :)

x
 
Phew thanks everyone for all the info It's all good stuff to know as before I was a bit scared that I even ate a slice of bread I would gain a few pounds and Lostris I'm glad I'm not the only one who had the worry lol xxx
 
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