Lost weight and numbers going up???

[Marnid2014]

Your body is going through a lot of changes with your diet and exercise regime. So leave the cpap stuff alone. It isn't broken right now. Let your body get used to the new and improved you before you decide to futz with your pressure settings and such. The only thing to keep working on is leaks, because as your face skinnys up, your mask seal may change.

Agreed, my face is much slimmer, I have 30 lbs to go to my goal. I will just hang out and try the FX Swift tonight and see what that goes.

[SleepWrangler]

I have lost 15 lbs on just 1000 calories a day and 2 hours of exercise daily, but weight stalled for over a month and so now am on Atkins diet, but am thinking of going on a different type of diet after the end of this week, as my weight has not come off on this either, and I am a bit nervous eating so much protein.

I've never been on a 1000 kcal per day eating plan. For me that would be starving myself and weight loss when you are starving can be a problem with many plateaus.

Ive had plateaus and sometimes they last longer than you'd hope but eventually the weight comes off, particularly with a well managed calorie deficit (and some days with no deficit at all). A well managed deficit means eating food with a healthy base-metabolic-rate in mind. With 2 - 2.5 hours exercise you should be able to eat more than BMR and still have a good deficit. If you haven't found one already here is a calculator to help you plan your meals: http://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/. Hope this helps.

BTW, you referred to Atkins diet as being high in protein. That doesn't sound right. It should be moderate protein and high fat meal planning. Atkins, like LCHF in general, relies on a metabolic state called ketosis where your primary energy source is dietary fat and body fat. I use Bayer Keto-Diastix, $10 for 100, to make certain I am in keytosis and that there is no glucose in my urine. Weight loss may plateau even with LCHF but varying the workout intensity gets weight off in due course.

With a high carbohydrate meal plan I have spent months at the same weight even with a 24,000 kcal monthly deficit (i.e., 800 kcal per day). It can happen on any meal plan.

[DocWils]

if I understand your info correctly, your are on a fixed pressure machine, and that is the problem - as you drop weight, your pressure needs change and adjust - the fact that you are showing an increase in CAs indicates the problem is the pressure, and here an autoset is your best friend - however, do not judge too much by the AHI count, it is still incredibly low - and it will fluctuate up and down as you lose weight and your body adjusts. Don't forget as you drop kilos, your throat does not tone up automatically and it actually may get "flabbier" (I use that hesitantly, since that is not at all the correct description of what goes on, but it will serve to help build an image) and you need to tone the throat to take up the slack, so to speak. Relax, and keep shedding your weight.

You can or not eat red meat as you chose, you CAN eat carbs, but not carbs from things growing below ground - what you are looking for is a low glycaemic index carb (look it up, lots of tables of what has what) and mix that in with your meats - also consider meat substitutes when you can (tofu, quorn, etc). Having also dropped 12% of my body weight (in a few weeks, and it is still coming off, albeit a bit more slowly now) I know how hard it is for you to carry on with it, but do so. The health rewards are great. I am not really a fan of Atkins, for a lot of medical reasons, but in short doses it is not the worst diet out there, still I urge you to consider a diabetic's diet guidelines as the best, healthiest and above all safest and most sustainable diet to undertake or to go to as a maintenance diet. Also, research has shown pretty clearly that following the old rule of "breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and sup like a peasant" to be the most effective way to maintain a correct blood sugar and drop weight safely and effectively. It sort of means that your first two meals of the day should be the biggest by far, and this has again been born out by newly published research. Equally newly published is that exercise "snacks" (three ten minute workouts, even walks, spread over the day) per day are far more effective at maintaining correct blood sugar and aiding weight loss than one single long (say, half hour) workout per day.

[Marnid2014]

I find it so hard to eat now, with being on Coumadin because of the Afib, I am not supposed to have more than 80 grams of Vitamin K per day. Anymore than that and I run the risk of a stroke due to blood clots. All the good foods have vitamin K, spinach, etc. anything green.

My Afib was a one time deal, so far, so hopefully in a few months I might be able to get off the Coumadin, I hate being on it.

[Marnid2014]

I have lost 15 lbs on just 1000 calories a day and 2 hours of exercise daily, but weight stalled for over a month and so now am on Atkins diet, but am thinking of going on a different type of diet after the end of this week, as my weight has not come off on this either, and I am a bit nervous eating so much protein.

I've never been on a 1000 kcal per day eating plan. For me that would be starving myself and weight loss when you are starving can be a problem with many plateaus.

Ive had plateaus and sometimes they last longer than you'd hope but eventually the weight comes off, particularly with a well managed calorie deficit (and some days with no deficit at all). A well managed deficit means eating food with a healthy base-metabolic-rate in mind. With 2 - 2.5 hours exercise you should be able to eat more than BMR and still have a good deficit. If you haven't found one already here is a calculator to help you plan your meals: http://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/. Hope this helps.

BTW, you referred to Atkins diet as being high in protein. That doesn't sound right. It should be moderate protein and high fat meal planning. Atkins, like LCHF in general, relies on a metabolic state called ketosis where your primary energy source is dietary fat and body fat. I use Bayer Keto-Diastix, $10 for 100, to make certain I am in keytosis and that there is no glucose in my urine. Weight loss may plateau even with LCHF but varying the workout intensity gets weight off in due course.

With a high carbohydrate meal plan I have spent months at the same weight even with a 24,000 kcal monthly deficit (i.e., 800 kcal per day). It can happen on any meal plan.

I bought Keto sticks and it showed I am in Ketosis, so if nothing is off by Friday, I am going to try the Med diet, hopefully I can find the right combination.

[SleepWrangler]

I bought Keto sticks and it showed I am in Ketosis, so if nothing is off by Friday, I am going to try the Med diet, hopefully I can find the right combination.

Weight off or the diet gets it huh? I hope you can shake things up enough that your body sheds the extra pounds in a reasonable time-frame. It appears that you've already made great progress!

[DocWils]

I find it so hard to eat now, with being on Coumadin because of the Afib, I am not supposed to have more than 80 grams of Vitamin K per day. Anymore than that and I run the risk of a stroke due to blood clots. All the good foods have vitamin K, spinach, etc. anything green.

My Afib was a one time deal, so far, so hopefully in a few months I might be able to get off the Coumadin, I hate being on it.

Sorry, you said you were on Coumadin? Did you clear your diet choice with your doctor????!!! You DON'T DO RADICAL DIETS AFTER an AFIB and BEING on COUMADIN UNLESS YOUR DOCTOR PRESCRIBES IT! Either I missed something in all the chatter here or you never stated that your doctor prescribed the diet. Please take all this to your physician and clear it through him/her.

Also please be aware that recent research pretty much puts the kibosh on either Atkins or the Med diet - both are good for short term weight loss, but after six months they even out and neither are shown to successfully keep weight off over long periods. Instead you should be examining what effect various portions of your diet are having on your insulin resistance and how to better that - in the process, you will lose weight, safely and healthily. Gary Taubes has written several books that describe well how all this works, and I should like to refer you to a New York Times article of the 16th May by David S. Ludwig and Mark I Freidman that adequately explains current thinking on the subject of effective dieting. Also be aware that your diet will ultimately eat away more muscle than fat - you will lose weight, but not in a good way. The idea is to reduce the amount of visceral fat, but the actions of your current diet have been shown to take away as much muscle as fat, gram per gram. A recent trial with twin doctors, one doing a high sugar diet and doing a high fat diet showed some interesting results, and was turned into a quite entertaining documentary on the BBC recently - you might look for it online.

[Marnid2014]

I find it so hard to eat now, with being on Coumadin because of the Afib, I am not supposed to have more than 80 grams of Vitamin K per day. Anymore than that and I run the risk of a stroke due to blood clots. All the good foods have vitamin K, spinach, etc. anything green.

My Afib was a one time deal, so far, so hopefully in a few months I might be able to get off the Coumadin, I hate being on it.

Sorry, you said you were on Coumadin? Did you clear your diet choice with your doctor????!!! You DON'T DO RADICAL DIETS AFTER an AFIB and BEING on COUMADIN UNLESS YOUR DOCTOR PRESCRIBES IT! Either I missed something in all the chatter here or you never stated that your doctor prescribed the diet. Please take all this to your physician and clear it through him/her.

Also please be aware that recent research pretty much puts the kibosh on either Atkins or the Med diet - both are good for short term weight loss, but after six months they even out and neither are shown to successfully keep weight off over long periods. Instead you should be examining what effect various portions of your diet are having on your insulin resistance and how to better that - in the process, you will lose weight, safely and healthily. Gary Taubes has written several books that describe well how all this works, and I should like to refer you to a New York Times article of the 16th May by David S. Ludwig and Mark I Freidman that adequately explains current thinking on the subject of effective dieting. Also be aware that your diet will ultimately eat away more muscle than fat - you will lose weight, but not in a good way. The idea is to reduce the amount of visceral fat, but the actions of your current diet have been shown to take away as much muscle as fat, gram per gram. A recent trial with twin doctors, one doing a high sugar diet and doing a high fat diet showed some interesting results, and was turned into a quite entertaining documentary on the BBC recently - you might look for it online.

I had discussed my diet with my doctor who told me to eliminate most carbs from my diet, and no sugar at all. They told me to look for anything that had hidden sugar as well. They want me to eat a diabetic diet, mostly protein and limited carbs. One thing that I told her was I was not going to eliminate green veggies from my diet, I would rather take more Coumadin. I eat a cup of Romaine lettuce in a salad every day, I have cucumbers, peppers, onions in it. All those are allowed on Atkins. He allows 20 grams of veggies a day, so I also add green beans or another non sugar veggie. I don't have pasta, or potatoes or sugar, other than that, my diet is mostly protein. Lean meats, fish, chicken. I don't fry anything, it's broiled. I also have nuts and avocado for the mono unstaturated. I have to be really careful of Vitamin K so my blood stays in the right levels.

I weighed myself this morning and FINALLY 2 lbs came off, so I am happy about that. When I go for my next INR levers I will see what the effect the Atkins has on the diet.

With having no thyroid, it's so hard to lose weight, the doctor told me to limit my calories to 1000 to 1200 maximum.

[SleepWrangler]

I weighed myself this morning and FINALLY 2 lbs came off, so I am happy about that. When I go for my next INR levers I will see what the effect the Atkins has on the diet.

With having no thyroid, it's so hard to lose weight, the doctor told me to limit my calories to 1000 to 1200 maximum.

Your control is amazing even with some really complex dietary restrictions. The calorie restriction and high protein in particular throws me off a bit.

Please follow up. I am implementing a LCHF diet similar to Atkins, not for weight loss, but instead for glucose management. I am scheduled for my next blood test in a about six weeks. I'd like to compare experience if possible.

Also please be aware that recent research pretty much puts the kibosh on either Atkins or the Med diet - both are good for short term weight loss, but after six months they even out and neither are shown to successfully keep weight off over long periods.

Research shows that junk carbs leads to food craving, and calorie counting often fails. I don't follow Atkins meal planning but how or why do you associate the common reasons for failure to Atkins? Hopefully this does not come across as argumentative. I really have no axe to grind except that careful management using the standard diabetic diet does not work for me.

Instead you should be examining what effect various portions of your diet are having on your insulin resistance and how to better that - in the process, you will lose weight, safely and healthily.

Yes. The standard diabetic diet often keeps my glucose levels somewhere between 111 mg/dL (6.2 mmol/l) and 122 mg/dL (6.8 mmol/l) postprandial. Spikes in the two hour window are large. Carefully managing carbs has brought that down to 86 mg/dl (4.7 mmol/l) but usually averaging 97 mg/dl (5.4 mmol/l). Following the standard diet is likely to have me on insulin within the next ten years. No thanks. I am looking for something better. I am currently evaluating LCHF. Should have some useful data over the course of the next sixteen months.

Gary Taubes has written several books that describe well how all this works, and I should like to refer you to a New York Times article of the 16th May by David S. Ludwig and Mark I Freidman that adequately explains current thinking on the subject of effective dieting.

The NY times article suggests junk carbs from overly processed foods leads to hunger and weight gain.

Carbohydrates, Gary contended, have fueled the epidemic of obesity in the U.S.; cut the carbs and you can eat all the fat and protein you like, just as the controversial diet doctor Robert Atkins has insisted for decades. Gary expanded on the Times article in a dense, 500-plus-page book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (Knopf, 2007), and a newer, much shorter, easier-to-digest sequel, Why We Get Fat (Knopf, 2010).

I disagree that you can eat all the protein you like. It converts to glucose too albeit through a longer pathway. Scaling carbs according to your glucose meter and protein according to exercise regimen makes much more sense.

Also be aware that your diet will ultimately eat away more muscle than fat - you will lose weight, but not in a good way. The idea is to reduce the amount of visceral fat, but the actions of your current diet have been shown to take away as much muscle as fat, gram per gram. A recent trial with twin doctors, one doing a high sugar diet and doing a high fat diet showed some interesting results, and was turned into a quite entertaining documentary on the BBC recently - you might look for it online.

Interesting overall with poor science, lacking real information on what they ate during their dieting month. Again, this isn't a bash on Keto, it's a bash on the intelligence of their diets - Protein and strength training are king in preserving LBM, and if any Keto dieter is using a low carb, low protein, high fat diet, expect muscle loss.

Agree that it is entertaining. In the same vein as Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me where follow-up documentaries like Fat Head say he lied about how many calories he was consuming per day.

[DocWils]

With having no thyroid, it's so hard to lose weight, the doctor told me to limit my calories to 1000 to 1200 maximum.

The problem is we DO equate, wrongly, that there is a simple calorie in/calorie out relation. While to some extent this is true, the picture is far more complex due to the interaction of certain types of foods with our body, end even with each other. However, keeping the calories limited when you have the list of conditions your have is quite correct - what is incorrect is to expect the weight to just roll off. Over time, you will get leaner, but as I said, it is far more complex a situation, and even the lack of a thyroid and being on Coumadin will add to the complexity of how the body deals with what fuel it gets.

As you can see, the weight is starting to decrease, and it will further, over time, but it is likely to go in fits and starts. That is perfectly normal - you will also see occasional weight gains as well. These are "plateaus" and adjustment periods as the body sorts out its metabolic settings in response to your dietary intake. Once you are off the Coumadin you will see again a different reaction of your food to your body (or vise-versa). We are discovering that timing is very important, when you eat what, perhaps as important as how much you eat a given thing.

About my caveats to the Mediterranean diet: Where the authors of the original studies that advocated the "Mediterranean" diet went wrong is that they really only saw half the picture - the study was done in the 1960s, when the people studied were physically active, spent lots of time outdoors and ate shared communal meals of fresh, seasonal, homecooked, locally produced foods. The authors ignored these elements and seemed to centre on the olive oil and fresh vegetables and meats, and ignored the high levels of fats in the diet altogether, thinking they had derived a "magic" mix for an ideal diet. There isn't one. No visitor to southern Europe could fail to notice the reliance on fatty lamb, full-fat yoghurt and cheese (feta, mozzarella, manchego, pecorino), kebabs and slow-cooked red meat dishes, such as the Greek beef stifado. Even vegetables come stuffed with red meat. Yes, monounsaturated olive oil is the default oil of the Mediterranean region (as it is in my diet, and thanks, sis,for owning an olive farm in Tuscany and sending me tons of olive oil whenever I need it), but a serious amount of saturated fat is eaten too. The secret to the longevity attributed to Southern Europeans was nowhere near so much what they ate (in the sense of any individual ingredient or combination of them) but HOW they ate and lived as a whole.

Increasingly we are being made aware that they were healthy DESPITE their diet, since we now know that a diet rich in breads and pastas is far from healthy in and of itself. When combined with an active lifestyle, yes, it does little or no harm (or perhaps it does, since we are seeing increases in the West of diet related chronic conditions, from gluten intolerance to Morbus Chron, even in Southern Europe). And of course it ignores the simple fact that a people native to a certain region, over a given long period of time develop tolerances to their diet far better than any immigrant to that region or adaptors to their diets ideas in other regions. In a very simple way, what your mummy ate while you were in the womb is more or less what you can eat (although if she ate a diet of Coke, cigarettes and Ho-Hos, I am not sure if that is also true - no study has yet been done on that one, and I shudder to even contemplate it). But it does explain why the Swiss, for instance, have a high tolerance for lactose and milk products when most adults develop mild intolerances to milk products. The Swiss have an enzyme that, say, Canadians lack. The Swiss also have the lowest mortality rate of all Europeans, which may be partly diet related, despite an essentially high fat and high carb diet, but I think, given we have such a massive immigrant population (approaching 30% at the moment, and growing), it says more about the quality of health care we provide, and the general quality of life we enjoy. It certainly helps that people aren't shooting at us all the time.

At any rate, there is clearly no one "diet" that applies well to people across the board - what about the Japanese, for instance? They are some of the slimmest, longest lived peoples on the planet, with a diet that loads up on all that fermented food, micronutrient-packed seaweed, low sugar and, last but not least, the appreciation of beef marbled with a high percentage of intramuscular fat. They have the highest percentage of centenarians on the planet, and the highest percentage of high functioning centenarians (meaning not made feeble by old age). Should we all eat that way? In all honesty, I doubt it, for the reasons mentioned above, but it might be interesting to find out; again, though, lifestyle certainly plays a large part, as does genetic predisposition. Still I know one doctor who went macrobiotic and swears he cured his cancer that way. I have a friend who eats only macrobiotically for 30 years, and despite being now 58, she has yet to enter menopause (which I must admit actually has me a bit worried). Who knows? We are still doing the science on all this, but it is, by the very nature of the method, slow and painstaking, and each day brings new knowledge based on years and years of research and following patients and populations. We know junk food is not good. We are now getting pretty sure that sugars and starches are not good, and that there are good sources of sugar and bad sources. But do we, can we, have a one size fits all approach? Not yet, and given the genetic diversity of the planetary population, I doubt we ever will.

I feel I am aiming this a bit at not just you, Marnid, but also at SleepWrangler and some others. I shall try and answer some of Sleewrangler's points separately, but I sort of got on a roll here.

At any rate, you have a rather tough row to hoe, and I congratulate you for the sticktoitiveness you have shown, and good luck. I am deeply relieved that your physician is monitoring your diet and aware of your approach.