I wrote a long post about adaptive thermogenesis, more commonly known as "Starvation Response." Simply put, you live in your body but you can't control your body. When you drastically change your body with surgery and then liquid, soft food and nutritional changes, your body notices and your metabolic system kicks in. It assumes you're starving, so it slows your metabolism down, drastically, to keep you from starving. There's nothing you can do about it, and mostly everyone experiences it, especially if the food consumed swings wildly.. At that point, you may experience a stall.
I was flawless in my consumption. I weighed and measured every portion and in a short time, I lost 65 pounds. Then I stalled. FOR FIVE MONTHS. My normal, healthy weight had been about 110 until I went cuckoo and gained a bunch, then got pregnant and gained a whole bunch more. My top preggers weight was 182. To console myself, I ate a hot fudge sundae every day. Duh. One day I crossed the street in front of a truck full of rednecks and they moooooooed at me.
So my metabolism didn't know what the duck was going on and went crazy trying to keep up. Long story short, I did start to look for solutions. An internist at my university hospital had just been approached by a doctoral student who was looking for candidates she could use to do a study on obesity and solutions like WLS. She came into my doctor visit, asked me a few questions, and signed me up. I was in that study for 7 years. She didn't assign me a diet. She simply took measurements--how far I could walk, how much I could lift, how many hours I slept (she discovered I had obstructive sleep apnea and during a study, I stopped breathing more than two minutes, then gasped and woke up choking). Eventually her case study was written up in JAMA.
But I didn't keep off all the weight I'd lost. And today, I struggle. I'm lucky to have learned so much in the study, and to keep a healthy weight (not skinny) these 20 years.
I have to ask: are you being completely honest with yourself? Do you take a bite off someone else's plate once in a while? Do you occasionally buy yourself a little treat to eat? Do you drink things that contain sugar? Just asking, not accusing. But I think most of us do engage in those little sneaks, and they add up.
Please keep a food journal. Write down every crumb you eat. Weigh and measure everything. Increase your activity several times a day, even if you just walk in place while watching t.v. or by doing pushups on the wall. Any activity will burn calories and your metabolism counts on that.
I wish you all the best, and I hope you'll be a little more proactive so you can break the stall.
