Twenty Pounds Down

I weighed in this morning 20.2 pounds less than where I was on May 12th. Most of that weight was lost in the first two weeks of keto. I've been slowly losing the rest with fasting and time-restricted eating. I'm really focusing on the time-restricted eating, but I should also incorporate more Atkins/Keto concepts as well. I've allowed myself to have more sugar and carbs than I should. It has kept me from losing another ten pounds probably. I think I'm doing pretty good for the time being. I'm slowly losing fat and my endurance for exercise has increased.

Speaking of exercise, I've been doing a lot more of that lately, and it's more intensive exercise. I'm gradually building up to full on jogging. I try to walk fast and jog intermittently. I usually keep this up for about an hour and a half straight. My heart rate usually stays above 120. When I jog it's more like 160 or 180. I like to try to sustain a heart rate of 130 or more when I'm on the treadmill. When I walk or hike outside, I take a day pack and just enjoy nature. I still keep my heart rate up, but it's more about having a good walk than working myself hard.

Twenty pounds isn't a lot. Twenty-five pounds will be a 10% loss from where I was when I started. My goal is to get down to 165 or 170. I still have about seventy more pounds. If I'm going to do that before my birthday, I need to step it up. It may be time to start alternate day fasting. I'm going to do time-restricted eating for another week, and if I don't see significant loss by then, I'm going to switch to alternate day fasting for sure. That will be difficult, but I think I can do it.

If all else fails, I'll go back to a strict no carbs diet. That worked well for the first three weeks. I'm mainly concerned with my metabolic rate. I want to speed it along as much as possible. I worry that fasting will slow my metabolism. However, I've not given time-restricted eating much of a chance to impress me. I've only started doing it. I'm just extremely skeptical of its benefits. I especially don't think that it'll result in weight loss, or I should say "fat loss."

I suspect that I will not lose as much on it as I did on keto. The version of keto I was doing was extreme, and losing weight on it was inevitable. If all else fails, I'll go back to that. It's so strict that it seems unnecessary, and if I went with an actual keto diet, I'd have to track so many things, I'd just give up. For now, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

Time-restricted eating is a somewhat new concept that is based on circadian rhythms. The idea is that you only eat during a small window of time during the day. I'm going to spend the next few days reading some of the scientific studies on the subject and seeing what have been discovered.