Hi,

Just wanted to start a thread for those of us who have the last 10pds or so to lose and need some ideas, support, advice, encouragement and the like.

Would love to here from peeps who have done it!!!!

My last 10pds are being *very* stubborn and are quite happy where they are thankyou. Unfortunately for them, I DON'T WANT THEM TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE.

So, if you had 10 sticky pds - what did you do?????

Hi Vee!
Do you exercise? Maybe adding some , or switching it up with something else like strength training or a different form of cardio. Usually the last lbs (from what I have read) are because your body gets comfy with what your doing with it, so you need to shock it a bit.

Otherwise I am no expert just an avide reader of Shape, Fitness, Self and Oxygen Magazines. Good luck!!

Exercise might help but it might also make it take a bit longer to happen. Quite often there will be a bit of a weight gain when a person first starts a strenuous exercise routine if they were out of shape. I'm probably being foolish but I'm waiting until I get back down to my goal weight before I resume my exercise routine. I've gained enough in the past year that I've only got a couple pairs of jeans that fit comfortably right now. I'm afraid that if I start exercising my thighs will get bulky again and I won't have a thing to wear. I hate shopping for clothes and I can't afford them either.

The last time I started exercising my thighs got quite bulky at first and I think I may have gained a couple pounds in the first few weeks. It's hard to remember now but I think it took a couple months of sticking to my routine before the weight came back off and the swelling in my thighs went down. At that point I found that I was able to eat a lot more food and still lose or maintain my weight. I also found that the shape of my legs started to improve dramatically. Everything started tightening up and didn't look as flabby.

If you try exercise, don't be discouraged if it appears to be working against you temporarily. It isn't really.

Linda Sue - If your speaking of Strength traininig your right, you may have a temporary water gain as your muscles hold on to water, but they will release it. I hate that, I try to go easy on it to see the scale move, but then I feel like I am robbing myself of beiung toned and strong when I get to goal. PLUS the more muscle you have the more fat you burn. Its a personal preference though, when I started Kimkins I did cardio only because I was terrified of not seeing a loss every single day on the scale, even if it was just water. Man that Kimmer!

Cardio will not do that though, unless MAYBE your a runner or do things like the stairmaster your muscles may swell because your working them hard.

Simple walking will only help you lose.

Vee, lets say you walk every day for 30 min at a brisk pace. Try Adding 10 min to your walks and even ad some intervals of running or very fast walking. just those little changes will make a difference. I started adding hills to my treadmill walks and it made a huge difference when I hit a stall, and not only that, I lost loads of inches in my butt and thighs

Yes, EtheralKim, I was talking about strength training rather than cardio. Unfortunately for me, I waited until I was in maintenance before I started doing any kind of exercise. I'll always have to wonder if I would have had a lot less excess flab if I'd worked out during my weight loss. I truly regret what I did to my body by getting so heavy. Thank goodness I've fixed the weight problem but now I have to live with the consequences of being fat and out of shape for so many years. I'd rather be thin and flabby than fat any day though. Exercising helps quite a bit but I don't think that I'll ever be in the shape I could have been in had I exercised during my whole weight loss. Plus, I'm a few years older now which makes it even harder to shape up.

Yeah I know the things we do to ourselves. If we had only known then what we know now right?

Coming from Kimkins its hard for me to add weights since it made me obsess over the scale. I am trying to break that mindset and focus on inches and how I feel.

Thanks for starting the thread! I'm 4 pounds into my last ten. I've made a few adjustments to my eating habits (cut out fresh dairy which is problematic for me anyway) and cut out as many processed low carb foods as possible. So, in short I'm back to eating mostly whole foods and making sure I get enough protein which is the basis of my plan anyway.

Its easy to forget the basics - there are a lot of low carb products that have helped me stay on plan (ice cream, wraps, tortillas, SF popsicles, SF chocolate, etc) but I think they were getting in the way of the "final ten." I'm not the sort of person who can just eat an ice cream once a week. lol. So for now its just the basics; yummy, well seasoned, interesting basics. :-)

Jen

P.S. My whole foods include plenty of fats: fatty meats (I'm partial to pork, salami and chicken legs with the skin on), butter, olive oil, nuts, coconut and coconut oil. I have no idea what the percentages are, but I'll run a fitday summary for a couple days and give an estimate in a future post. You can get an idea of what I eat by looking here Menus

This is a perfect topic for me. Thanks. I am trying ever so hard to get the last 7 pounds off. I've come this close using KK and, I have to admit that it worked, but I can't eat these amounts forever and I can't seem to cut back enough to start losing again. I know exercise would help, but, I also know myself and know that I will not maintain even a semi demanding exercise routine, so I need to lose the pounds, then transition to maintenance with minimal exercise.
I have also cut out low-carb products, except Atkins drinks and low-carb ice cream. I am not eating any low-carb bread type products. I'm eating so little, I don't know what more to do. HELP!!

Hey Marie and WELCOME to my forum if I haven't already done so.

Up your fat intake while keeping your carbs reduced. And if you are hungry, then EAT!

I eat every 2-3 hours so I NEVER get hungry...you're gonna get there!

I'd say the same thing as Jimmy and EtheralKim. Weight or resistance training at least twice a week combined with 4-5 days of aerobics and an adequate diet with enough protein (.8 to 1 gram per body weight, example 100 pound woman = 100 grams protein), fats, vegetables, and plenty of water and you should kick start a downward movement on the scale.

Don't be afraid of gaining muscle even if the scale moves up temporarily. It wasn't until I got serious about weight lifting and put on muscle that I started getting my body fat percentage to go down significantly. A pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day even when not used. A pound of fat burns about 3 calories. If you build 5 pounds of muscle thats 250 calories more you'll burn everyday!

Something that Jah Frog said reminded me that during my initial weight loss, I never drank anything but water, used almost no artificial sweeteners and ate no low carb desserts. I basically just ate "clean" and had no trouble losing, no stalls whatsoever and got below my original goal weight almost before I realized it. Fast forward a few years. I've been in maintenance since the spring of 2003 and have since experimented with all sorts of low carb products such as Carbquik, started drinking diet soda, coffee and have tried lots of low carb dessert recipes. I also began to occasionally have high carb indulgences. It's no wonder that I now find myself having to get rid of about 5 stupid pounds (it was over 10 at one point - ouch!). I think I know what I need to do.

I'm on my last 10 also.

Don't have anything else to add but I think I'll be hanging out here.

Well - after reading your posts, it's very encouraging to see that I'm noy the only one with this problem. I also got out of my seat, said to hubby "Do you want to go for a walk?" - which he has been bugging me to do - and off we went. We walked to the teller machine coz I had to get some money out and to the deli to buy the newspaper - something we would normally take the car for. All up a 45 min walk.

I have to admit I don't do alot of exercise - I work fulltime, and spend quite a bit of time driving my daughter to dance lessons and organising stuff for her, so fitting in dedicated exercise can be hard. I will say that in summer, we were walking 4 or 5 times a week for around an hour each time, but that is a lot harder to do in the winter months. We're in spring here now, so that should be easier to manage - and I just have to commit to doing it.

I am tweaking with my protein/fat/carb ratios to see if something happens and I have to say that eating "clean" probably is a good way to go.

Onward and upward (or rather downward)!!!!!

Just posted elsewhere that my laptop died from a virus yesterday and I have lost all my low carb resources, recipes and info I have collected over the last 8 weeks - including all the recipes I had tweaked from american to australian

I am using hubby's pc but probably won't post heaps until we sort out the mess. Just wanted to say I have been walking the last two days and I know I've eaten low carb today (even tho my spreadsheet for traking is dead) - haven't weighed anything but just know from my choices have done well. Haven't lost a damn thing but my muscles are really sore and feel kinda "tighter" if that makes sense.

As Dory from Finding Nemo sings "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming la la la,la la, la la

Hey!What doesn't kill you makes you stonger

I feel your pain, Vee. Viruses really stink. I've never completely lost everything to one but my husband's computer is in that condition at the moment so he's been using mine. Every time he uses the internet on my computer I have to pray that he won't pick up a virus. He has no idea where he got the virus from so it's possible that he could go to the same site again from my computer. I'd really be up a creek if he did.

backup backup backup. can't say it enough. its likely to happen again, or several times (trust me). hard drive backups are cheaper than new computers and cheaper than having your old computer serviced.

Once you have a bcakup drive, make sure you actually backup your system weekly )or more often if its important.

its easy to do. you don't need to be a computer expert. And if you are not using a good updated virus protection get one ASAP.

My hard drive failed this past spring and I lost everything or just about everything. I thought I had been backing up pretty frequently to ZIP disks and CD's but realized when it was too late that I had stuff that hadn't been backed up in YEARS. The only good thing about this story is that I got a brand new super fast computer because I was long overdue and now I have a second hard drive just for backing up EVERYTHING once a week. It probably takes me 20 minutes to do the job and I can sleep at night again knowing that even if my computer won't boot in the morning, I've got copies of everything safe and sound.

By the way, I looked into data recovery and it would have cost me over $1,000 to have it done and I would have had to pay that whether they recovered everything or just one file. I spent the money on a new computer instead, moved on with my life and tried to forget all that work that I'd lost.

Women should not worry about getting bulky with weight training. Women don't produce enough testosterone to build huge muscles. Secondly weight training along doesn't increase muscle mass. If you want huge muscle mass you have to eat a lot to gain muscle mass. If you eat Atkins style, you have to eat even more because of the metabolic advantage. For example I will eat around 4000cal per day just not to feel hungry.


Women please throw out your scales, scales are useless when you eat protein/ fat. What we are after is bodyfat, not bodyweight. Buy a sexy dress a size smaller, and try and fit it instead of being a slave to scale.

Weight training burns fat during exercise, and fat after exercise (repairing muscle fibers). Weight training tones and help lean out the body by shaping muscles. A quick 20 minute circuit routine with dumbbells can easily replace hrs of boring cardio. Circuit training will increase heart rate (Cardio Action) and build muscle at the same time.