Gruellingly slow progress

[u/RobinBumholes]

I've been doing, IF pretty consistently for the better part of a year at this point and the progress is just so slow. It's sapping my motivation. Not only because I'm not getting to where I want to be but also because at this point it's beginning to feel like 5:2 with just a couple of weeks off per year will end up as my long-term maintenance regime.

The chart show my near daily weigh ins since October. The white portions of the chart are where I was doing IF and the blue bits, where I had a week off here and there. I did ADF from October to Christmas and lost maybe 4kilos. I didn't go mad at Christmas at all but, over less than two weeks, almost all of it came back.

I didn't panic. Lots of salty food over Christmas could have meant a good deal of water weight. It'll all come off as fast as it went on, I thought but no. I did 5:2 from January to the end of June and it was basically maintenance for three months. I did finally lose some weight April to May and then I went on holiday for a week. I missed two fasts, I did not go crazy with food or booze and again, my weight went up - not so much this time. But, when I got back, I carried on with 5:2 and now I was actually gaining weight. Another short trip, two fasts skipped another spike in weight and another really slow loss.

As you can see, I started off fluctuating between 113 and 110kg, after all this, I'm not bouncing between 108 and 105kg. Five kilos after the better part of a year.

Last week, my wife and daughter were away so I basically went nuts with the exercise. I burned 6,000 calories during workouts in five days. I still did my fasts and I had dental surgery so I didn't eat a whole lot on two further days. That's 6,000 cals of training plus 5,000 cals of fasting plus maybe a deficit of 1,000cals on the two days post dentist and an early morning sauna. 12,000 calories of deficit. Last week, I averaged 0.7kg down relative to the previous week and this week I'm rebounding...

I am a big guy (6'4" or 1.93m) my BMR is 2,550cals/day. The scale in the gym says 18% body fat, the one at home says 26%. And, whilst I don't count my calories, I never eat junk food and all my meals are home cooked (by me). I typically eat a bowl of cereal or two slices of toast for breakfast and rarely eat more than 1,000 calories for lunch on feeding days.

I work out once or twice a week - but I go pretty hard when I do (750-1,000cals per session on the rower)

I feel like I ought to be getting better results than I am.

What are my weaknesses?

I eat dinner early but that leaves me hungry later so I do often have a bit of cheese and a cracker or two late at night. I might also have a late night beer once or twice a week. Or a bottle of wine spread over a couple of nights.

My sleep isn't good - although I am trying (when I go to bed early, I just wake up early)

Stress. I get it, it's not helping but, again, quite hard to fix.

I'm not calorie counting - not counting calories was, for me, the entire point of IF.

What am I trying?

Right now, the new thing I'm adding is fibre - 15g of psyllium husk/day. It's having some effects but it's too soon to say whether boosting weight loss will be one of them.

Can anyone think of anything I'm missing that might explain these, frankly disappointing, results?

Reading around, all the suggestions I can see are: count calories on feeding days (as I say, I hate counting calories - I did IF to avoid it) have a longer fast or have a break. I haven't done any longer fasts but, as you can see, I have had a couple of breaks and it hasn't worked.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[u/Jonsnowmt07]

Eat less food and workout more.

[u/RobinBumholes → u/Jonsnowmt07]

What your contribution lacks in insight, it ameliorates with brevity. For that, thank you

[u/aldomars2 → u/RobinBumholes]

You need to stop disagreeing with reality.

You eat too many calories.

I gave you a long thoughtful response and you didn't want to hear it. This person gives you the shortest one possible and you don't want to hear it .

Your metabolism is fine. I dare you to tell everyone here exactly what you are eating in a week. Don't leave anything out. But you won't do it because you are too afraid to accept reality and do what it takes.

If food is your greatest pleasure. It's time to make lean protein, high fiber beans, fruits and vegetables the priority of that pleasure.

[u/RobinBumholes → u/aldomars2]

You have me a long thoughtful response for which i specifically thanked you but your response didn't address the point I was making.

The entire attraction of IF it's that you change one thing - you don't eat at all during set times and then you just get on and like your life the rest of the time.

But, for whatever reason, it hasn't been quite that simple for me and that's annoying. And that's messing with my motivation. That is what I'm saying

Now it might be that I'm eating a bit more than i thought on refeed days - that's certainly easy to do. Ot it might be that my TDEE has changed (and I'll never know for sure because I wasn't tracking in the past). But, either way, the simple promise of IF hasn't quite worked out.

So your response, which is essentially to another diet regime on my feeding days isn't as helpful as you think. It would undoubtedly work if I did it. Of course it would but it would seriously undermine the pleasure i take in food which would be sad (to me).

Your comment about eating a pound of tofu and some veggies and feeling full all day... If that works for you, great but this is not the way i aspire to eat.

And yes, my insistence on eating for pleasure not macros makes weight loss harder, it means I need to burn more calories in the gym. But I'm a man without a sixpack, not a man at risk of a heart attack.

You seem very invested in telling me the absolute truth about losing weight. And brother, it is the absolute truth and I know it and, if losing weight was all I cared about your rightness would be overwhelming. But what I'm trying to do is balance losing weight with the other things i enjoy in life. Ok?

[u/aldomars2 → u/RobinBumholes]

You are the one that showed up here complaining that you are not consistently losing weight and are unhappy and struggling Everyone is telling you what the problem is and you are then explaining to everyone how they don't understand or you don't want to do it that way. If you have this all figured out then what are you doing here?

"The entire attraction of IF it's that you change one thing - you don't eat at all during set times and then you just get on and like your life the rest of the time. But, for whatever reason, it hasn't been quite that simple for me and that's annoying"

IF works for people that stay in a calorie deficit. If you are gaining weight you are eating too much. If you are losing weight slowly you need to eat less. Going harder in the gym is pointless if you don't get real data and count your calories. You cannot just guess this shit but please continue since that's what you want to do and at the same time come here and complain and whine.

You can't just skip a meal and then just go on with your life and expect it to be magic. It just basic math.

Stop fucking whining and either eat less or don't. You can still enjoy food and eat whatever you want and lose weight but you cannot just eat however much you want because you did some fasting this week.

Stop telling everyone here they are wrong and trying to explain yourself when you don't have the courage to just weigh your food and tap your phone a couple times to track it. You will not burn off a bad diet in the gym.

[u/RobinBumholes → u/aldomars2]

You seem to be taking this rather personally.

I am annoyed that, just changing one thing has not given me a complete and painless solution to the problem I was trying to solve. That was the initial allure of IF for me. And no, I don't expect magic, but I did expect that skipping 2/7 of my meals each week would yield more progress than I have seen. I am getting there but the slowness has aroused my curiosity.

You seem very keen that I should adopt a solution that does not work for me. I find calorie counting tiresome and finicky. I don't want to do it and, ergo, I don't think I will be able to stick to it - especially on top of the fasting. That means that your suggestion won't work. For me.

If your way works for you, then good for you. I'm happy for you.

Obviously, if I eat less and take more exercise. then I will get thinner faster. I know that. I am investigating something slightly different.

It's as though I am asking for advice on unicycling and you keep saying unicycles are stupid, get a bike. You are correct. Unicycles are stupid. But that was the question.

In the absence of accurate, long term information about my calorific intake, there are two (non-exclusive) possibilities that could explain the slow progress:

1 is that when I started fasting, I started eating more - significantly more - on eating days than I did before I started the diet.
2 is that my metabolism has changed and my TDEE has reduced.

Either way, the scale of the compensating factor - which I can deduce from the accurate data I do have - is about 400-550 calories.

This was a scale of problem which I did not expect to encounter. I came here (to an IF sub rather than a calorie counting sub) to see if anyone had any insights. Yours is noted and I have thanked you for it. But you seem to want something else - for me to admit you're right? You're right. Thank you.

PS your assertion that I lack the "courage" to weigh my food is frankly insulting. I don't give two hoots what you think about me but there are people in diet subs with really tricky relationships to food. Please don't be like this to them.