when i was about 15 (in 1996) i think i weighed about 202 or so. So i went on the atkins diet, which was called the anabolic diet back then. on weekdays you’d eat under 30 grams of carbs and on weekends you’d eat whatever you want. Within a couple months i was down to 186 and stayed there by staying on the diet. My bodyfat appeared to be about 13%. When i was 17 (about 1.5 years after i started, i think) i went off the diet and naturally regained the weight. Then all my muscles expanded for some reason, but i didnt’ pay attention.
I didnt’ weigh myself for a few years, but about 2 years after the diet (1999 roughly) i weighed myself and i was 272. So, naively went on atkins again for 2 weeks. i dropped to 265, but slowly crept up to 289. In april of 2000 I had some anxiety for a month and couldn’t eat well for that month. This dropped me from 289 to 272 and i stayed at 272 for a couple of years w/o diet or exercise.
I found out i was gaining weight again (i was 302 in june 2003) even though i hadn’t done anything. I was at 280 in nov 2002, 286 at march of 2003, and 302 at june 2003. i’m at 285 now due to a low fat diet and exercise. I won’t touch anything atkins like ever again. I went on the low fat diet this time because my experience a few years ago with a low calorie diet was positive. I didn’t regain the weight or experience muscle expansion like i did when i lost with atkins.
I know alot of people when they gain weight back from a diet try to pretend its muscle but whatever i gained is honestly inside my muscles. My arms are about 18" now, they were 14" before the diet but i am not stronger. I have a 48" waist but have been skinfold calipered at 20% bodyfat. The fact that when i was 186 @ about 13% but am now at 20% means my lean body mass somehow went from about 160 to 230. Bioelectrical impedence says my LBM is at least 202, calipers say it is 230. Either way i gained at least 40 lbs of LBM.
What hte hell did i do to myself? DId i mess up my ability to store glycogen & water in my muscles? Whatever is in my muscle, whethere water or intramuscular fat (i’m guessing its 1 of the 2) i am not stronger but i look like it.
i know the response will be ‘see a doctor’, but i also want to hear opinions on what i did, or if anyone else has had this happen to them.
Why is this the atkins diets fault? I’d say the issue is with poor eating habits and not enough exercise. Not tryin’ to be an ass, just being logical. Going from 186 to 272 is going to take a huge toll on your body, atkins or not.
And since you’re bigger, don’t your muscles have to increase in mass to be strong enough to move you around? They have to be bigger to move 272 with something near the same efficency as they did moving 186, right? I’ve heard your bones get denser too.
It’s not the Atkins diet, although I’m no fan of that. It’s yo-yo dieting. What you experience can happen with any fad diet that is not accompanied by exercise.
The best way to lose weight is to not worry about. Decide to get fit, not thin. Work on good balanced nutrition and exercise for several months aerobically.
Once you get to the point where you are doing the equivalent of running 25-35 miles a week and if you are eating healthily and moderately, your body will slim down on its own.
When I was fat and wanted to lose weight the way I figured it was that no fat person crosses the finish line at a marathon. Therefore I figured that if I trained and ran a marathon I would no longer be fat.
dammitalltohell. this always happens. WHy do people keep wanting to assume i have 140 pounds of subcutaneous fat and that i still have a LBM of 160? Why am i calipered at 20% when i weigh 285 then? Why do bioelectrical machines say i was at 28% when i weighed 272? No one can answer that.
I just want to know what is ‘in’ my muscles. is it water, glycogen, intramuscular fat, because i am not sure.
its the atkins diets fault because i did not gain 100 lbs of subcutaneous (ie the fat under your skin) type of fat when i quit, i gained some of that and something else. I do not know what i gained, that is what i want to find out.
Before anyone else assumes i am at 50% bodyfat and just lying to myself, look at these figures. I currently weigh about 285.
I’ve done this caliper thing at least 10 times and i always get 19-21%. I’ve done bioelectrical impedence (not since i was 272 though) and i was 28% bodyfat.
Which means that i only have aboyt 58 pounds of subcutaneous bodyfat.
So how did i go from 186 at about 13% bodyfat to 285 at about 20% (subcutaneous) bodyfat? No one will explain it to me.
Just a note that as far as I know, Atkins never promoted going off his program on the weekends. You may have been on some type of low-carb cyclical diet, but it sure doesn’t sound like Atkins’ program to me, even the original plan before it was revised in the late 90s. It gets bashed enough as it it - let’s not bash it for something it isn’t.
I agree, and unfortunately, while I’d like to give you an answer I can’t. The Atkins Diet is not the cause, to my knowledge anyway, of your issue. I’ve known hundreds of people on Atkins and never seen this type of issue before.
Seeing a medical professional may be your best option at this point, sorry to cop out, man, but that’s how I see it.
Self diagnostics is never a good way to figure out what is going on. Memory is not very acurate and neither are caliper measurement. Get a hydrostatic measurement. Do you have a slew of pictures to show what is going on?
Muscle can store lots of water. In many cases it has to do with your diet, stress levels, activity levels and sodium intake. Your genetics can also play havoc on trying to compare yourself to what others are like. My friend is 5’7 and 250lbs. He has a huge gut that I swear starts at his ample chin and keeps going down and out at probably a 17 degree angle. Yet when you poke him in the gut it is as solid as mine. I do heavy weighted crunches every week as part of my routine and my bodyfat is somewhat low. He “claims” it is all muscle, but since nobody has muscle that looks like a beer gut, I would just guess that all his fat is under the abdominal walls. I am sure this can really screw up a caliper reading.
Nobody can explain it to you because they don’t have all the information they need. Pictures and body weight/height stats just wont cut it. A trainer or other certified personel would have to examine you in person, with the right equipment for them to even come close to figure out what is going on.
Probably nothing. Personally I would say that you have lots of subcutaneus bodyfat, a high sodium diet with lots of carbs that causes bloating and such with a high bone density. Your measurements are rounded, your caliper method is not accurate and there is probably even a bit of scuffing of the results so that in your mind there is something really wrong. The truth may just be that there is a bunch of little things that when added together make a big difference.
that sounds somewhat like me, i can only press in a 1/2" on my stomach before i get to the abdominal wall, but my stomach goes straight down instead of outward because i have a large chest. i am shaped like a barrel or a cylinder, 48" waist & 56" chest. I am willing to accept that i may have alot of intramuscular fat, i’m just saying that i seriously doubt i have 120 lbs of subcutaneous fat as that doesn’t add up when compared to bioelectrical or caliper testing. sometimes i wish i did have 120 lbs of subcutaneous fat because at least then i would know what it was and how to get rid of it.
yeah i was on the anabolic diet. THe idea was to ‘refeed’ on the weekends to keep up motivation. On weekdays i’d eat maybe 30 grams of carbs a day, but on weekends i’d eat upwards of 600 grams a day. I think this radical cycling of no carbs/high carbs may have done something to make me store water, but that is pure speculation on my part.
calculus – I tried the diet you describe, except the one I was on limited daily carb intake to 20 grams. I only tried it twice, but each time, after I stopped (it was a two weeks on, two weeks off regimen) I noticed that I rebounded – i.e., put on more weight very quickly on the “rest” cycle than I had taken off during the on cycle.
Your description of an increase in muscle size with no increase in strength reminds me of an article I once ran across discussing “sarcoplasmic hypertrophy”, which (as I understood it) is the increase in size of the connective tissue that holds muscles together. It adds bulk, and is fairly hard, but doesn’t contribute any contractile power.
As I recall, it was supposedly stimulated by lots of high-rep exercise. What type of exercise do you do?
Of course, you don’t consist only of muscle and fat. You also contain tons of water, plus your bone mass and internal organs. So no, it’s not only subcutaneous fat. It’s also fat around your heart and in your blood vessels. And it’s probably also an enormous amount of water weight…that can make a huge difference.
Diets don’t work. You’re a perfect illustration of why–because of the instant re-gain after getting “off a diet.” I did this to myself for years.
And the caliper test is notoriously unreliable.
Someone suggested that you might have gained some muscle mass because you’re carrying around more weight, and I suppose that’s true. But ordinarily, while you may LOSE muscle mass while dieting, when you gain weight back, it is only EVER flab. You don’t gain muscle while you’re sedentary and over-eating.
Well you are using two different, unreliable testing methods, taken at different times, by (I assume) different people. I’m not surprised you can’t reconcile the data.