NLP - reducing carbs

Hi .
, 41, 265lbs, waist 47”, body fat unknown but guess 30%
I’m about 7 weeks into NLP after a couple of years not training due to injury, gout and birth of 2nd child.
As per blue book, I’ve been on 3,500 daily kcal and 265g protein.
Had an initial weight drop of 5lbs in the first week, weight stable over the last 6 weeks (actually gained 1lb).
However in the blue book it says fat guys like me should keep around the same weight but see the waist get smaller and pants feel looser, or YNDTP.
This isn’t happening for me and waistline hasn’t reduced in 6 weeks.
Book suggests if this is the case you should reduce carbs, but I don’t know what I should be reducing to, or what level of fat is tolerable to keep overall calories up.
Typically I’ve been trying to keep fat under 100g per day, but with varying degrees of success.
Any suggestions on macro levels I should aim at?

Just a random internet person here, my n=1 thoughts are:

  • Reduce overall calorie intake by 200-300 kCal/day and/or add some cardio. When you next stall out reduce another 200kCal/day. Your metabolic needs will reduce over time as you loose weight and a 150lb version of you would not need to eat as much as a 300lb version due to less mass / tissue being supported. Nothing to do with ‘metabolic adaptation’, you’ll just be smaller.
  • Keep fats above 50-60g/day for hormone production and other basic needs.
  • My understanding is 1g/lb of body weight is advised for relatively lean people. Unless you like getting that much protein for satiety or another reason there is nothing I can think of for having protein intake that high. I think better guidelines are 1g/lb of lean mass, which might be more like 180g/day. Not super important though, just not necessary.
  • Macros are not super important as long as you are getting minimum ‘requirements’ for each. Personally, I have daily minimum protein and fat targets and aside from hitting those and my overall calorie targets don’t care about the specific balance. YMMV if you have diabetes or are pre-diabetic as that would take priority on carb intakes.
  • Unless you can violate the laws of thermodynamics, it all about CI/CO.
  • Take your time. Its all about making a series of sustainable lifestyle changes and slowly trimming down if you want to sustain the changes.

What is the “blue book” and NLP?

That seems like a lot of calories and grams of protein. Are you cycling a lot? If you are weight stable then you are eating maintenance calories. Try 500 calories less and go from there.

I don’t think cutting carbs is going to help. low carb diets are misleading in my opinion on how they generate weight loss. At the end of the day, it’s not the macros, but the calories that matter from a weight loss perspective. Now, macros do play a big role in body composition, so they are important, but the idea that cutting carbs is going to help you lose weight is based on a couple of assumptions. One is that people eat poor quality carbs, which tend to be unsatiating and calorie dense. And Two, that carbs turn into glycogen, and glycogen is heavy because it contains water. When people lose weight quickly from a low carb diet, it’s mainly water weight from shedding glycogen. Glycogen is our fuel for riding bikes, so giving that away doesn’t seem like a smart move.

My advice would be to increase your calorie deficit. Keep your protein macro, but focus on a daily fiber goal of at least 30g. High Fiber = good quality carbs, and the added bonus is that you don’t actually absorb all of those calories since they pass direclty through you. From a fat grams per day perspective, I’d aim for around 75 rather than 100, and i’d get the rest of my calories from carbs.

Neuro Linguistic Programming

It’s been around for a while. Fell out of favor with the more scientific crowd though.

See meta-analysis here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/j.1440-1614.2005.01601.x
Advocates of new therapies frequently make bold claims regarding therapeutic effectiveness, particularly in response to disorders which have been traditionally treatmentrefractor y. This paper reviews a collection of new therapies collectively self-termed ‘The Power Therapies’, outlining their proposed procedures and the evidence for and against their use. These therapies are then put to the test for pseudoscientific practice.

and

I refer to NLP here not to target the practice for further denigration, but to hold it up as an early example of what some call an ‘Alphabet Therapy’ and others refer to as a ‘Power Therapy’. To emphasize the issue of fads in psychotherapywhat Iaim to show is a cycle of business behaviour in our profession. Indeed, one practice within NLP is a technique called ‘Visual-Kinaesthetic Dissociation’ (VKD) and this has subsequently become one of the ‘Power Therapies’ in its own right.”

The “field” of NLP is open to interpretation and there’s no real standard;

Cat registered as hypnotherapist

“In the UK, George (the cat) was registered with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP)”

As an obese guy who used to ride a road bike I know how it feels when you’re in the depths of despair. It (weight loss) certainly appears as if it is magic.

Unfortunately losing weight so simple as to demand magical thinking as a way of stifling our cognitive dissonance over our failures in self-controlled eating. Hence trying everything under the sun (other than disciplined eating).