And that your body weight doesn’t fluctuate up is so interesting. I find it amazing that sometimes weight gain/loss seems completely untethered to diet, calories, micronutrients, and activity, while at other times the connection is clear.

That book, Strong Medicine, (with the old fashioned U.N.-pc views) struck me as so amazing in that the Doc could predict to the patients exactly how many weeks it would take them to lose the required pounds. That was so fascinating.

Funny, also, dr Donaldson, the author, reported that other docs asked him why he wanted to work with overweight people as they as such liars!

http://supremexen.com/strong-medicine-blake-donaldson/strong-medicine-blake-donaldson–ro-oysterz-20140102.pdf

I eat very little dairy as it is.

I appreciate your trying to think of something that would work for me, but I have come to believe everyone is very very different, and that in my case I’m probably the weight my body very much wants to be, and it’s not such a bad weight. I still keep trying, though.

One good thing is that as hard as it is for me to lose weight, it seems nearly as hard for me to gain it past a certain point. Of course, I’ve never tried stuffing myself day after day after day, but what I mean is that when I diet strenuously I only lose a couple of pounds, but when I eat sort of normally (which for me isn’t so very very much food, and occasional desserts rather than regular desserts) I only gain a couple of pounds. Over the years, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gained weight compared to when I was young, maybe a total of 15 to 20 pounds over my earlier setpoint (not over my dancing weight, which was much lower), and that’s the weight I’d like to lose.

I cannot even explain why that I don’t crave food or why I have pretty much completely stopped thinking about it , when it used to dominate my thoughts. Something about fat burning versus carb burning at the cellular level. I think that lower carbs flips the switch and once that switch gets flipped my cells see that their fuel source, fat, is available from both food and fat cells. Don’t really know why, but I view it as a tremendous gift.

Yes, your situation truly is so different because you are way close to where you want your weight to be.

I do follow a FB group about the keto diet. It involves lots of cooking beyond just meats and eggs. There many, many people are delightedly posting before and after photos and some are losing huge – and regaining normal lives – yet there are many also who are whittling off the 10-15 lb range. Lots of enthusiasm among them all.

So, clearly you aren’t interested in keto, but there is a friend of mine who drops all forms of dairy out of her diet completely when she needs to whittle off a few pounds. Is that something you might try?

Thanks!

By the way, the first time I went on the diet I was a very young woman—in my early twenties. It was called the Stillman diet at the time, and it was very similar to the way keto is described. I had the previously mentioned problems with it, including not losing weight.

But I wonder: did you have a lot of weight to lose at the outset? I never had all that much weight to lose. When I first went on the diet, I was 5’4″ and weighed in the high 120s or maybe 130. I wanted to get way down because of ballet. I ultimately did lose weight (ended up at 105 for a few years) but only by basically starving, eating 900-1000 calories a day for years. I doubt that at this point in my life I’d lose all that much weight, even on that, but I wouldn’t be able to starve myself like that anyway. Which is probably a sign of health.

I’m also curious—on such a restrictive diet, why don’t you have cravings, if only for more fruits and vegetables? When I was on that Stillman diet I used to dream about vegetables—literally, to have dreams about eating them. I had tremendous cravings that never stopped!

For me, the keto diet helped me lose fast, for about four months. Slowed way, way down to barely a trickle for this past 5 months. The reason that I stick to it, though, is first, hope to keep the direction downward, but the second reason is the freedom from cravings and intrusive thoughts of food, as well as decreased hunger. In fact going this diet has disconnected my very relationship with food, moving food way down in priority in my mind.

Just it clicked for me in its way. However, really wish I had discovered this diet when I was a young woman.

Yes, I can understand your frustration. Good luck

But I will say two things: First, I have known three men who both consumed huge quantities of calories, and never gained an ounce. Two of them started gaining some weight when they hit late middle age, but the other never did. So there is something about some people’s metabolism (or whatever) that protects them from weight gain. It’s unfair, but there it is.

Second: exercise does not cause you to lose weight, except possibly in a few extreme cases, like lumberjacks.

That can be more directly countered by the internal neigong breathing used in Tai Chi and other Eastern medical lineages.