@charmmeth Thank you so much! Yes, for 20 to 30 grams each meal of protein, I have been eating "Proats", which is oats mixed in with frozen berries and then after cooking, adding in a scoop of chocolate protein powder. Also, boiled eggs, high fiber bread which has protein in it, Ekezial or Brownberry bread, lean chicken, fish, and steak and turkey breast. Let me know if you need more info. We got this! Way to go everyone!
Pre logging my workouts. It's forcing me to be accountable to myself. Also pre logging my meals, so I know exactly what I can eat later. Also was very shocked when I stood on the scale for the first time since restarting this again.(I am 17 days into it this time) I didn't want to admit how much I had fallen off the rails. The funny thing is, I don't feel badly about my weight gain. I have the exercise part in place, always have. For instance, I ran up the stairs from the basement to the third floor in my building and wasn't outta breath. It's my eating habits that have gotten back outta hand again. Oh well, ce la vie and I know, I got this. It's just gonna take time. And I know this works because I used myfitnesspal years ago and kicked all this weight to the curb. Kerb if you are British.....hehehehe
Pre logging my workouts. It's forcing me to be accountable to myself. Also pre logging my meals, so I know exactly what I can eat later. Also was very shocked when I stood on the scale for the first time since restarting this again.(I am 17 days into it this time) I didn't want to admit how much I had fallen off the rails. The funny thing is, I don't feel badly about my weight gain. I have the exercise part in place, always have. For instance, I ran up the stairs from the basement to the third floor in my building and wasn't outta breath. It's my eating habits that have gotten back outta hand again. Oh well, ce la vie and I know, I got this. It's just gonna take time. And I know this works because I used myfitnesspal years ago and kicked all this weight to the curb. Kerb if you are British.....hehehehe
It's so great that you kept the exercise up! I fell back in love with working out after a long time away. It doesn't necessarily help me lose weight (diet is really only what works for me) but it FEELS so good and it's so good for you!
Once again, the prepped carrots and Greek yoghurt dip saved me when I encountered technical difficulties in the kitchen this evening while preparing dinner. Chow down some of those, have a glass of water and then solve the problem and get on with cooking instead of reverting to a take out meal or less nutritionally dense pick me up.
I also had a look at my steps after dinner, decided below 5000 wasn’t acceptable and therefore headed off for an evening walk bringing me easily to 12K.
i ordered pizza and decided (really a friend told me about this) to take the toppings off and put it on my 50 calorie low carb 4g flatbread. Great way to eat pizza.
I had a toothache (divine intervention?) which made me not want to eat much, especially if it involved chewing! I'd rather not have the toothache, but it did have bright side!
Transitioning from mostly going on fasted runs to making sure I eat a little bit of each macro about an hour before running. I might not be as "fat adapted" (quelle horreur!) but I'm less hungry later in the day. Also, moved my protein into smaller portions, eaten intermittently throughout the day, instead of at 3 big meals. That makes me less hungry too.
I'm shooting for 100g of protein daily, and 2L of water. Today was a good day. I hit 92g protein, drank 3.5L and hit my calorie goal of 1500. Also blasted out some weights this morning. If only every day were like today! LOL
Understanding that I was eating because I got some bad news and I wanted to feel something other than what I was feeling. I was able to put the brakes on.
Knowing that I am retaining water if I have sore muscles. I just smiled and shook my head at the number on the scale instead of freaking out, and spent the day moving and eating in budget and making sure I drink all my water. As the soreness leaves, so will the water.
Resting...still tracking every morsel.... Found this great article in prevention...just have to share: The "Hormone Reset Diet" Can Help You Lose Stubborn Belly Fat
Turn off the weight-gain hormones that are holding you back.
By Sara Gottfried, MD
Oct 18, 2019
Mature woman stretchingPATRIK GIARDINOGETTY IMAGES
Here's a mind-bender: Being overweight often has nothing to do with calories or exercise. For a huge number of us, the problem is misfiring hormones. Research is still catching up with this paradigm shift, which has yet to be comprehensively studied. But seeing how this revelation has helped my patients and I slim down and feel better gives me confidence that it's true for most women who are trying to lose weight and can't. You already know about some weight-affecting hormone issues, like thyroid and insulin imbalances. But more subtle ones could also be keeping you from the body you want. Here are some other ways your hormones might be causing weight gain.
.
The Hormone Reset Diet: Heal Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss!
prevention.com
$31.95
SHOP NOW
You're consuming too much sugar.
I think of leptin as the hormone that says, "Darling, put down the fork." Under normal circumstances, it's released from your fat cells and travels in the blood to your brain, where it signals that you're full. But leptin's noble cause has been impeded by our consumption of a type of sugar called fructose, which is found in fruit and processed foods alike.
RELATED STORY
Hey, Let's Talk About Why You Want to Lose Weight
When you eat small amounts of fructose, you're OK. But if you eat more than the recommended five daily servings of fruit (which in recent decades has been bred to contain more fructose than it used to)—plus processed foods with added sugar—your liver can't deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. Instead, your body starts converting it into fats, sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides and depositing them in the liver and elsewhere in your belly.
As more fructose is converted to fat, your levels of leptin increase (because fat produces leptin). And when you have too much of any hormone circulating in your system, your body becomes resistant to its message. With leptin, that means your brain starts to miss the signal that you're full. You continue to eat, and you keep gaining weight.
🚨If you eat more than the recommended five daily servings of fruit, plus processed foods with added sugar, your liver can't deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. 🚨
You're super stressed.
The so-called stress hormone cortisol can create all kinds of trouble for women who want to shed weight. When cortisol rises, it encourages the conversion of blood sugar into fat for long-term storage. Hoarding body fat in this way was a useful survival adaptation for our ancestors when they faced stressful famines. But not so much today. Obviously, reducing stress in your life will help rein in this fat-storing hormone, but there's another very common source of the problem: daily coffee, which elevates cortisol levels dramatically, causing your body to hoard fat when you least need to.
Your high estrogen levels are expanding your fat cells.
Although estrogen is responsible for making women uniquely women, it's also the hormone that can be the most troublesome in the fat department. At normal levels, estrogen actually helps keep you lean by goosing the production of insulin, a hormone that manages blood sugar. When estrogen gets thrown off, though, it turns you into a weight-gain machine.
Here's how: When you eat, your blood sugar rises. Like a bodyguard, insulin lowers it by escorting glucose into three different places in your body. When insulin is in good working form—not too high and not too low—it sends a small amount of glucose to your liver, a large amount to your muscles to use as fuel, and little to none for fat storage.
If you're healthy and in good shape, your pancreas produces exactly the right amount of insulin to have your blood sugar softly rise and fall within a narrow range (fasting levels of 70 to 85 mg/dl). But when your estrogen levels climb, the cells that produce insulin become strained, and you can become insulin resistant. That's when insulin starts to usher less glucose to the liver and muscles, raising the levels of sugar in your bloodstream and ultimately storing the glucose as fat. Your fat tissue can expand by as much as four times to accommodate the storage of glucose.
How do estrogen levels climb, exactly? Meat is one of the primary reasons. You take in a lot less fiber when you eat meat. Research suggests that vegetarians get more than twice as much fiber as omnivores. Because fiber helps us stay regular, and we process excess estrogen through our waste, eating less fiber drives up our estrogen.
Meat also contains a type of fat with its own estrogen problem. Conventionally raised farm animals are overloaded with steroids, antibiotics, and toxins from their feed and the way they've been raised. When you eat them, those substances are released into your system. They can behave like estrogen in the body, adding to your overload.
Your low testosterone levels are slowing down your metabolism.
You are confronted with an astounding number of toxins each day, including pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and about six different synthetic hormones in meat. Toxins are lurking in face creams, prescription drugs, processed foods, your lipstick, the linings of tuna fish cans, the fire-retardant materials in couches, and even the air you breathe. The list goes on.
Many types of these toxins, such as pesticides, plastics, and industrial chemicals, behave like estrogen when absorbed in the body. Experts believe that our increasing exposure to toxins helps explain why so many girls are entering puberty earlier and why many boys exhibit feminine characteristics such as developing breasts. Xeno-estrogens, as these particular toxins are called, have been associated with an elevated risk of estrogen-driven diseases like breast and ovarian cancers and endometriosis.
HOW TO LOSE BELLY FAT
These 2 Life Changes Will Help You Lose Belly Fat
Your Hormones May Be Why You Can't Lose Belly Fat
15 Best Exercises to Burn Belly Fat
All this fake estrogen overwhelms your body's testosterone—which is vital for hormone balance—and contributes to estrogen overload. Testosterone contributes to muscle growth, which in turn supports metabolism. And, as we already know, estrogen overload raises insulin insensitivity. The combination adds pounds to your frame: A study from Sweden published in the journal Chemosphere showed that exposure to a particular type of pesticide called organochloride was linked to a weight gain of 9½ pounds over 50 years.
And that's just one type of toxin. Your risk of weight gain and disease from exposure to toxins may be greater than you realize. A survey by the CDC demonstrated that 93 percent of the population has measurable levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in store receipts and canned foods that disrupts estrogen, thyroid, and androgen hormones. Endocrine disruptors have been shown to interfere with the production, transportation, and metabolism of most hormones.
The bottom line: You have to to address your hormone imbalances.
Now you know the "whys" of your broken metabolism, these are reasons regular diets don't address the root cause of your weight gain. Hormones dictate what your body does with food. Talk to a doctor about fixing your hormones, and your body will slim down without any extra effort from you.
Grabbing a hard-boiled egg and some Norwegian crisp bread on my way out the door to run errands. Everything took way longer than expected, but I never got hangry.
Replies
It's so great that you kept the exercise up! I fell back in love with working out after a long time away. It doesn't necessarily help me lose weight (diet is really only what works for me) but it FEELS so good and it's so good for you!
I also had a look at my steps after dinner, decided below 5000 wasn’t acceptable and therefore headed off for an evening walk bringing me easily to 12K.
Turn off the weight-gain hormones that are holding you back.
By Sara Gottfried, MD
Oct 18, 2019
Mature woman stretchingPATRIK GIARDINOGETTY IMAGES
Here's a mind-bender: Being overweight often has nothing to do with calories or exercise. For a huge number of us, the problem is misfiring hormones. Research is still catching up with this paradigm shift, which has yet to be comprehensively studied. But seeing how this revelation has helped my patients and I slim down and feel better gives me confidence that it's true for most women who are trying to lose weight and can't. You already know about some weight-affecting hormone issues, like thyroid and insulin imbalances. But more subtle ones could also be keeping you from the body you want. Here are some other ways your hormones might be causing weight gain.
.
The Hormone Reset Diet: Heal Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss!
prevention.com
$31.95
SHOP NOW
You're consuming too much sugar.
I think of leptin as the hormone that says, "Darling, put down the fork." Under normal circumstances, it's released from your fat cells and travels in the blood to your brain, where it signals that you're full. But leptin's noble cause has been impeded by our consumption of a type of sugar called fructose, which is found in fruit and processed foods alike.
RELATED STORY
Hey, Let's Talk About Why You Want to Lose Weight
When you eat small amounts of fructose, you're OK. But if you eat more than the recommended five daily servings of fruit (which in recent decades has been bred to contain more fructose than it used to)—plus processed foods with added sugar—your liver can't deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. Instead, your body starts converting it into fats, sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides and depositing them in the liver and elsewhere in your belly.
As more fructose is converted to fat, your levels of leptin increase (because fat produces leptin). And when you have too much of any hormone circulating in your system, your body becomes resistant to its message. With leptin, that means your brain starts to miss the signal that you're full. You continue to eat, and you keep gaining weight.
🚨If you eat more than the recommended five daily servings of fruit, plus processed foods with added sugar, your liver can't deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. 🚨
You're super stressed.
The so-called stress hormone cortisol can create all kinds of trouble for women who want to shed weight. When cortisol rises, it encourages the conversion of blood sugar into fat for long-term storage. Hoarding body fat in this way was a useful survival adaptation for our ancestors when they faced stressful famines. But not so much today. Obviously, reducing stress in your life will help rein in this fat-storing hormone, but there's another very common source of the problem: daily coffee, which elevates cortisol levels dramatically, causing your body to hoard fat when you least need to.
Your high estrogen levels are expanding your fat cells.
Although estrogen is responsible for making women uniquely women, it's also the hormone that can be the most troublesome in the fat department. At normal levels, estrogen actually helps keep you lean by goosing the production of insulin, a hormone that manages blood sugar. When estrogen gets thrown off, though, it turns you into a weight-gain machine.
Here's how: When you eat, your blood sugar rises. Like a bodyguard, insulin lowers it by escorting glucose into three different places in your body. When insulin is in good working form—not too high and not too low—it sends a small amount of glucose to your liver, a large amount to your muscles to use as fuel, and little to none for fat storage.
If you're healthy and in good shape, your pancreas produces exactly the right amount of insulin to have your blood sugar softly rise and fall within a narrow range (fasting levels of 70 to 85 mg/dl). But when your estrogen levels climb, the cells that produce insulin become strained, and you can become insulin resistant. That's when insulin starts to usher less glucose to the liver and muscles, raising the levels of sugar in your bloodstream and ultimately storing the glucose as fat. Your fat tissue can expand by as much as four times to accommodate the storage of glucose.
How do estrogen levels climb, exactly? Meat is one of the primary reasons. You take in a lot less fiber when you eat meat. Research suggests that vegetarians get more than twice as much fiber as omnivores. Because fiber helps us stay regular, and we process excess estrogen through our waste, eating less fiber drives up our estrogen.
Meat also contains a type of fat with its own estrogen problem. Conventionally raised farm animals are overloaded with steroids, antibiotics, and toxins from their feed and the way they've been raised. When you eat them, those substances are released into your system. They can behave like estrogen in the body, adding to your overload.
Your low testosterone levels are slowing down your metabolism.
You are confronted with an astounding number of toxins each day, including pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and about six different synthetic hormones in meat. Toxins are lurking in face creams, prescription drugs, processed foods, your lipstick, the linings of tuna fish cans, the fire-retardant materials in couches, and even the air you breathe. The list goes on.
Many types of these toxins, such as pesticides, plastics, and industrial chemicals, behave like estrogen when absorbed in the body. Experts believe that our increasing exposure to toxins helps explain why so many girls are entering puberty earlier and why many boys exhibit feminine characteristics such as developing breasts. Xeno-estrogens, as these particular toxins are called, have been associated with an elevated risk of estrogen-driven diseases like breast and ovarian cancers and endometriosis.
HOW TO LOSE BELLY FAT
These 2 Life Changes Will Help You Lose Belly Fat
Your Hormones May Be Why You Can't Lose Belly Fat
15 Best Exercises to Burn Belly Fat
All this fake estrogen overwhelms your body's testosterone—which is vital for hormone balance—and contributes to estrogen overload. Testosterone contributes to muscle growth, which in turn supports metabolism. And, as we already know, estrogen overload raises insulin insensitivity. The combination adds pounds to your frame: A study from Sweden published in the journal Chemosphere showed that exposure to a particular type of pesticide called organochloride was linked to a weight gain of 9½ pounds over 50 years.
And that's just one type of toxin. Your risk of weight gain and disease from exposure to toxins may be greater than you realize. A survey by the CDC demonstrated that 93 percent of the population has measurable levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in store receipts and canned foods that disrupts estrogen, thyroid, and androgen hormones. Endocrine disruptors have been shown to interfere with the production, transportation, and metabolism of most hormones.
The bottom line: You have to to address your hormone imbalances.
Now you know the "whys" of your broken metabolism, these are reasons regular diets don't address the root cause of your weight gain. Hormones dictate what your body does with food. Talk to a doctor about fixing your hormones, and your body will slim down without any extra effort from you.