Velocity Undetermined

The time scale for fat loss is month to month not week to week or
day to day. There hasn't been even one dieter in all of history
who was happy with that fact, but disliking a fact doesn't magically
convert it into fiction.


hey! Does too! I do it all the time!

Relax. You are doing fine. So you're past the point of water loss
and into the stage where water retention bounce dominates the
day to day scale readings to the point the scale readings are
meaningless until the next new low registers. It's frustrating but
it IS a *victory*. Seriously. Boot camp has been completed.
Other folks understand that and of course you won't now. But
relax and in a few months there will be plenty of new lows.


Sigh.


Darker isn't better, you know. Think about what the sticks are
designed for - They are designed to detect fatal ketoacidosis.
When they turn dark black, the reaction is to call an ambulance
not celebrate. But of course no non-diabetic low carber ever
gets that sort of out of control ketone generation. Still, pink
beats dark purple.


Well, yesterday I was actually in the purple/browns. Either I ate too
much coconut bark or my spleen is on fire -- I'm guessing A. But as I
said, it was all very entertaining.


The book says the way to deal with that is add another 5 grams
to your weekly quota ahead of schedule. In the first two weeks
I've never been convinced that helps - Folks clear up by the end
of Induction without change most of the time so the normal
approach is to move the calendar forward another week aka wait.
But if you aren't on schedule remember what the quotas are week
to week - 20, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 and so on until you've spent
your week out of ketosis to find your CCLL (5-10 lower than the
quota that kicked you out).


You know, I don't ever remember doing that. I remember not being
hungry at all, settling at 1300 calories with one salad a day and a
couple of slices of diet bread, and using the fact that my
hypoglycemia seemed to be coming back as a guide to whether my carbs
were too high or not. I lost way over a hundred pounds in like seven
months -- the last 30 took me another six. By that time I was more a
calorie girl than a carb girl and unfortunately I'm basically right
back above that last 30.


I think you're remembering a different time scale.

I think you must be right. How could I have gone through seven months
of absolute dedication to this whole thing and now be blown away by
three weeks of Chubbette Awareness?


You are doing FINE. Do NOT search for extremist actions then make
up justifications for those extremist actions. And absolutely do not
take tiny bits of my low carb integrative hypothesis and use those
bits out of context to justify doing the wrong thing. That would be
like glancing at the title page of DANDR and switching to eating
nothing but steak for the next year.

Lol...I was wondering what you would think of that book. Thanks for
the review.

c

dammit, i was hoping this was the chocolate chip pancake diet.

"Days" is too short. I've mentioned this before... I keep a graph of
my weight each day, and only look at *trends*, which take at least a
week or two to even show up. See the first half of[*] and you'll see
that you CANNOT determine the trend from any single day's measurement;
it takes at least two weeks of them to see that I was going nowhere.
Graphs athttp://www.delorie.com/health/

[*]http://www.delorie.com/health/20030724-chart.html


. Hey I forgot about your awesome webcharts. I know I went through
this the last time I had quite a bit of weight to lose ( and hey, man,
in five years it's never happened before now) -- it's less, almost,
about eating and more about adopting the right relationship to the
time that's passing. In five years, I have *never* felt this "going
too slow" thing. Suddenly it all can't happen fast enough and that's
at a top weight about eighty pounds shy of where I was five years
ago.

Weird. My Time got joggled somehow.


* Get a body fat measuring thing. Either the funky scales or calipers.

* Every day, calculate the actual amount of fat and lbm in your body.
Again, trends are more important than specific numbers, since the
process is imprecise. I say "every day" only to make it a habit,
and get enough measurements for the averages to be more accurate.
You could do it once a week if you want, but it so, do it three
times and take the average.

* Graph "lbm" vs "weight" for a few weeks. You'll see that they don't
always move together; the interesting changes are the diagonals -
up+right and down+left mean changes in water weight, not changes in
actual body composition. The UL/DR changes are actual body
composition. See[*] for an old sample of mine, light orange is
older measurements, dark orange is newer.

[*]http://www.delorie.com/health/20051212-weight-lbm.html


Oh! I wanna do that! More pacifying entertainment for the impatient
weight loss infant in my head.

Hey did you ever go and get your metabolism tested by that place? What
was it like? What did they say?

OTOH I recall you having problems with too much soy protein last time
around, you might want to look up your old posts about that and make
sure you're not repeating past mistakes.

Oh, yeah -- I didn't even think about it till you mentioned it. It's a
little notch in my head -- before I googled myself I thought, oh, it
wasn't that bad. Now I see it was. But I'm off soy except for the very
occasional Atkins bar. I did this one straight.

I think it's just been five years since I got on this train and I
forgot all the little things that make the experience...so special...

c
are we there yet?

writes:
. Hey I forgot about your awesome webcharts.

One of them was your design, too :-)

it's less, almost, about eating and more about adopting the right
relationship to the time that's passing.

I think "dieting" would work better if you could form good habits,
then ignore the whole problem while you get on with your life, only to
realize a year later that you're really healthy all of a sudden :-)

It's a big "if" though.

Hey did you ever go and get your metabolism tested by that place?
What was it like? What did they say?

I did. 1470 kcal/day just to be alive, 1950 for an "average" day.
That was at 150 lbs (i.e. 10x kcal/lbs just to be alive, 13x for an
average day, a little lower than what the popular numbers are).

Basically, you just sit still and breathe into a little device (looks
like a cell phone with a big straw) for ten minutes, and it pops out
the answer (the 1470) based on measuring CO2 and O2 in the air going
in and out.

I'm not sure how much that information helped, though, other than to
know that my metabolism is a little lower than average. There are so
many things that affect metabolism that one (somewhat artificial[*])
particular number isn't much of a reflection on real life.
[*] the moment you get up and walk away, the number changes.

Jackie Patti writes:
c
dammit, i was hoping this was the chocolate chip pancake diet.

I love your taglines. I read all your posts just to see the next
tagline.

The fun part is figuring out which you can make true. I think I have
(or can make) a recipe for LC chocolate chip pancakes.

Googles....
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.s...b93ee834328819

LC chocolate is a common recipe, make chips from that and add to the
above.

wrote:

c

dammit, i was hoping this was the chocolate chip pancake diet.

I love your taglines. I read all your posts just to see the next
tagline.

--
http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

On Oct 17, 4:36?pm, Jackie Patti wrote:
wrote:
c

dammit, i was hoping this was the chocolate chip pancake diet.

I love your taglines. I read all your posts just to see the next
tagline.

--http://www.ornery-geeks.org/consulting/

. It keeps my mind off the scale. And I figure it's a small way of
saying thank you for reading me go on and on and on about my
bellyfat.

c
Some people only stare at their navels. Others seem to have to narrate
the thing.

Try eating less and exercising more.



wrote in message
oups.com...
I'm a little disoriented.

I've dropped about 13 pounds I think. But the needle on my bathroom
scale now has both its annoying little arms wrapped around the same
number. It's been that way for three days. I'm perplexed.

I know, all right? I know that this is an excellent loss and I
shouldn't get all whiny before even a month has passed at 20-35 carbs.
It just doesn't feel right. It feels slow, or too hard or something
and I feel like I should have cut through at least 20 pounds by now.

I even bought some ketostix today. I've realized that ketostix are
really just a babysitting device, but anyway good news! I had a very
satisfying interaction today with my own urine and discovered that I
am burning fat at an almost terrifying rate.

But it still feels wrong. Slow. I should have more energy. I don't.
My head feels fuzzy, like there's too much space between my eyebrows.
The worst part is that the extra padding on my abdomen is sitting
there without budging like my cat Elvis and that is *not* what
normally happens. Normally that's the first thing to go.

I can't tell if I'm just paranoid because of all the crap I read about
trashing your adrenals with drugs and the hormonal roadkill left
behind by antidepressants, or if I really am in a new, unpleasant type
of homeostasis.

Then I made the mistake of reading this book ( I'm a librarian so I
can scoop books off the New Titles shelf and get them back on by
morning) called Cheat to Lose, which basically sort of says what Doug
says about leptin and I'm wondering if I should cycle. Or hold steady.
Or just calm down for another month.

Or what.

c
gone completely quantum

On Oct 17, 4:01?pm, DJ Delorie wrote:
writes:
. Hey I forgot about your awesome webcharts.

One of them was your design, too :-)

it's less, almost, about eating and more about adopting the right
relationship to the time that's passing.

I think "dieting" would work better if you could form good habits,
then ignore the whole problem while you get on with your life, only to
realize a year later that you're really healthy all of a sudden :-)

It's a big "if" though.

Hey did you ever go and get your metabolism tested by that place?
What was it like? What did they say?

I did. 1470 kcal/day just to be alive, 1950 for an "average" day.
That was at 150 lbs (i.e. 10x kcal/lbs just to be alive, 13x for an
average day, a little lower than what the popular numbers are).

Basically, you just sit still and breathe into a little device (looks
like a cell phone with a big straw) for ten minutes, and it pops out
the answer (the 1470) based on measuring CO2 and O2 in the air going
in and out.

I'm not sure how much that information helped, though, other than to
know that my metabolism is a little lower than average. There are so
many things that affect metabolism that one (somewhat artificial[*])
particular number isn't much of a reflection on real life.

[*] the moment you get up and walk away, the number changes.
I did. 1470 kcal/day just to be alive, 1950 for an "average" day.
That was at 150 lbs (i.e. 10x kcal/lbs just to be alive, 13x for an
average day, a little lower than what the popular numbers are).


Wait a minute, I remember now. I was surprised it was less than 1500
because you seemed to burn a lumberjack breakfast just batting an
eyelash.

I wanted to do it too but then I think I got distracted, being a
refugee from the law and so forth. And like you said, that number
probably changes for just about any reason, from sunspots to sugarless
gum.

c
they wouldn't let my metabolism into canada...

I did. 1470 kcal/day just to be alive, 1950 for an "average" day.
That was at 150 lbs (i.e. 10x kcal/lbs just to be alive, 13x for an
average day, a little lower than what the popular numbers are).


Wait a minute, I remember now. I was surprised it was less than 1500
because you seemed to burn a lumberjack breakfast just batting an
eyelash.

I wanted to do it too but then I think I got distracted, being a
refugee from the law and so forth. And like you said, that number
probably changes for just about any reason, from sunspots to sugarless
gum.

c
they wouldn't let my metabolism into canada...

On Oct 17, 8:59 am, DJ Delorie wrote:
Doug Freyburger writes:
Also do some arithmatic on calories. Even though "a calorie is a
calorie" is nonsense and "calories in equals calories out" assuming
fixed calories out is even worse nonsense, calories do have some
meaning and they are useful for approximations -

This might be interesting reading...

"Determining the Maximum Dietary Deficit for Fat Loss"http://www.mindandmuscle.net/articles/lyle_mcdonald/maximum_fatloss

Damn, how did I miss this one? I thought I had read every one of
Lyle's article on bodyrecomposition.com. The page says that this
article was added in early 2006, but I'm sure I've visited the page
since that time.

The very neat and tidy claim is that, through dieting, body fat can be
coaxed to yield only 31 calories per pound.

Since there are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, 31 calories per pound
represents only 0.8% of the energy. In other words, your fat stores
can dwindle by at most 0.8% per day.

Loss of fat is therefore regarded as exponential process, simialr to
radioactive decay, capacitor discharge or cooling.

We can determine the half-life of fat: the theoretical number of days
required to cut your body fat in half, no matter where it is at.

This is simple:

log 0.5 / log (1 - 0.008) =~ 86.3

So, at least eighty six days to cut your fat in half. Let's call it an
even ninety.

E.g., assuming no lean mass change, to go from 50% body fat to 33%
body fat, 25% to 14.3% or from 10% to 5.3%.

These numbers seem overly optimistic, but not wildly out of reach,
like they are about the right ballpark for a theoretical maximum.