Calorie counting vs insulin resistance with pcos edit: forgot to add

Health & Wellness Reproductive
1

been doing 1200-1500 calorie tracking for like 3 years straight. tracked everything, met with a dietitian twice, hit my targets consistently. scale barely budged. gained weight during luteal phases even when i was perfect with calories.

felt like i was doing everything right and my body just refused. finally dragged myself to an endo and got full labs. fasting insulin was 18. my LH/FSH ratio was a mess.

she said “this isn’t a willpower problem. your body is insulin resistant and it’s trashing everything into fat storage.” so i stopped counting calories and started tracking what i ate instead. more protein, more fat, way less simple carbs, added inositol. and suddenly things shifted.

not fast, but actually shifted. 8 wks later my fasting insulin was 9. two completely different problems. calorie restriction works if you have normal insulin sensitivity.

it doesn’t touch anything if you’re insulin resistant with pcos. did calorie counting fail for you too? did ur labs ever actually show the insulin resistance piece?

2

the ‘gained weight during luteal phases even when i was perfect with calories’ part is exactly why calorie counting often falls short for women with IR. that 2-4 lb fluid shift from progesterone’s secondary effect on aldosterone is a real confounder for the scale, especially when you’re already battling insulin resistance which shifts metabolism towards fat storage. not a willpower problem at all, just a different set of mechanisms to address.