Night shift ER nurse, 46, so my labs are always a mess anyway. Down about 18 lbs since February and feeling great, but ApoB and LDL both creeped up at my last draw.
Same lab, same fasting window, nothing changed except the weight coming off. My NP just shrugged. I keep reading that active fat loss can do this — did it settle down for anyone else, or stick around? Not asking about meds, just the pattern.
My LDL went 112 to 139 during a 30 lb loss, then settled to 118 by week 20. I was eating way more cheese and eggs.
Cheese and eggs would be my first guess too. Did your ApoB move with the LDL or stay lower?
My ApoB jumped 15% during rapid fat loss too. It dropped after I held weight for 8 weeks.
Similar thing here: my ApoB went 84 to 101 around week 9 while I was dropping about 1.5 lb/week, then settled back to 82 by week 18 once my weight held steady for a month. Waist kept shrinking the whole time.
I retested after a normal maintenance stretch, not during a steep deficit, and it looked totally different. Active fat loss seems to scramble some people's lipids for a bit.
A 3.5-inch waist drop is the headline; my belt notches always beat a random Tuesday blood draw.
My LDL bounced when I leaned hard into cheese/eggs/ribeye to hit protein in a deficit. ApoB 81 to 95, then back to 85 after I swapped some of that for oats, beans, and salmon. Sleep was also trash those weeks, which probably didn't help. Same 14h fast, same lab.
So for me it was diet composition plus active loss, not just the scale.
Week 12 is peak chaos for labs; week 20 is a better story.
38 here too, and the thing that finally explained mine was the rate of loss, not the food itself. I was dropping about 2 lb a week for 10 straight weeks and my LDL went 98 to 131, then when I deliberately slowed to roughly 1 lb a week and added 10g psyllium plus a cup of oats daily, it drifted back to 108 over the next 8 weeks.
My totally unscientific read is that when you're mobilizing fat that fast you're also mobilizing the cholesterol stored in that tissue, so the panel looks worse while the actual trend is fine. 18 lb in 12 weeks is about 1.5 lb a week, right in that zone.
A 38 to 34.5 waist at the same time says the recomp is clearly working.
How steady has your weekly loss been — even drops or big chunks early?
Sleep is the one nobody brigs up and it's the only thing that moved my numbers in a weird direction. I wear a ring and tracked it: during my hardest deficit weeks sleep went from 7.5 hours to 6.2 and resting HR climbed 6 bpm, and my LDL rose 20 points with the diet basically unchanged.
Then I took a deload week, went to bed at 9:30 for eight nights straight, and the next draw came back 15 points lower. Total reversal of what I expected, since I'd spent a month blaming dietary fat. Three heavy lifting days plus a deficit is a real stress load. How's your sleep and resting HR now versus week 1?
same here—mid-cut lipids looked awful, then got boring once loss slowed. Hang in.
Hotel treadmill + airport coffee here—mine was ugly at week 12 too, then settled when the scale slowed. Hang in!
Two kids + chaotic dinners here, so my snack drawer is basically a food group. During my loss phase I swore meals hadn’t changed, but my “handful” of nuts/cheese/pretzels had doubled because I was starving by 4pm. Logged it for a week: saturated fat way up, fiber basically gone. LDL/ApoB did the same creep.
Did your between-meal stuff shit at all—protein shakes, bars, cheese, nuts—or is it truly identical? That was the piece I’d been missing while blaming the scale.
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