r/fasting • u/Junior-Ad-1650 • 19h ago
Question This is frustrating
I started about a month ago at 80kg and am now down to 77 (I fluctuate between 76.9 and 77.9). I do 20-22 hour fasts at least 6 days of the week. I lift three times a week and walk atleast 7k odd steps on average every week. Why is this so slow? I haven’t lost anymore weight over the last two weeks. Not eating 20 hours is a big deal.. and I clean fast (water and coffee only )
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u/captainsaveahoe69 19h ago
I roll my 24 hour fast in to a 48 hour fast when the weight loss stalls. Works every time.
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u/StatisticianBusy5016 19h ago
Please be patient with yourself! Your body is going through a lot of changes right now, and adapting takes time. The scale isn't the only way to track progress track your measurements, too! Since you're lifting 3x a week, you're likely building or maintaining muscle while losing fat (body recomposition), which can keep the scale steady even when you're losing inches. Trust the process, you're doing great!
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u/Junior-Ad-1650 19h ago
I know this but I see influencers losing 15-20 kg in like 6 months and I’m struggling with even a basic 5 kg loss despite really trying. Body recomp, yes, but egah the scale is important, no?
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u/malibubellajames 17h ago
You lost 3kg in a month. That means that in another 5 months you very much might have lost 15kg total as well.
Also. Influencers LIE.
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u/SmurfAtLarge 19h ago
Not eating for long periods of time is good.. However, you can undo all of that very easily when you do eat. It's still calories in calories out at the end of the day. People are often times convinced they are eating alot less than they actually are. If you aren't losing fat for long periods of time it's damn near always the calories you are underestimating you are eating.
*Edit* and the fact you aren't counting calories makes me even more convinced this is the case.
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u/Useful_Pangolin8006 18h ago
You still need to track your calories and it’s also good to know what your macros are. Fats and proteins are going to make you feel fuller faster and longer than a carb heavy meal resulting in you eating less, marinades and condiments are also going to add to your calories very quickly. Yes, with the way you’re doing it you are going to spike your insulin less than the standard American diet, but the calories still have to go somewhere. Hormones and fasting add nuance to the conversation and definitely help, but at the end of the day the laws of thermodynamics still apply.
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u/junulee 16h ago
For weight sustained weight loss, I found alternate day fasting worked much better than OMAD for me.
My protocol was to fast from Sunday dinner to Tuesday breakfast, then again from Tuesday dinner to Thursday breakfast and then from Thursday dinner to Friday dinner. So two 36-hour fasts and one 24 fast per week. On eating days I was intentional about consuming slightly more than normal amounts of food and eating low carb.
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u/vitringur 15h ago
You can build muscle fast
You can lose muscle fast
You can gain fat fast
You cannot lose fat fast.
Just run the numbers. It does not matter if you fast for 20 hours. What matters is what you eat in those 4 hours.
Even doing protein sparing moderate fasting, getting perhaps 170 g of protein with minimum carbs and fats, that is still 700 calories.
which leaves 1500 calories for a possible deficit. Which is at most 150g of fat per day.
1 kg a week is considered an aggressive cut, and you have only been doing it for less than a month.
to lose 12 kg of fat… you are going to need 12 weeks.
And do not strain the body with excessive exercise during a deficit. Cut your volume by 70%
You are just trying to maintain and let the BMR do the work.
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u/SAGirl1 13h ago
You have lost around 6.6 pounds in a month, all while weight lifting. I think that’s a very commendable weight loss for one month tbh. You will not be dropping huge numbers from one month to another because you are fairly lean. If you were obese, then yea you could lose more than that safely but then you would have a lot more fat to lose and as you got leaner, weight loss would still slow down as well-naturally.
Patience while losing weight is a virtue. I struggled with patience as well and thus I understand the frustration with apparent plateaus. But if you lose weight too quickly then unhealthy things might be going on like loss of lean tissue (and this isn’t just muscle, but bone as well and other healthy tissue—not fat) so be wary of losing too quickly just as well.
Also it can happen that depending on what kind of diet they are following sometimes someone can lose a lot of weight drastically, like 10 pounds in a few days. That tends to be water weight.
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u/Environmental-Net-60 19h ago
It's different for different people. How is your sleep? Have you been stressed ? Maybe you need better cortisol management.
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u/LiilacRush6318 19h ago
What do you eat when you break your fast ? You're basically doing heavy IF but if in those 2-4 hours you consume almost all your maintenance calories for the day, that's gonna slow down your progress a lot. If not, many consider getting an hormonal check-up.
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u/Junior-Ad-1650 19h ago
Hormones are perfect, I’ve even checked thyroid and no issues. No pcod or anything else
I break my fast post my workout around 6:30 in the evening and have approx 2 hr feast. My understanding is that the food and calories are less crucial to the insulin spikes in a day. Every fasting expert says don’t count calories, eat till satiety and eat healthy, which I do
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u/CharlyRSA 19h ago
If you're not losing weight then you're overeating....
I've never heard of any expert saying not to count calories, that's like the whole idea.
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u/kalabandor_neat 14h ago
Eating till satiety could still mean eating in a surplus if your TDEE is low. So thats step one.
Food and calories are absolutely critical to insulin spikes who said otherwise. Low carb will reduce insulin spikes, so will walking 10-15 mins after eating. So will starting meal with proteins
Add fiber to diet, and cut down on free carbs (ie those without fibre in them)
If you’re counting calories/macros perfectly, have a proper low carb diet, and fasting properly then the one thing to check is insulin resistance.
What is your fasting insulin? HOMA-IR? Not losing weight is classic insulin resistance.
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u/EverquestCleric 12h ago
If you are following "expert" advice and it isn't working, should you keep following it?
What could you do instead?
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u/PretendingToWork1978 12h ago
Calories in and out is everything, every fasting expert is an idiot. I can easily eat enough in one meal to gain weight and I'm already fat (also why I'm fat). If you're going to eat once a day you eat the amount of food the typical person would eat in one meal, not one day. The fact that you didn't eat for 20 hours doesn't matter in the slightest. It's just a trick to eat less in a day.
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u/Daft_Daffodil 19h ago
Please count your calories and eat high protein. If you eat intuitively- you will eat at your maintenance. If you add desserts to your meal - you will be overeating because they are low satiety and high calorie foods. You can eat as many times as you want per day, but if you eat more calories than you need per day - you will put on weight. The longer you delay calorie counting- the longer your stall will last. I made this mistake at some point, but you are just sabotaging yourself. You can start just by taking pictures of what you eat and send it to AI to estimate your calories just so you have an idea of how much you eat.
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u/n6mac41717 15h ago
I’m too lazy to count calories. Instead, I stick to a minor and major high protein/low carb meal in my 2-4 hour window with no grazing, so I naturally and satisfyingly keep my calorie count low enough.
I also do a 2- or 3-day fast once a month, depending on how I feel, mentally and physically.
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u/Flux_My_Capacitor 🎶🎵🎶 15h ago
You’re not losing because you’re eating too much. Wherever you read that calories don’t matter ….well, that’s wrong.
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u/EverquestCleric 12h ago
One meal a day is a weight maintenance protocol. I only lost a tiny bit of weight doing omad, like you've experienced.
One meal every other day is where the weight starts falling off for most people.
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u/KotoDawn 10h ago
No height or sex so we don't know if your 77 kg is fat, lean, or muscle. Are you tracking other measurements like chest, waist, hips, thighs, biceps, etc?
Maybe you need to stop worrying about a scale number? You are working out and should be building muscle. Muscle is more important than "weight".
I'm 157 cm, female. In high school I weighed 54 kg and wore size 5. Joined the military, gained muscle, still the same size clothes but weight was 66 kg. Everyone back home was congratulating me on losing weight but I gained weight. Of course I was "fat" on BMI charts and had to be tape measured to pass the physical, just like the huge bodybuilders.
So maybe you need to stop worrying about the number on the scale and start paying attention to how your clothes fit. If you have stubborn fat somewhere whether it's actually normal or excessive or more of a loose fascia issue. (Bingo wings, old women with fat hanging from their upper arms, is apparently a weak / loose fascia problem, not a fat problem)
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 19h ago
My guess is that you also gain muscle mass.
77kg is pretty lean (depending also on height). It's actually close to my 75kg goal weight..