I have heard a lot of contradictory things on this subject. “It’ll happen in six months” or “You have to lose weight and gain it back for it to happen in a reasonable amount of time”

What’s the truth about this? What’s your experience with it?

  • @knightlyEnglish
    24•3 months ago

    I think the mechanics are the same as how it was explained to me for E (but I’ll happily stand to be corrected by someone with direct experience).

    Your existing body fat doesn’t get redistributed. Rather, the distribution pattern of new body fat changes over that 6-month period of time.

    If your weight remained perfectly stable then this wouldn’t cause any visible changes, but in the real world we’re constantly gaining and losing fractions of a pound over the course of the day.

    Over time, you’ll eventually burn through the body fat in places where it isn’t building up anymore and gain it where it does. You can accelerate this process by deliberately burning off your old body fat, but large swings in body weight in a short period of time are generally considered to be unhealthy for a number of reasons.

    Just keep working slowly toward your ideal and you’ll get there!

      • @knightlyEnglish
        6•3 months ago

        Yes, and I’m sorry:

        • Stay hydrated!
        • Get any sort of regular exercise, even if it’s just a few minutes walk every other day.
        • Try to get to bed early enough that you usually don’t need an alarm to wake up in time.
        • Grab a scale and any sort of weight-tracker app that can estimate your caloric balance over a period of two or three weeks. (I’m using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.cachapa.libra and this is my 2023 holiday bump:

        this

        It’s way easier to add one or two data points to the graph every day than to count calories and estimate your burn rate, and the long baseline better captures your overall habits and averages out any variance in hydration.

        • Set a reasonable goal. A caloric deficiency of just 200 per day (the green line through my graph) will shave off 15 pounds a year.
        • Stay hydrated!
        • Be patient with yourself. Small changes in diet and exercise are probably all that’s needed to put you on track, and occasional indulgences (like the five-pound Halloween candy binge visible in my graph XD) are just blips in the trend line of your habits.
        • Did I mention to stay hydrated? =P