Some of you know that I lost a bunch of weight after switching to a low-carb diet on January 1.
The latest news is this: my weight stopped trending downward at the end of April and has fluctuated around 143 for all of May, June, and July. Every time it dips below that I think, "Aha, I'm back on track." Every time it spikes above 144 (today, for example, it's 145) I think, "Uh-oh, here's the dreaded inevitable return of all the weight I lost." In general, though, I try to avoid over-extrapolating. This is a process of learning and experimentation.
I'm not looking for a miracle diet, nor claiming to have found one for myself, much less one that will work for everybody. Indeed, that word "miracle" irks me as it reminds me how much of our thinking about nutrition is, frankly, superstition. Understandably so, and I don't pretend to have some Spock-like immunity from magical thinking, but still. What I'm trying to do is reason more effectively about how I eat. It's sometimes hard — there's a lot of competing dogma out there — but I try to shake off my biases, or at least be aware of them, and be as rational as I can, even if that means more questions raised than answered. At some point I hope to post an update on how my reasoning has evolved; for now, this is just a status report.
To put the numbers in context: my weight on January 1 was 161 pounds. That may not sound like a lot for an adult male until you consider that I'm only 5'2" and I'm fine-boned, with small wrists and hands. You know that little guy Aziz Ansari? According to Google he is 4 inches taller than me, and he only weighs 136.
My average weight for the preceding 6 months was about 162.5, so in theory I could reasonably use that higher number as the "starting weight" for this diet experiment. Here's the raw data for the second half of 2015:
2015-07-01: 161.5
2015-08-01: 162
2015-09-01: 164.5
2015-10-01: 163
2015-11-01: 160
2015-12-01: 164
If I were to go back an additional 3 months the average would go even higher. But I decided not to use an average at all. For broad trends it feels simpler, and good enough, to just look at measured weight on the first of each month.
Depending on where I put the goalposts, I've been stuck for three months at something like 18-20 pounds below where I started. Let's call it 18 pounds — 161 minus 143. I am not unhappy about that. If you believe the "set point" theory (and I'm not saying I do), you could say I seem to have lowered my set point by 18 pounds with relatively little effort, and with an increase in satisfaction from the food I eat. I say "seem" because I've only been at this weight for 3 months, which is not a long time in the big picture of weight loss. Still, I'd rather be where I am than not, so yay for that.
On the other hand, I've still got a gut, and I think it's mostly from visceral fat (the kind that collects around the organs) rather than subcutaneous fat (which is just under the skin). The reason I think that is that when I tighten my abs there isn't much "pinch" in the skin above the muscle. There's a bit of pinchable flab, but most of my excess girth seems to be below the muscle. My understanding is that health-wise, visceral fat is worse to have than subcutaneous fat, and that it's also harder to get rid of. I'll keep this in mind in my ongoing efforts.
[UPDATE: I could have sworn I'd read that visceral fat is harder to lose than subcutaneous fat. I double-checked the other day and apparently it's the opposite. I was right though that visceral fat — the fat that accumulates around the organs — is worse health-wise than subcutaneous fat.
Hopefully I won't triple-check that at some point and find out I had that backwards too. If that happens I'll know the universe is messing with me.
Body fat isn't just "stuff" that sits on you passively like a schmear of cream cheese on a bagel; it's living, hormonally active tissue. If I understand correctly, visceral fat is the more dangerous type because it can wreak hormonal havoc on the organs it is in contact with. Something like that.]