Setting a Realistic Weight Loss Goal

Setting a Realistic Weight Loss Goal

Low Carb Styles

No matter which low carb diet program you choose, one of the first things most dieters do is set a weight loss goal. Most of the time, this goal involves a number on the scale. Sometimes, that number is realistic, but most of the time it's not.


Weight charts are sometimes used by medical professionals to tell you exactly what you should weigh. Many dieters use them to help them make a weight loss goal. These numbers are supposed to take your height, gender and sometimes age under consideration. The general rule is that a 5-foot individual such as myself should weigh about 100 pounds. A man should weigh around 110. For every inch taller, you would add an additional 5 or 6 pounds. These charts were designed for life insurance companies, not dieters. Hence, the numbers reflect life expectancy for the average individual and sit on the low side of reality – especially since our food supply has changed drastically since then.

Measuring body mass index (BMI) is similar. BMI looks at your height and weight, and then it attempts to discern from those two measurements if you’re too heavy or healthy.

Scale Weight Doesn’t Consider Lean Body Mass

Neither of these two ways of measuring health considers your lean body mass (LBM). LBM consists of everything that is not fat, so it includes muscle, organs and body tissues such as your hair or skin. It even includes water, blood and other body fluids. When it comes to weight loss goals, what matters most is how much body fat you have. Since the scale doesn’t tell you how much of your weight is fat, weight is the least reliable measure of a healthy body composition.

There are weight loss scales that measure water, body fat percentage and weight, but they are not reliable when it comes to low carb dieting because severely restricting carbs keeps your glycogen depleted. Since several pounds of water were attached to your lost glycogen, maintaining depleted glycogen leaves you too dehydrated for these scales to be of any use. Dehydration gives you a wrong body fat percentage.

In my own case, the scale measures far too low – even when I’m not low carbing. I have more body fat then a tanita-like scale tells me I do. I’m in my late 50s and sedentary due to my health issues. Even though I’m large boned, it would still be highly unlikely that I’m carrying around 120 pounds of lean body mass, but that’s what those types of scales tell me.

Think Size Rather Than Pounds

The best way that I have found to set a weight loss goal is to think more in terms of size than weight in pounds. Size is a much better indicator of where you’re at, even though it is still not 100 percent reliable. You can actually be normal weight and carry too much body fat. That occurs more often among those who don’t eat adequate protein. For a low carber, arriving at goal weight with too large of a body fat percentage would be extremely rare. However, LBM will affect the final number on the scale by as much as 10 or even 20 pounds. There are valid reasons for that, but these reasons are often misunderstood.

Does Muscle Weigh More Than Fat?

One of the popular notions among the low carb crowd is that muscle weighs more than fat. In fact, many low carbers often use this fallacy to support weight loss stutters and stalls. If you aren’t losing weight on the scale as quickly as you think you should be, the common blame for that is you might be putting on muscle. The reason given is that muscle weighs more than fat.

If you take a pound of muscle tissue and place it on a scale, and then you take a pound of body fat and place it on another scale, both will weigh exactly the same amount. A pound of one thing is always equal to a pound of another.

What you’ll discover, is that muscle tissue is denser than fat. It will be smaller in volume. Body fat takes up more room than muscle tissue does, so as you lose weight following a low carb diet, you will fit into a smaller size when compared to the average individual that is at that same weight. For example, when I reached 160 pounds after following the old weight watchers’ exchange program, I fit into a size 14. When I reached 160 pounds after doing hHCG, I wore a size 12, so many people who find their last 10 pounds to be extremely difficult are actually at a healthy weight already. The number they wanted to see on the scale is unrealistic for them.

Truth About Gaining Lean Muscle Mass

Along with the belief that muscle and fat weigh the same is the belief that putting on muscle mass is relatively easy if you just exercise. For those new to weight-bearing exercises, that’s true. Sedentary beginners do tend to put on more muscle mass initially than those who have been exercising for awhile. Beginners can put on muscle weight at the same time they are losing body fat. They will also lose more body fat anyways because they have so much of it. When that happens, less weight will be lost on the scale because the body is either adding to its muscle reserves, or it is using less of what you already have to repair other damaged body tissues.

If you are very overweight or obese, you will have more muscle and connective tissue to support that muscle because during weight gain, some proportion is lean body mass. You don’t just gain fat because it takes more strength to haul around your fat stores. That’s why many medical authorities believe some LBM loss is acceptable in obese individuals because the muscle mass was in excess of what is needed for an average person of healthy weight.

If you are not new to exercise, then you won’t gain LBM while dieting. That takes a specific weight gain regimen. What you’re doing instead is convincing the body that it needs to hang on to your current level of muscle mass because you need it. That’s also what’s happening when you cross the threshold between beginner and average exerciser. More body fat losses than lean tissue can result in those who exercise. The body won’t get rid of what it believes it needs. It will choose to adapt another way. What you’re left with is a higher number on the scale, but a smaller size.

Realistic Weight Loss Goals

So what’s realistic? The size you choose to stop at has got to be a size that you can maintain without a struggle. That’s the number one lesson I’ve learned about myself over the past year. If you have to spend the rest of your life hungry to maintain a smaller size, it probably isn’t going to happen. If you’ve been overweight or obese for any length of time, the body is hardwired to return to that level; it will fight against you to get back there.

For me, I thought a size 7 would be a good number. About 125 to 135 pounds is the goal I set for myself. That’s quite a bit higher than what weight charts tells me I should weigh. I’m not a young chicken, and with 160 pounds placing me at size 12, size 7 initially appeared to be realistic. I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.

When I first started reacting to the hidden corn in my diet, half the weight I’d lost while doing hHCG last year came back fairly quickly. Since then, the next-to-impossible reality of finding all of the hidden sources of corn in my current diet and replacing them with safer options has undone the rest of it. Today, I’m a size 14 again. It’s like hHCG never happened for me.

Granted, some of that weight gain has occurred because I can no longer use sugar substitutes. Some of it has come because a strict meat and vegetable diet such as Atkins’ recommends results in excessive vertigo. That means I’ll have to find another way, but at the moment, I have no clue what that other way will be.

A couple of years ago, I started another blog to separate low carb from my moderate carb research and experiments. It’s called Life After Low Carb, but I’ve been too sick since then to keep up with it. At that time, I didn’t know that dairy products made from cow’s cream and corn are major issues for me.

Now that I do, I have reclaimed a small portion of my health. It’s a catch-22 situation, though, but one I’ve come to accept – at least temporarily – until I figure out where to go next. That journey will not be recorded here. I want to keep this blog tightly focused on low carb dieting because I know that for most individuals, with only a few tweaks, it works well. Plus, the goal of this blog is to help as many folks as I can reach a healthy weight by following some type of a low carb diet.

Moderate carbs doesn’t fit into that mold, but for me, that’s a realistic weight loss goal.

Weight Loss, Low Carb Diets and Sustainability

Weight Loss, Low Carb Diets and Sustainability

Low Carb Diet Questions??

(This is part 8 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet. It explains the path I have traveled in my weight loss journey so far. If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link. Part 1 also contains links to the rest of the series.)

The low carb road I have traveled towards thinness has been long and rugged. Many times along the way, I’ve been tempted to give up. Looking back now, I’ve made little progress in my weight loss attempts since I left my version of Kimkins behind. That’s the cold, hard truth for me. By following a variety of low carb diets, I’ve learned a lot about myself. My health has improved because I was able to discover many of the food categories I need to avoid (gluten, cow’s dairy and corn) but I am no closer to my weight loss goal than I was then.

This morning, I weighed in at 173 pounds, and all I could do was sigh. While that makes my before and after pictures still accurate, that glorious one-hundred pound marker I had at one time achieved was, unfortunately, not sustainable. I’ve never talked about how I managed to carve off those extra pounds because I did it with the help of hHCG drops at a calorie level I would never advocate on this blog.

Like all of the other low carb diets I’ve been involved in, I did not follow Dr. Simeon’s original protocol. Although low in carbs, it was far too low in protein, and after only two days, I felt absolutely terrible! So I tweaked it by dropping the fruit (except for strawberries when they were available in my area), doubling the protein, using mostly turkey breast, and increasing my variety of vegetables to match what was allowed on Lyle McDonald’s plan.

Even so, the 12-week experience was so traumatic for me that one diet round was all I could stand. I have never been able to talk myself into doing it again. I am an extremely inactive person due to the vertigo and ataxia, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to attempt that strict of a diet if you were working outside of the home or had to take care of little children. It just totally blows my mind!

The biggest problem for me in regards to sustainability has not been the calorie level I’ve used while dieting. It’s been my food sensitivities and the calorie level needed to sustain my new maintenance level. Food allergies and intolerances keep the intestines inflamed, and that causes all sorts of strange body reactions.

Unfortunately, when I started reacting to corn, my weight loss suddenly became unsustainable. Part of that has to do with an increase in appetite that occurs when you come in contact with an allergen, but I also believe that your metabolism slows down freeing up body resources needed to fight the perceived invader. The result? I’ve regained almost all of the weight I lost while using hHCG.

Now, when I reached about 165 pounds, I started to panic. It felt like I was losing ground, and I didn’t want to look at my hHCG experience as a waste. So what did I do? I joined Weight Watchers online out of a knee-jerk reaction to protect myself. I honestly didn’t know what else to do. I knew I couldn’t return to Atkins’ Induction. I knew that a very low carb diet would mess up my metabolism again. (I have a theory about that, which I’ll be doing a post on soon.)

So I did the next best thing: I turned to simple calorie control.

But I didn’t get very far before I realized that I was putting out a ton of cash for an extremely low fat diet plan that was creatively designed to hide the fact that all you are actually doing is counting calories. Today's program is nothing like the old Weight Watchers' exchange program at all.

Today, Weight Watchers has you keep track of points, and they claim that their new diet formula is not connected to calories. They claim that these points come from a formula that only takes fiber, protein, carbohydrates and fats into account. You can see that in their old formula that’s easily available online, but most of us already know that calories are easily determined if you know the grams of protein, fiber, carbohydrates and fat of any particular food. Protein and carbohydrates have four calories per gram, fiber has one or two, and dietary fats have nine.

It would be as easy as heck for their computer program to know exactly how many calories you’re eating. Plus, I was also plugging everything I ate into Fitday as well as their online program, and my calorie count for the day was fairly consistent: 1200 to 1300. I canceled my subscription because I realized that if I wanted to count calories, I could do that myself for free. I didn’t need to count fancy points.

At the moment, my weight loss road has come to a halt because I’ve been fighting to find some type of stabilization in my life. I’ve been trying to figure out all of the places where corn hides, what safe brands are, and what I can and cannot eat. Throughout this process, I’ve come to the shocking realization that a typical low carb diet is loaded with corn and corn derivatives.

Corn hides in almost everything, especially in the way that meat is processed and preserved. It hides in the waxes that coat fresh vegetables such as cucumbers, tomatoes and bell peppers. It hides in the gas that’s used on avocados, and in the way that eggs are washed and sometimes coated. It’s found in almost all cheeses, butter and other dairy products. Heck, it’s even used to make distilled vinegar and can be found in refined oils as a de-foamer, which makes mayonnaise also off limits. Citric acid and maltodextrin are generally made from corn (but not always) and can be found in catsup, canned tomatoes and most sugar substitutes, especially sugar alcohols such as erithritol or sorbitol.

To be intolerant of corn is basically a nightmare. So here I sit, not knowing where to turn to next. But one thing I do know is that I'm not so sure I can do what it would take to maintain 125 pounds. Most of the low carbers who have reached goal weight maintain that weight by eating very few calories. Of those I've investigated previously, their calorie count is somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 calories. That's maintenance!

So, I've been thinking about that a lot over the past two weeks. Struggling with that actually. Because if I can't maintain 160 pounds at a size 12, maybe I should just call it quits and be content with my current size 14.

Part 9: Personalize Your Low Carb Diet with Atkins 72