80 lbs lost now just stalled over and over

You're male, right? How old are you, and what's your height?

Without knowing more, my recommendation would be to get something like a FitBit and figure out your real TDEE and then start making adjustments based on your goals.

I know you want to lose more weight, and this is gonna sound counterintuitive, but you need to eat more.

When you were very obese, eating below your BMR was fine because you had a lot of fat stores to get energy from. Now that you're a lot closer to a healthy weight, eating that little isn't gonna be the best idea.

I recommend eating 1800-2000 every day. For the first week or two, you might gain a pound or two, as some of your glycogen stores are refilled. BUT THAT'S OK. DON'T GIVE UP. After that first couple weeks, if you keep eating 1800-2000, you'll start losing again.

Edited for not-enough-coffee

do you weigh your food? Log everything accurately?

typically if you are not losing weight you are eating more than you think.

You read one thing from a Nutritional Guru and the opposite from another. lol

Everyone is just trying to help, keep that in mind, ok? But we are just opinionated strangers on the internet.

If you aren't obese (which you aren't anymore) and you eat greater than 1000 calories below your TDEE for an extended length of time (which you seem to be trying to do) you run the risk of bone loss, muscle loss, hormone problems, etc. Most men I know, especially the ones who lift weights, want to make sure to keep their testosterone and male hormone levels up.

This isn't to say you can't start doing selective fasting or something like that. 5:2. 18:6, etc. But once you're not obese anymore, I don't think anyone would advise you to eat so few calories if you're looking to maintain muscle and hormone balances. Just my two cents.

A few things to consider which you may not have previously - what's your body fat and muscle mass like? Your BMI is 27.8 but BMI doesn't take into account muscle mass. People who have a lot of muscle may be told they are overweight because of a higher BMI when this is not always the case.

Also, are you still eating low carb? Extended low cal and low carb eating negatively effects thryoid and leptin and you may find that a period of refeeding especially on carbs helps you to lose again. You'll gain water weight initially, but as long as you're eating at maintenance levels and working out that weight will come off again when you start dieting again.

going from a VLCD to eating regularly will make you gain weight very fast. If it's just a short break and you're eating at maintenance it would likely have just been water weight that you gained. How long was the break for? For someone who lost so much weight doing VLC, it's easy to gain a bunch of water weight in the short term.

You could be right about your metabolism if you have been continuously dieting for years without breaks in between. Prolonged dieting does appear to have this effect based on a few studies that have been done. In which case what I said above about refeeding may really benefit you and help get things moving again.

Another thing is that you say you have LBM of about 160 - that means you only have 20% BF so it depends what your goals are. Are you a fitness professional? If you're just looking to be within average body fat then you are within it. Average BF for men is 18-24% so you're pretty much ideal for an average guy. And remember, the less fat you have, the harder your body will fight back to preserve that fat so it's not any wonder that you're finding it difficult to lose more fat and keep it off.

Starvation mode as far as fat loss stopping altogether does not exist, otherwise people would not become anorexic. But slowing metabolism is a very real thing. Some studies show that metabolism slows by around 10%, which for you would mean you'd have to create a standard deficit plus and extra deficit of 180 cals a day (based on a BMR of 1,800) to see weight loss. Not knowing your age I can't estimate calorie expenditure but with extensive dieting you do have to take metabolic slow down into account and unfortunately you may only be expending enough to maintain your weight. But instead of going even lower and slowing things down further I really think your first step should be to try a refeed over a month at maintenance calories and up your carbs to around 300g a day. Keep protein to around 200g a day and fat to around 70g and add in some cardio as well as weight training. This is just to help get hormone levels back up and get your metabolism to increase a bit more.

Hope that helped!

I have also thought of them as a non essential nutrient for a longtime.

OH GOD NO. Carbs are ESSENTIAL to TONS of functions in the body. The body CAN make most of what you need carbs for by cannibalizing other things, but it can make much of the protein it needs from cannibalizing other things, too, doesn't mean that's a good idea in the long term! Girls on the team try to go low, low carb without telling the trainers and their performance just falls apart. It's so easy to tell, if someone's performance takes a nose dive, it's either (1) broke up with SO or (2) stopped eating carbs (or has cut their overall calories too low in general)

I have also thought of them as a non essential nutrient for a longtime.

OH GOD NO. Carbs are ESSENTIAL to TONS of functions in the body. The body CAN make most of what you need carbs for by cannibalizing other things, but it can make much of the protein it needs from cannibalizing other things, too, doesn't mean that's a good idea in the long term! Girls on the team try to go low, low carb without telling the trainers and their performance just falls apart. It's so easy to tell, if someone's performance takes a nose dive, it's either (1) broke up with SO or (2) stopped eating carbs (or has cut their overall calories too low in general)

They're not essential to life or survival. Only protein and essential fats are. But no one said that is optimal. If you're just trying to survive you're not talking about someone who is trying to achieve sports performance.

do you weigh your food? Log everything accurately?

typically if you are not losing weight you are eating more than you think.

This.

Please don't listen to any of those people telling you that if you, at nearly 200lbs, aren't losing on a supposedly 1600 calorie-a-day diet then the answer is to eat even more calories.

If you're not losing on 1600, the highest likelihood is that you're just not eating 1600 calories. Before you even think about getting into any metabolic slowdown possibilities, check your food.

Are you meticulously weighing EVERYTHING that goes in your mouth, every single day, and recording the results? Or are you, like most people, guesstimating, half counting, and ignoring those "bites here and there"?

Is it you in the pic? If so, you probably need a lot of glycogen to fuel those muscles. If your going keto, they'll get depleted and then replenish themselves (+water) when you eat 'normally'. Not sure how much scale weight that'd equate to e.g. I packed 7lb back on the first couple of weeks of a very moderate bulk. Just guess work, on my part, btw but it might explain some of the gain.

ETA: a smaller deficit might counter it if that's what it is.