Low Carb Confidential

My diet, to put it bluntly, is going nowhere.

That’s not the point of this post, however.

What I don’t get – even though I have experienced this throughout my history on low carb – is how very frequently what I eat has no correlation with what I weigh. Over the years I have tried to glean what the relationship between my food intake and what the scale sez, and about the only rule I’ve been able to rely on is: if I am going great guns and I cheat one day, it doesn’t affect my weight. Two days it does.

Beyond that, I see no consistent pattern.

Case in point: I have been adhering to my desired diet rather poorly. I am an emotional eater, and my stress levels have been pretty high as of late. I’m not complaining, it’s part of the warp and the woof of life – it’s just it makes sticking to my plan hard.

So yesterday, beside my breakfast of 2 eggs and a tablespoon of butter, I had a deli sandwich at lunch that left me feeling as if I had been attacked, then on the way home stopped at the symbol for all things wrong with the American Way of Eating – McDonalds – and had three – yes, three – double cheeseburgers.

While bloated beyond belief, I thought: hey – why stop there? I had some sugar-laden creme soda and some candy – not much – but some.

I was not looking forward to this morning’s appointment with my scale, but when I got on, it told me 211.8.

That’s a 0.4lb. difference from yesterday, and only a 2.5 lb. difference for pretty much the last couple of weeks – whether I was good on my diet or bad on my diet – it really didn’t matter.

All this bring me to think about the notion of weight setpoints – the idea that our bodies have a particular set of weights that they are comfortable at. In my adult life, the numbers 185, 195, 215, 230 and 260 were all numbers that sort of felt like the stable weight numbers that I couldn’t budge either way without great effort. I never stayed for very long at 205, for example – I was always passing through that number – either up or down – to 195 or 215.

It seems at these weights my body will just excrete extra calories if I eat too much or hold on tenaciously to calories if I eat too little.

What the hell is going on here? What is the mechanism of setpoints – and what causes them to change?

I’m sorry that this post has little in the way of answers – it’s a FAIL posting most assuredly – but it’s a question I should investigate.

As someone once said: knowing the right questions is half the way to finding the answer.

Filed under: Food, Goals, Personal Journal, diet, low carb, weight loss