plumwd wrote: »

I know that with Atkins they recommend adding carbs back slowly, in like 5-10 gram increments until you no longer gain nor lose.

Yes, I've been told adding 5 grams per day, upping once per week until you stop losing, then dropping back 5 grams to maintain.

So say you started at 20 grams.

Week 1 would be 25 grams per day.
Week 2 - 30 grams per day
Week 3 - 35 grams per day

And so forth until you stopped losing.

Then say that was at 65 grams. You would bump back down to 60 grams per day and see if you maintain, tweak from there! This works with metabolism support, too, as slow adjustments allow your body to keep up and not stall out after rapid losses, confusing us...

I'm not trying to pick on anyone but looking at this from the view point of a retired manufacturing engineer the typical advice offered for tweaking a daily meal plan sound like a recipe for disaster. (If there is ever any doubt, a pun in anything I write is fully intended.) Weight measurements are "noisy." Carb recordings are estimates at best. Trying to make 5 gram adjustments on the basis of single weight measurements will result in an endless cycle of adjustments.

I weigh in daily and normally have a day to day variation in a 3 pound range. My normal weekly weight loss is in the 1-2 pound range. If I were running this as a manufacturing process, I would have a standardized sample plan and would be generating X Bar R charts and would be able to provide any customer with data showing that the 6 sigma of the distribution was within his tolerance limits. In the 80s & 90s I actually did that sort of thing using a hand held calculator, graph paper and a pencil.

The typical advice of weighing only once a week is only good for spotting long term trends like monthly changes. That's probably good enough. I don't really obsess with the calculations necessary to track it statistically. Instead I enter it into MFP each morning. MFP automatically dumps it over to Fitbit. By the time I pour my coffee and click over to Fitbit, there's a chart displayed on my dashboard at a scale which allows to to see trends without sweating the details.

I'm similarly skeptical of 5 g adjustments. Does anyone really know them that accurately? I'm not trying to make light of the problem. I've been wondering the same sort of thing myself. My weight loss rate has gone from 10-12 pounds per month to 1-2 pounds which is hard to see within that 3 pound daily variation. But I'm also near the weight I want to be.

I'm not dieting. I'm eating a diet which I find satisfying and which my blood tests indicate is healthy for an old guy. My current "plan" is to let my weight drift to whatever it will be until or unless something I don't like shows up on that Fitbit chart or my pants get too loose or too tight. It will be interesting to see which happens first. Maybe I'll start a new career as a "body engineer."

True, but if you had been losing weight, the lost weight will naturally lower your TDEE and maintenance just happens. It's not something you really have to adjust for.

Continuing to lose weight after your body has decided to enter maintenance on its own is another issue entirely.

KeithF6250 wrote: »

I'm not trying to pick on anyone but looking at this from the view point of a retired manufacturing engineer the typical advice offered for tweaking a daily meal plan sound like a recipe for disaster. (If there is ever any doubt, a pun in anything I write is fully intended.) Weight measurements are "noisy." Carb recordings are estimates at best. Trying to make 5 gram adjustments on the basis of single weight measurements will result in an endless cycle of adjustments.

I weigh in daily and normally have a day to day variation in a 3 pound range. My normal weekly weight loss is in the 1-2 pound range. If I were running this as a manufacturing process, I would have a standardized sample plan and would be generating X Bar R charts and would be able to provide any customer with data showing that the 6 sigma of the distribution was within his tolerance limits. In the 80s & 90s I actually did that sort of thing using a hand held calculator, graph paper and a pencil.

The typical advice of weighing only once a week is only good for spotting long term trends like monthly changes. That's probably good enough. I don't really obsess with the calculations necessary to track it statistically. Instead I enter it into MFP each morning. MFP automatically dumps it over to Fitbit. By the time I pour my coffee and click over to Fitbit, there's a chart displayed on my dashboard at a scale which allows to to see trends without sweating the details.

I'm similarly skeptical of 5 g adjustments. Does anyone really know them that accurately? I'm not trying to make light of the problem. I've been wondering the same sort of thing myself. My weight loss rate has gone from 10-12 pounds per month to 1-2 pounds which is hard to see within that 3 pound daily variation. But I'm also near the weight I want to be.

I'm not dieting. I'm eating a diet which I find satisfying and which my blood tests indicate is healthy for an old guy. My current "plan" is to let my weight drift to whatever it will be until or unless something I don't like shows up on that Fitbit chart or my pants get too loose or too tight. It will be interesting to see which happens first. Maybe I'll start a new career as a "body engineer."

the 5 gram adjustments I suggested were to find a set number, not to perpetually adjust. No, we don't know them that accurately due to the FDA allowing 25% discrepancy in all the numbers, but for what we are measuring, we can increase incrementally to find a threshold. This would not be a frequent adjustment factor. This would be once to set your initial numbers, perhaps again after 20% weight loss (I'm not sure how lean body mass might affect this number), and at maintenance.

And at a certain point, unless you are zero carbing it, you have to trust the method you choose to track, whatever that is, or you have no way to set goals or determine compliance with whatever method you've chosen to measure your success. So no, the carbs are not a hard and fast exact number, but to achieve ketosis, you had to set a threshold number at some point, based on calculations of carbs at some point, even if loosely. This 5 gram - 10 gram adjustment allows you a slow increase over a steady rate to determine whether your threshold can rise.

Whether any measurement is exact or not, you have to have a baseline, you have to have a way you measure, and you have to have a threshold. The increments or exactness do not matter as much as a gentle increase to determine upper limits.