Can you eat carbs to break a No carb No sugar Plateau.

rheddmobile wrote: »

Yes, actually this is very common, and even has a scientific explanation. Google "the whoosh effect." The short version is that during weight loss, fat is replaced temporarily by water, and then the body flushes the water. For some reason a higher than usual carbs day seems to trigger the flush in some people.

It would have happened eventually anyway.

This shouldn't be the case after only a few weeks though. This usually happens to people who are closer to lean and have been in a deficit for a while. What is more likely the case is the OP lost a bunch of water weight due to removing carbs. This is a very common occurrence. If the OP is not in a calorie deficit from either eating too much or inaccurate logging (not weighing food with a food scale, etc) then weight loss will stall as there is no more water weight left to lose. 9/10 times if you aren't losing weight it's because you're eating too much.

If the OP eats a bunch of carbs she will likely gain a lot of weight due to the return of some of the water weight lost when going low/no carb in the first place.

Most likely, you lost water weight due to cutting carbs then ceased to lose weight because cutting carbs alone doesn't cause fat loss (it only works if cutting carbs also results in cutting calories because a calorie deficit is what causes fat loss).

Five weeks since you started? Premenopausal female? Here's one possible theory:

The first week or two of a calorie deficit are unusual for most people. Usually (but not always) it's an unusually high loss due mainly to some combination of lower average weight of food somewhere in the digestive system (full transit from mouth to the other end can take 50+ hours), plus higher initial lost water weight. When you reduce carbs and sugar significantly, high initial water weight loss is almost guaranteed.

I'll connect the dots later, but another thing to know is that most premenopausal women gain several pounds of water weight at some point in their monthly cycle. This can happen at any time from ovulation through the menstrual period itself.

So: In five weeks, perhaps your first two weeks included some fat loss, some average digestive contents weight loss, some water weight loss, and a couple of pounds of menstrual cycle gain, the latter of which was masked (outpaced) by the other losses, for a net drop on the scale.

Now that the first couple of unusual weeks are over, you're mostly seeing fat loss, which is a slower scale drop. At the 4-5 weeks point, you may be seeing that routine couple/few pounds of water weight gain from your cycle . . . but now that gain is masking the slower fat loss. It looks like a plateau: Up a couple pounds of water, down a couple of pounds of fat, scale holds steady on net.

As always, in a few days the monthly cycle water weight drops off - whoosh! - revealing the fat loss it had been hiding. In this scenario, carbs eaten would be an irrelevant red herring.

Just one possible theory . . . maybe see what happens next month?