I can't go round to everyone's diary and say WEIGH WEEKLY to them, so I'm doing it here. If you don't weigh weekly, at least make a contract with yourself not to fuss over daily fluctuations until you've seen the weekly result.
Essentially, bodies are weird things. They'll hang on to fat for as long as they can, or retain water to temporarily fill up the fat cells that your hard work has managed to empty, and theyll do it for reasons divine and mysterious.
Atkins describes a stall as six weeks with no downward movement on the scale. Not one week. Definitely not a couple of days. They body's general mysteriousness has to be accounted for.
Yes, eating the wrong thing can stall you. That much is obvious. But people who think they stall on, say, cheese, or another allowed food, might well actually not stall on cheese. They might have had a week of eating a little more than normal and the salt content might have caused a little water retention, causing a stall. The next week, that would have evened out.
Or, and here's the important one: they might have stalled for no (controllable) reason at all.
People on vlcds have weeks where they stall or loss slows right down. People on every and any diet have weeks, sometimes more than a week, where loss slows or stops for no controllable reason.
Because we're on diets we fuss around and wonder what we've done wrong and what we might change to improve things. I do it. I do it nearly every week. But unless there's a really obvious factor in there, like I've decided to swap my scrambled eggs in the morning for a slice of toast, it's possible I'm fussing over nothing. It would take several weeks of eating the offending ingredient and then several weeks of removing it to prove what might have caused a stall. And after all that it might have been nothing. Just the body being mysterious.
I still do it, and doing it weekly can be maddening. Doing it daily would make me dive off a cliff.
So why should you only take weekly losses into account?
Weight fluctuates, day by day and over the course of the day. Weight loss, especially on Atkins, is not linear. You're not looking for daily losses, you're looking for a downward trend.
If you are looking for daily losses, you're going to be disappointed, and disappointment on a diet can be lethal.
With the exclusion of the first week, possibly two, of starting this diet, you're going to be looking at an average loss of 2lbs a week.
2 pounds divided by seven days equals not very much. It's likely most of those seven days you're going to be anxious or disappointed.
You might not lose for 5 days and drop 2lb on the sixth. Your weekly result will be the same but you'll have spent five days wondering why you're stalling.
I have, in the past, made pacts with myself where if the scales hadn't shown any downward movement that day, I was allowed to cheat. Because what was the point of being good when I wasn't losing anyway, right?
Disappointment, on a diet, is lethal.
Some weeks you're only going to lose one pound. Some weeks you'll not lose. I always hope for 2lb but if it's 1lb it's still adding up, and if it's nothing - well, I haven't gained. If I'd eaten pizza I would have done.
Now looking at it the other way. Count the weeks until say, Halloween. Or Xmas, or new year. Times the figure by 2. That's the average you can expect to lose. Pretty decent when it's all added up, right?
When I think of being ten and a half stone it feels like a distant impossibility. A fairytale figure.
When I think of being ten and a half stone in terms of 2lbs it's 14 weeks. 14 weeks. That's just over 3 months and I could, possibly, have reached something distant and impossible.
Of course I have to increase that for any time off the plan- which is a good motivation to stay on track, but it's also a reassurance that even if I took time off, even if I gained - both of which I have done recently - time does not stop. I can get back on and give myself another 14 weeks, or however long it may take.
Week by week. It's not the days that matter, it's what they average out to, over time.
