cmteach4 wrote: »

Youare probably righ, Ashley! I have read recommendations that say you should go on maintenance after you have been “dieting” and losing for 6 months. I am at that point right now, but wonder why do that? I definitely don’t want to go gaining my weight back as I did last time I lost 75 lbs. I am at 43 or so now and want to get back to 75. Do you know anything about the stopping for a while after 6 months?

I also find once I have some things like pie and homemade rolls I struggle to stay on my healthy eating plan as the cravings come right back! It amazes me how hard it is to establish new habits, but how easy to fall back into old ones!

@cmteach4 There has been some research lately to suggest that eating at a caloric deficit for so long is hard on the body and that eating at maintenance for a while could help your body to reach that happy point again and level out your hormones and other things, but I don't necessarily know how much merit to that there is, it's soft of a new idea, not that new ideas are necessarily bad. Another thing is that sometimes it's mentally taxing too and in that respect, I did intentionally take last week off and try to stay the same for the week, eating more, and just trying to feel fuller, not that I felt bad or anything before, but I did sort of put my body through hell with eating low calories and training hard. What I found is that I sort of lost that momentum and it's been so much harder to get back into it, and it wasn't until today that I really felt encouraged to get really start trying again. I'm finally losing my water weight that I gained last weekend eating carbs *gasp* so that's a step in the right direction, and so I think it might be a personal choice, but I'm not sure that it's a choice I'll be making again until I'm a lot closer to my goal since it has really been so hard to get back to what I was doing.

As for those cravings, it's mostly because sugar is addictive! Sugar has the same response as like drugs on the brain, once you have it, you gotta have more! It's really one of the major reasons I went keto and cut sugar. not only do I feel better, but I almost never want those things that tend to be everyone's downfall. And if I want them, I just make sugar free and flour free versions, I've found that if you look hard enough, there's pretty much a way to make it "diet friendly" and I've sort of become the expert of making things sugar free, all of my family and friends ask me for recipes...

Our society today doesn't really make it easy for people to avoid sugar. I watched a documentary once on why people are getting fatter despite exercising so hard. This documentary suggested that it's in the way our food is processed and presented. They point back to the 60's-80's when someone decided that fat was bad, well they started removing fat from food so we'd eat less of it and thus become "less fat" but what they found was that made food taste terrible so they started trying to make food taste better and added sugar...which is not only addictive but basically for most people, empty calories...and in turn started people down the path of eating a lot of sugar, without even realizing it. The real problem is, fat isn't bad, it's a necessary part of the diet. Fats support cell growth. We actually don't need carbs (not that there is anything wrong with carbs really, it's an energy source), our bodies are designed to use the stored fat we have in the absence of carbs and this process is called ketosis. Everyone will use this process to burn stored fat whether or not you are on a ketogenic diet or not. Mostly this happens at night when you've been fasted for a while, so really, you lose the most weight when we're sleeping, crazy right?!
Those on a ketogenic diet just use fat for energy all the time, instead of glucose for energy, which in turn means we're always burning fat, but when we're fasted, we're using the stored fat from our bodies instead of dietary fat.

Okay, didn't really think that response would turn out to be so long, but it's still good info!

I guess basically, the way I feel about it is you should listen to your body, if you are feeling okay, I think it's a good time to continue, if you're feeling down, lack of energy, having some other crazy side effects, then it might be time to pull back and re-feed a bit. But these would be more long term side effects rather than daily...
A trick I use daily is drinking water when I think I might be hungry, if water satisfies me, I'm not hungry! If water doesn't help and I can feel my day heading downhill, like starting to get a headache, more irritable, etc, then I believe that I'm starting to actually get hungry and that's when I eat. Everyone's tells might be different, if that makes sense at all.

@SLIMn2016 Awesome pics! And that cake looks amazing, like it's not actually a cake!!