Hello friends, I (23F) have been IF at 18:6 for awhile now and haven’t been seeing any results. I’ll add some details to give the full picture and hopefully someone can give me some insight into my issue.
I’ve recently decided to add in daily exercise and a 1000 calorie a day diet to my 18:6 plan and following it pretty religiously for the past 10 days or so. For the first week I saw about a pound or so drop off a day, weighing myself when I wake up each day, but three days ago I was startled at how I gained three pounds from the day before and I haven’t lost an ounce since. I drink 8-10 glasses of water a day but water weight was never a problem in the first week. I’m burning 2500-3000 calories a day and only ingesting ~1000. I don’t understand how my weight is just staying the same. Any insight or advice would be great.
Edit: my eating hours are between 6pm and 12AM; I usually weigh myself between 10am-12pm the next morning before I ingest any water.
What is your daily food consumption consisting of? A game changer for me was to not worry about the scale or the mirror in the begining, it was more important to focus on gut biome, cos then your body handles everything better. I couldn’t look at my self in the mirror like 4ish years ago when I started my journey, but each day I exercised just to feel good and practise self love, and then one day I noticed changes, that snowballed, and now I’m so happy in my own skin.
Edit: A watched pot never boils, literally summed up my experience.
I was stuck just like you doing 18:6 and not seeing any results at all. I eventually switched to 20:4 and then OMAD when I started seeing results. Based on my experience, I’d suggest a few things:
These are the steps that helped me to lose my stubborn last 15 lb. Hoping it helps. Good luck. You got this.
Hey, I don’t typically spend much time on reddit but I’m actually doing something really similar to you. 18:6 or 16:8, 1000 calories (don’t anyone @ me. I’m 5’ 2” and I’m on a diet that was recommended to me by a physician/endocrinologist and I have checkups with him every 2 weeks, so I don’t need any non-MDs telling me that that’s not enough. I’m fine.)
So my diet requires me to have a minimum of 100g of protein a day and a max of 75g of carbs per day. And also at least 3 L of water. The protein definitely helps keep me satiated but it also kind of flushes more water out of my body. I aim for consistency, not perfection, so occasionally I’ll decide to have something that’s a little outside my macros. Split one of my favorite bakery treats with my husband, or get a grilled cheese sandwich from my favorite shop in town… I do something like that like once a week or so. If I have something carby or sugar-y, especially something with a ton of yeast, I’ve noticed it makes me bloat like crazy. Once I went up like 5 lbs in a day. But I noticed I also peed a lot less….so I’m pretty sure it was water weight. It all resolved itself with 3 days of clean eating or a couple of coffees (since I don’t usually have coffee) along with staying on track with my diet and water intake. I’ve been losing 4-7 pounds every two weeks, but sometimes the scale stays the same or goes up one week and then plummets the next. So I just keep on keeping on, and remember that whatever I’m seeing is probably the results of something I ate 3-5 business days ago and can’t be fixed overnight.
I know it can make it easy to second-guess your approach, but if you’re worried, just give it a couple of weeks and see if you see progress on a larger time scale. Whenever we start a health journey it feels like all the search engines and every person you meet starts talking about how there’s another way that’s better or how there’s something wrong with what you’re doing. But the best diet for you is the one you can actually stick to, so just keep at it and feel free to layer in more tweaks as you feel the interest/need to. It’s totally okay to just focus on fasting right now and then layer in calorie counting and then layer in tracking macros or exercise or whatever. Just see what works for you and don’t feel the need to do it perfectly right now.
One other note is that I track my cycle and I find that during my follicular phase (between your period and ovulation) I naturally am not as hungry and have more energy. So I eat lighter meals and less overall and I do more intense workouts. I tend to drop most of the weight I lose in a month during these two weeks. During my luteal phase (ovulation to the next period) I naturally am more hungry and have less energy. I eat a little more during that time, especially more starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes and lentils, and I ease off the intensity of my workouts but find that I’m happy to spend like an hour or two walking on a treadmill. I still lose weight during this time but not quite as quickly. It’s been so much easier being consistent and not getting discouraged ever since I started being aware of my hormones rhythmically changing throughout the month and adapting my diet and exercise, and even my fasting windows to it.
Weight loss isn’t linear. You should be looking for a downward trend over time.
There could be many reasons why you stopped seeing results. What are your stats? What metics other than weight are you using? What are your goals?
The more fat you have to lose the more you can get away losing within a shorter time and the more you can get away with low calories.
How do you know you are burning 2500-3000 calories a day? This is really difficult to accurately estimate.
There is just so much accessible information on nutrition, fitness, energy storage and how your body and brain work. I strongly recommend digging in to what’s out there. A lot of the questions posed here come down to the person having next to zero understanding of this other than soundbites that were made in to cute IG posts and it’s really difficult to distill it into a reply.
Exercise is essential but not for weight loss. Your body will adapt (metabolic adaptation) to exercise (see Herman Pontzer and studies on the Hadza tribe). It will take carbs and store as fat because the fructose in simple carbs and fruit act as a “survival switch” to lay down fat for times of hardship (see Dr Richard Johnson’s well published research).
You don’t need carbs. Nowhere (other than by food manufacturers) is there any research suggesting you do. Gluconeogenesis will generate glucose from non-carbohydrate sources a lot more cleanly. My suggestion is a high protein breakfast (protein shake if necessary), Google ‘protein hunger drives overeating of processed foods’ and remove the carbs. Eat real foods only, pretty much fat and protein. Call it lo carb, keto, adapted Mediterranean, whatever. Add some resistant starches if you want but if the weight starts to creep back then omit them for a while. If you can do OMAD, great - but if not then 2 or 3 meals with nothing after say, 7pm. Don’t count calories, people have been doing that for decades and it doesn’t work. It’s not a lifestyle change that you can adhere to forever.
Finally, lift weights. It will reduce your mortality risk, increase your metabolic rate and give you stronger bones and physical strength.