Todd Moody wrote:
>
> ...I've been doing Neanderthin for a little over 3 years now,
> and I'm pretty strict about it....I did weigh myself
> recently. I discovered that of the 40 pounds I lost (33 of them
> on the Zone before starting Neanderthin), I have regained 20. My
> body fat has gone from 17% (the lowest it got) to 22%.  I am in
> the depressing situation of having to buy "fat clothes" for the
> summer, to replace the stuff that I naively gave away, thinking I
> would never need it again.  My LDL cholesterol remains elevated.
>
> My trajectory is the classic "dieter's syndrome," in fact:
> Initial success with weight loss, followed by a period of stasis,
> followed by a slow return of fat, *without making any overt
> dietary changes*.  There are many theories as to why this occurs,
> but nobody really understands it yet.
>
Dang, man! That's serious...
It sound's like the body's adaptive machinery at work.
It just becomes 10 times more efficient so as to continue
stockpiling what it thinks it needs in the way of reserves...

I don't know for sure, of course, but there's only one other
explanation that coule possibly make any sense:

How is the exercise picture? And, most importantly, what has been
going on with your lean body mass?? Arthur DeVany, whose book
Evolutionary Fitness will, I hope, be out soon, wrote that "lean
body mass is the biologically active, real you". I've never heard
that stated any better. He pointed out that lean body mass is the only
measurement worth tracking. I've got one of those scales that reports
percentage of body fat, which is nice, but now I use those numbers
to calculate LBM . It's been a revelation. Some days weight would go
down, which seemed good, except that LBM went down, so it wasn't.
Other days, weight would go up, which seemed bad, but LBM went up,
too. As long as it stays high, and the diet stays the same, then
weight *should* be constant. If it doesn't, we're back to the
"adaptive machinery" explanation, which bodes ill...