Good Article on Weight Loss Blockers

http://www.fitsugar.com/Reasons-You-Losing-Weight-24882317

Guilty on several counts.  Good article Keith.

Thanks!

The biggest guilt trip on this board seems to be #24, leaving out entire food groups, which causes cravings for what was cut.  I have been wondering for a while now why it is that the intense cravings and problems with adjusting to normal healthy eating in maintenance so commonly reported here is relatively uncommon in the support groups that I attend where there is little emphasis on these high deprivation diets that are all the rage on this forum. Cravings are often the result of something that is missing (that's why nature made cravings in the first place!) but the trouble comes from mistaking them with the supersaturated junk foods that overpower our senses.

Numbers 8 and 26 are also common failings here, and ones for which one can be shamed into violating by the carb police.

Do the support groups that don't emphasize the things you reference show the same levels of dedication and success that we see in the vets here?

My friend who never counted calories, always ate "real" food, real meals, just in very small portions with an emphasis on protein, low carb, but without tracking lost 75 pounds before she leveled out, and loves her life and her body.  She's still a few pounds into the overweight range (two or three pounds, I think) but would rather eat the way she's eating and live the way she's living (and has been maintaining for two years now) rather than count/track/keep losing, perhaps be counting/tracking/struggling the rest of her lilfe.  That's the way she sees it.  And I call what she has success.  But it's not the success a lot of us want.

So, how do you rate what you're seeing in these other places?

I am not sure I am looking at it the same way you are. While my primary goal is to lose weight, the idea is to do it in a healthy way and along the way truly adopt a new lifestyle that includes exercise and adequate sleep. Its a paradigm shift. It a mindset change. It sounds to me like your friend is successful. They set a goal and achieved it. We have to do what works for us. For me right now, I am looking for a formula that works. If I have a formula, I can easily repeat it. Will it work for everyone, probably not. For me tracking everything gives me a way to go back and look at patterns. For example I recently discovered that when I go through periods of low fat that I tend to see a stall in my weight loss and somewhere between 25g and 50g of fat help to get the scale moving down again. I discovered this because I had 2 months of weight tracking and food logs to look back on. Now I haven't found the magic number, obviously more fat means more calories and less good foods like veggies. So with VSG patients it is literally a game of ounces. I think in the early stages following the same pattern is important and as you get into your 3rd or 4th month you can start to experiment a little find what works better for you.

If you look at the pattern of the very successful vets on here, it is a very similar pattern. Low Carb, Low Fat, Exercise, Extreme dedication, Tracking, drinking water, and undereating. There are people on here who have lost over 200lbs and that doesn't happen without following a straight forward approach.

I think I misunderstood the point you were making about deprivation, etc.

I track, but I don't track fat. Or rather, don't worry about it.  My only real concerns are calories and protein, which pretty much keeps fat and carbs lower. But I eat veggies and fruit sometimes. As long as it fits within the caloric count I don't sweat it. I do not follow my friend's method.

That's pretty much what I did - protein and calories and everything else as fits in as it does. Everything is tracked so that trends can be seen and adjustments made as needed, just not controlled other than protein and calories. The ultra low carb approach as promoted here can't discriminate between a grapefruit and a twinkie - that's just not a healthy attitude to promote for long term sanity in this game.

Oh, Keith--you weren't the one who made the point about #24 and deprivation! That's what confused me about your response. 

Okay, my head is on straight again.

As for me, I had the same goals you did.  I wanted a healthy body, healthy habits, and changes I could carry out for the rest of my life.  I've gotten that in spades.  I'm at the weight my family doctor wanted me to reach (he didn't think I should go lower but I will).  My labs are "beautiful."  Seriously, beautiful. I'm stunned by them. I did this to get healthy but to me that meant coming off my BP meds and my CPAP machine.  When I saw how low my cholesterol was, how flat out perfect my other labs were (except D3) I almost burst into tears. I simply never imagined being so healthy!

Because of various cir****tances, I've pretty much been in an ongoing maintenance mode for some time, though I continue to lose a couple of pounds a month. Watching my protein and calories, eating smart, etc. is so much a part of what I do, so natural at this point, while continuing the slow slide down, I'm perfectly fine with this. Yes, I want to lose 20 more pounds. No, I don't feel any desire to kick it old school and lose it all in one big push. I'm just too happy doing it slowly! It wasn't my intention, but it's what happened, and I'm okay with it.

The main thing that isn't emphasized is the low carb diet - someone asked about the classic ketosis symptoms that she was experiencing, and the response was simply that her diet was low on carbs (neither a good nor bad thing, just a statement of fact.) Most of the other common WLS protocols are there - protein first, lots of water, tracking, limiting simple carbs and junk foods of any description (not just the high carb ones!), not drinking your calories, or during meals, etc. Overall, people take a more balanced approach to their loss efforts  - there isn't a formulaic cookie cutter like we hear about from the Dr. C crowd, more guidelines and individual tailoring as needed - which seems to carry over into maintenance better as most seem to have a healthier attitude toward food. Success is certainly there (as is some failure and struggles, as one will find in any population,) but what is missing is the agonizing over every carb even when years out. It seems that as number 24 suggests, not going into such heavy widespread deprivation damps out a lot of the cravings.

And that may also simply be an individual difference between what is necessary for success in different individuals. 

There are varying degrees of addiction, from what I can tell, and some people have to be far more diligent than others, or so it seems.  I could be wrong.