Stall or Done???

Hi everyone I'm 18 month out from surgery have lost 105lbs. Feel great only 10lbs from my personal goal. I've been the same weight now for the past 3-4months. Up and down a few pounds but always settling around 181-183.

Guess my question is.......is this just a very long stall or is this where my body wants me to be and I'm done losing?

I wish I knew the answer to this. I'm in the same place- 23 months out have hung around 192-195 for upwards of six months.

I don't consider myself done- and likely never will. I'm still working- preferably to lose more but maintaining is work too. I sure I can lose more-- I'm not sure I'm willing to put more effort into doing so. I like where I am now (nutritional intake wise)-- it's 'livable'

Bigger thing with me is I'm happy with how I look and feel and my overall health-- so I'm not stressed about where I am.

I've been on a stall for almost four years. I guess you could call it that. Others call it maintenance.

If you haven't lost in 4 months, or gained, you are eating just as many calories as you are burning. That's maintenance. You can decide you are happy, and continue on as you have been -- it's a great accomplishment. If you decide you aren't happy and want to lose more, you absolutely can. But it will require some new commitment, focus, and work on your part.

Our bodies don't "want to be" anywhere. They don't decide. Our brains do. You'll need to watch what you are eating more closely. Weighing my food and logging it are huge keys for me. If you cut back 500 calories a day, you will lose 1 pound per week over the long run. That's doable. If your brain decides it's worth the effort.

I would like this response multiple times if I could! It's spot on.

I need to print this out and put it on my mirror to read every.single.morning!

I'm sorry this is such a long post!

I would like to respectfully disagree with part of your answer. Most of us have a weight set-point. It's a place our body is regulating to keep us at it's theory of where we need to be based on our stress levels and some crazy effed-up formula only our body understands. "Resetting" our set point is one of the beautiful side effects of WLS - on average it tends to reset us to to a level that's about 50% of the way to our ideal weight. They haven't figured out how to change that or how to tell what patients will end up where (but RNY tends to reset lower than the VGS). When you are at your set point you can generally increase your caloric intake to the "normal" level of calories for your weight and exercise levels - for most of us women it would be around 1500 to 1700 calories a day and you'll "STICK" to that weight. There is a general belief that with WLS patients, this 'new' set-point shows up around the 18 month mark. You can move it lower - you hear people on here talking about losing 15 lbs more than you WANT to lose, this is one way the body will sometimes reset - it will push back up against about 15 lbs and then be "happy". But this is not lock step and it doesn't happen to everyone the same way. It's one more reason to grab the honeymoon phase and pu**** for all you can! What pushes the set-point up? Probably cortisol (think Freshman 15 etc). What drops it down? Not sure, but it will drop with consistent weight loss and maintenance.

The above is my own understanding, here is another view from an online source. My experiences are based on study (I'm a nerd who has to over analyze everything) and my own experiences as I've tried to lose weight most of my adult life.

Here is my personal experience with my body's set-points-

My set point has been 205 for the past five or six years. I know this because it used to be around 250, and when I lost weight I couldn't get down below around 210 without doing dramatic calorie reduction. In 2004 I was out of work for for the first four months of the year. I dieted and I worked at at a curves that was 2 miles from my house. I'd walk there, in the road if it was snowy (Ohio) every single day, and I'd work out then walk home. I was home and able to really control my diet, ate protein forward low calorie meals and I was able to get to 200 lbs. This crept back up towards 220 over the next four years, and then in 2009, when I found out I have the BRCA2 gene mutation I REALLY started to lose weight. I basically did the same thing, this time logging my food with MFP, and working out every day. I was able to drop down to 180 before I allowed life to intervene. I slowly crept back up, and this past summer I hit 205 which puts me in the Morbid Obese category. I decided to embrace this negative by utilizing my new 35 plus BMI to qualify for weight loss.

As I started through the WLS journey it became apparent that my set point was 205. How did I know? I eat a healthy "clean" diet, and actually prefer the Mediterranean style foods, so my food diaries that date back to 2009 show that junk food, fast food, etc aren't my problems. Portion control is my problem. I eat about 1900 calories a day when I'm not dieting and that put me at 205. As I progressed through the WLS process I was told that if I drop below 205 I risked losing coverage for the surgery. I decided I should pad this a little and go up a couple of pounds. CLEARLY I could gain weight by eating a high carb diet, but I just let myself eat what I wanted, and I want good food. But I did indulge in the occasional maple creme stick from the little bakery up the street, and I did allow myself to go through the drive through once or twice a month. I gained 3 pounds over several months eating what I wanted. Why only three pounds? My set-point was around 205. Also, those three pounds came off easily the week before surgery when I started trying to average about 1200 calories a day, even though I was having food funerals and eating things like cheese burgers and a waffle! The cool thing is that my set point had dropped from the 250 mark to the 205 mark because the 2009 diet and overall weight reduction lasted for a several years.

My plan is to push hard over the next 8 to 12 months and get down to around 110, and hold it there no matter how hard it is, for at least five years. After five years I'll start adding calories and see if I can't move back up to the 125 mark, very slowly, and land with a long term (2022 through end of life) maintenance level of 1500 calories. That is my plan.

For the original poster - You can still drop your set-point down to your ideal weight. You will have to do some sort of change up to trigger the loss again. You might go back to the diet of Month 1 and 2. Go totally liquid diet for the first few weeks, then move very slowly to "real" foods, keeping your calories super low. You might use something like Optifast to help out in the first stage... Then move back to what you're doing now and see if the scale keeps moving. Once you get where you want to be, go a little lower and hold that weight for at least a year. It's not something we can really control, but like Grim said, this is about our MIND deciding what to eat, how much and when :) You got this!

People talk about "set points" as if it were an impenetrable barrier. That, no matter how much they drop calories, they can't get any lighter. It just is not true. It's not.

We all have a maintenance level of calories. If we eat x calories, we will weigh z pounds. Being morbidly obese screwed those numbers for us. It made the number of calories to maintain a particular weight lower than for someone who had never been obese. WLS helps restore that. That's why it's called bariatric and metabolic surgery.

But weight and calories are still a range. A spectrum. Your maintenance calories at 150 pounds may be different from another 150 pound woman of the same age, but not drastically different.

There have been many studies looking at people who swear they are eating very low calorie to see why it is they can't lose weight. The answer ALWAYS is they are eating a lot more than they say they are. Every person they put in a controlled environment and feed them ACTUAL very low calorie diets, loses weight. Every single person. Every single time. The "set point" that was preventing them from losing weight was a rationalization, nothing more.

I agree that people put too much weight on a set point. Like I described, I've been able to break through mine a few times. My hope is this surgery will HELP me both break through it, and maintain long enough to re-set it :)

The past few months were I was having food funerals, my "set-point" helped me not gain weight - BUT it wouldn't have lasted at that caloric level indefinitely! I'm sure that another month or two and the scale would start up again!

Arguably, set point would be effective when calories are not being controlled, don't you think? It's a combination of factors at work influencing how much you eat and when and how much you move. For example, if you overeat one day then the next day you're just not as hungry. Or you overeat, but then you have the motivation to go for an extra long walk in the evening. It's the idea that left to its own devices the body tends to balance out. Yes people whose diets are being closely controlled will lose weight--but if they could, they'd eat a bit more the next day.

Now, that being said, all of us who have had (or are going to have) wls are metabolically challenged. We're not like the typical human bodies out there. For me when I overeat my body wants to rest--so it can move calories to storage, rather than burning them off, I'd assume. When I undereat my body wants to more than make up the difference the next day. But again, metabolically challenged. If my body could regulate itself, I wouldn't need surgery!

IMHO, set point is a mental thing. When you unconciously get to a point where you can't reduce calories more mentally then you stop at the weight supported by the current caloric intake. Just my experience for what it is worth...