I recently joined an intermediate fasting group on Facebook, and I'm actually quite surprised at the comments and posts I see on it. It seems like the IF noobs haven't researched anything about intermediate fasting at all, and the people who have been doing it a while are fed up with the new people. I can't really blame the veterans, but I expected the entire scene to be a little more supportive.
It's pretty interesting that many people claim that everyone else has no idea what they are doing. Some are completely clueless though, so it's frustrating from both sides. As someone who has researched it all quite a bit, along with doing private experimentation to determine how many diets and life styles affect my own body, I can say that most of the people on the group have bad opinions especially as it pertains to me.
There are some questions on the group that would have been better asked on Google. I mean I saw a new person as if protein drinks would be considered breaking the fast. Seriously? Of course it's breaking your fast. Protein drinks are full of protein, which your body and use to create glucose. If you are taking in protein, you are no longer fasting. It's that simple.
I saw one person ask if they could smoke while fasting, which could have simply been answered with a "sure why not", but most of the people on the board took the opportunity to trash the person for smoking. One lady even went so far as to say "if you can fast for 16 hours, you fan easy not smoke." Trust me, that's complete BS. I quit smoking last year and that was way more difficult than going 30 hours straight without food.
I'm just surprised at some of the hostility in a group of people who are all striving to do the same thing. It's not like they are in competition with each other. I suspect the problem is that everyone feels like they know a lot about the subject. I program for a living. There's a lot to computer science and programming in general. Fasting is pretty simple. Fasting + Keto is pretty simple. Changing your eating habits is simple. I don't know why so many people try to overcomplicate something so simple.
Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not complicated. It's just difficult to accomplish. It's still a simple process. There's no super secret thing that is hiding from everyone. You simple eat less than you burn. There's not a lot a more to it than that. Sure there's a lot of theory and physiological things we can discuss in detail that make the issue seem more complex, but we can make any subject way more complicated than it really is if we dive into the details. If you are going to fast, just fast. Why try to cheat at something as simple as fasting?
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Saturday, July 6, 2019
The First Step to Healthy
In order to become more healthy, you usually have to do two things: lose weight and exercise. I recently watched a documentary called Fit and Back which showed a fitness instructor gaining weight for six months and then losing it again in the next six months. He knew how to lose weight. He knew his body pretty intimately. One huge problem I saw with his take on fitness was that he tried to apply what he used for himself to others who came from completely different physical backgrounds.
The difference is that he was losing his weight with the prior knowledge and ability to overcome weight training fatigue and the ability to limit his eating substantially more than someone who has been fat for ten to twenty years. There's a reason said person has been fat for a long time. There's a lot of it that is mental, and some of it that is physiological.
Having been overweight for a long time, I can say the hardest thing for me to overcome initially. I'll go into that more, but let's examine further what a person has to do in order to become more physically fit. In this scenario, the person starts out overweight. Weighing too much is a symptom of an underlying problem. Some may say that the problem is laziness. That could be somewhat true. I know plenty of overweight people who aren't mentally lazy. They just don't exercise enough physically. Lazy isn't exactly the answer.
So this fitness coach from the documentary was trying to coach these overweight people, and the first thing he did was to put them on weight training. Why the heck would anyone think this is a good idea? It was probably a good idea for him when he was trying to get back into shape because his body was used to physical activity, even though he hadn't been doing much of it for six months. His body was able to bounce back into a routine that he had been doing for a decade. Likewise, it's hard for an overweight person to bounce out of a routine that they've been doing for a decade.
Exercise, especially weight training causes a lot of muscle pain. Fitness experts and coaches thrive from muscle pain and love exercising. An overweight person has years of inflammation and typically doesn't like exercise. You could say that most people don't like exercise. However, people who are in great physical fitness tend to power through physical pain easier, especially muscle pain. They thrive from the endorphins released from exercise. A person who has been overweight and not exercising for an extended amount of time can't enjoy the endorphins because they are experiencing immediate pain in their muscles and joints.
So throwing an overweight person onto a weight training routine seems like a terrible idea. They will soon become unmotivated. In order to motivate an overweight person, they have to see results from the huge amount of effort that they have to put forth. If you put them on a 1500 calorie per day diet, they expect to lose weight. It's difficult for them to not eat at least 2500 calories probably, and here you are taking away almost half of their intake. Which leads me to this formula:
The difference is that he was losing his weight with the prior knowledge and ability to overcome weight training fatigue and the ability to limit his eating substantially more than someone who has been fat for ten to twenty years. There's a reason said person has been fat for a long time. There's a lot of it that is mental, and some of it that is physiological.
Having been overweight for a long time, I can say the hardest thing for me to overcome initially. I'll go into that more, but let's examine further what a person has to do in order to become more physically fit. In this scenario, the person starts out overweight. Weighing too much is a symptom of an underlying problem. Some may say that the problem is laziness. That could be somewhat true. I know plenty of overweight people who aren't mentally lazy. They just don't exercise enough physically. Lazy isn't exactly the answer.
So this fitness coach from the documentary was trying to coach these overweight people, and the first thing he did was to put them on weight training. Why the heck would anyone think this is a good idea? It was probably a good idea for him when he was trying to get back into shape because his body was used to physical activity, even though he hadn't been doing much of it for six months. His body was able to bounce back into a routine that he had been doing for a decade. Likewise, it's hard for an overweight person to bounce out of a routine that they've been doing for a decade.
Exercise, especially weight training causes a lot of muscle pain. Fitness experts and coaches thrive from muscle pain and love exercising. An overweight person has years of inflammation and typically doesn't like exercise. You could say that most people don't like exercise. However, people who are in great physical fitness tend to power through physical pain easier, especially muscle pain. They thrive from the endorphins released from exercise. A person who has been overweight and not exercising for an extended amount of time can't enjoy the endorphins because they are experiencing immediate pain in their muscles and joints.
So throwing an overweight person onto a weight training routine seems like a terrible idea. They will soon become unmotivated. In order to motivate an overweight person, they have to see results from the huge amount of effort that they have to put forth. If you put them on a 1500 calorie per day diet, they expect to lose weight. It's difficult for them to not eat at least 2500 calories probably, and here you are taking away almost half of their intake. Which leads me to this formula:
- In order to be healthier, you have to exercise and lose weight
- In order to exercise, you have to reduce your pain
- In order to reduce your pain, you have to reduce the problem that's causing your aching joints and muscles
- The primary cause of those issues is your extra body fat and possibly insulin resistance
- You have to reduce body fat and fix any insulin resistance FIRST or at least be well on your way before getting into intense exercise
That all being said, light walks should be incorporated from the beginning, and the duration of those walks should be increased over the first few weeks. Then, once the person is at a comfortable level with the walking, increase the pace and add inclines.
That is the extent of exercise an obese person should be doing at first. The impact of their own weight could actually injure them and cause them more problems than good. I'm going through all of this and I've hurt myself in the past because I was jogging too hard for my health. I have a left ankle that makes noise every other step as a result of this. Keep away from high intensity for someone who isn't used to exercising regularly. It's just a bad idea to introduce that too early. You have to decrease the body fat first.
So if reducing the body fat is the primary concern, how do we do that? By reducing calorie intake and improving what type of food we intake. Some people attempt to reduce calories without some good prior knowledge. We've all heard of the Atkins diet and that we should eat less carbs and more protein. Or at least that was my idea about it before I researched a few different diets. I think the underlying benefit to Keto, Atkins, etc is that by reducing or eliminating carbs, we reduce hunger. Pay attention to that, because it's the most important thing in any of these low-carb diets. Eating little to no carbs significantly reduces your hunger cravings.
It's the key to helping overweight people lose weight. If they can replace their carbs and sugars with other foods that they like, whatever that food may be, let them have as much as they want, because if they aren't eating carbs, they'll eventually require less and less of that food. That food may not be the best thing they could eat, but at least it's not making them more and more hungry.
I mean if you try to get an overweight person to cut calories, without paying attention to what calories they are eating, they will have at least some sugar and carbs in there. A single 12 oz cola may have 140 calories, which can be fit into a 1500/day calorie diet and still leaves you with 1360 calories for the day. So if I drink that soda, I'm not even wasting ten percent of my daily calories, but I'm significantly increasing how hungry I'm going to be tomorrow, which in turn makes it significantly harder for me to only eat 1500 calories tomorrow. So I think that the best first step for overweight people is to allow them to eat as many calories as they want, as long as they have 0 grams of carbs, and I'm actually more strict than a keto or Atkins diet when it comes to this. I'm not talking about net carbs. Eliminate carbs completely. Any cheating on this will make the person more hungry. More hunger pains makes it more difficult to continue with everything else that needs to occur.
Eating protein and fat, whenever you feel hungry, greatly reduces the hunger you will have later on. Eating any sugar or carbs significantly increases future hunger. So if you are having trouble counting calories and getting your calorie intake low enough, take a look at the types of foods you are getting your calories from. When you get hungry, don't eat carbs. Plain and simply this is the first step to becoming more healthy if you are an overweight person.
Fasting Plus Low Carb
As I sit here and write this post, I'm hungry, but it's bearable. I have been thinking about food for the last five hours. I'm currently on hour twenty-nine of what I hope to be a 48-hour fast. Will I make it? Probably, but it's rough at the moment.
I have been doing 23-1 or one-meal-a-day for a few weeks. This is the first real attempt I've made at a 48-hour fast. The last time I ate, I had a ribeye steak, collard greens, brussel sprouts, and broccoli. I've had about five grams of carbs in the last three days. I've lost about four pounds according to my fluctuating scale. It's hard to get a good accurate reading from a scale when you can get two readings four pounds apart just by moving slightly forward or backward on the scale. I'm confident that I'm at 231 though.
Add to all of this that I've burned nearly 7000 calories since I last ate, and it's easy to see that I should be at least two pounds lighter regardless. The low carbs for the last few days coupled with the extra long fast I'm attempting along with the large amounts of cardio I'm also doing, have led to a decent couple of days of weight loss. I feel slimmer and my skin feels tighter.
That being said, I can't wait until I get to eat again. I may cut the fast short to only forty hours. That would be like combining a twenty-four hour and a sixteen hour fast. My legs are sore from the extra jogging/walking. I'm hoping that I can have some self control when I break my fast. I'm sitting here thinking about all the things that I would like to eat.
I'd like to have some rice, but that will be high in carbs and I'm not sure that I want to gorge myself on carbs right after this fast. I half-way think that allowing myself to have a reward for going so long without eating would be a good way to reinforce the fasting behavior. I could be completely wrong. I don't have a coach through any of this and I'm having to supply my own will power. My main motivation right now is the desire to see my BMI drop below 29. I have good amount of weight to lose still before that happens, but it's a goal. I really don't know if BMI is a good indication of anything though. It doesn't really consider fat percentage and I'm really just trying to get my fat percentage down below 25%. That's a more healthy goal and the one I'm really interested in. Sure, I eventually want to go further than that, but that's my current goal. I'm only concerned with my BMI because I'm sick of being considered "obese".
I watched a documentary on Youtube last night. It was about a guy that went from fit to fat and then back. He was an underwear model and a fitness coach. He was doing it to show that it could be done and also so he'd have a better understanding of what some of his clients were going through losing their weight. It's one thing to gain eighty pounds in six months and then immediately losing it. It's another thing to be obese for a decade or more and try to retrain your mind. I don't think he had a good idea of how to help people. He needed a longer time in the obese zone I think. Also, he was putting them directly on weights. My goodness that can be overwhelming for someone who hasn't exercised in years. The muscle soreness on top of the already nagging brain that's wanting to eat, makes it very difficult to stay motivated.
I think first and foremost a person has to change their diet, but it has to be in a way that is easy to transition in steps. The first dietary changes should be toward a goal of eliminating sugar. That's difficult to do, but I think it has to be the primary concern of a trainer/fitness coach. You can't eliminate sugar and carbs instantly. You can't take someone who's drinking a sugary soda constantly throughout the day and tell them to stop that plus stop all other sugar they are consuming. It has to happen eventually, but they just won't have much success doing that cold turkey.
I quit smoking in 2008. I started back up in 2011. I quit again last year (2018). I can tell everyone reading this that quitting that habit was ten times harder for me than quitting sugar, but both are hard and I had help with smoking. I took Chantix which helped a lot with smoking. There's not a drug, at least none that I know of, that will make you not want sugar. I'm not sure why that hasn't been created, but it's definitely what we need to curve our obesity epidemic.
Sugar and carbs are such a major part of the American diet that it's difficult to cut them out completely. There's a lot of diets that revolve around low-carb, high-fat and/or high-protein. I don't think that the big concern should be "what do I eat since I'm not eating carbs?", I think it should be more along the line of "eat anything but carbs, where ever you can." Sugar and carbs drive hunger. It's SO hard to cut calories or fast when you are hungry. The first step should always be to remove as much of the hunger as possible, and that means to cut all sugar and carbs. That should be the primary goal of most diets. It's the only way to be successful. There's no way that I could go forty-eight hours without eating if I had just had a big bowl of ice cream and a slice of cake right before attempting it. In fact, I couldn't do a forty-eight hour fast if I'd had sugar in the previous 24 hours. Sugar and carbs DRIVE hunger because the insulin they cause your body to produce makes you hungry when it has processed the sugars you've given it. At least that's how it seems to me. If I have had any sugar, even if it was from a banana, my hunger is increased significantly.
If you want to lose weight or help someone else lose weight, the key to success, at least in my opinion, is to get sugar and carbs out of the system completely. It's very difficult to stop eating. It's hundreds of times more difficult if insulin spikes at all previous to that.
I have been doing 23-1 or one-meal-a-day for a few weeks. This is the first real attempt I've made at a 48-hour fast. The last time I ate, I had a ribeye steak, collard greens, brussel sprouts, and broccoli. I've had about five grams of carbs in the last three days. I've lost about four pounds according to my fluctuating scale. It's hard to get a good accurate reading from a scale when you can get two readings four pounds apart just by moving slightly forward or backward on the scale. I'm confident that I'm at 231 though.
Add to all of this that I've burned nearly 7000 calories since I last ate, and it's easy to see that I should be at least two pounds lighter regardless. The low carbs for the last few days coupled with the extra long fast I'm attempting along with the large amounts of cardio I'm also doing, have led to a decent couple of days of weight loss. I feel slimmer and my skin feels tighter.
That being said, I can't wait until I get to eat again. I may cut the fast short to only forty hours. That would be like combining a twenty-four hour and a sixteen hour fast. My legs are sore from the extra jogging/walking. I'm hoping that I can have some self control when I break my fast. I'm sitting here thinking about all the things that I would like to eat.
I'd like to have some rice, but that will be high in carbs and I'm not sure that I want to gorge myself on carbs right after this fast. I half-way think that allowing myself to have a reward for going so long without eating would be a good way to reinforce the fasting behavior. I could be completely wrong. I don't have a coach through any of this and I'm having to supply my own will power. My main motivation right now is the desire to see my BMI drop below 29. I have good amount of weight to lose still before that happens, but it's a goal. I really don't know if BMI is a good indication of anything though. It doesn't really consider fat percentage and I'm really just trying to get my fat percentage down below 25%. That's a more healthy goal and the one I'm really interested in. Sure, I eventually want to go further than that, but that's my current goal. I'm only concerned with my BMI because I'm sick of being considered "obese".
I watched a documentary on Youtube last night. It was about a guy that went from fit to fat and then back. He was an underwear model and a fitness coach. He was doing it to show that it could be done and also so he'd have a better understanding of what some of his clients were going through losing their weight. It's one thing to gain eighty pounds in six months and then immediately losing it. It's another thing to be obese for a decade or more and try to retrain your mind. I don't think he had a good idea of how to help people. He needed a longer time in the obese zone I think. Also, he was putting them directly on weights. My goodness that can be overwhelming for someone who hasn't exercised in years. The muscle soreness on top of the already nagging brain that's wanting to eat, makes it very difficult to stay motivated.
I think first and foremost a person has to change their diet, but it has to be in a way that is easy to transition in steps. The first dietary changes should be toward a goal of eliminating sugar. That's difficult to do, but I think it has to be the primary concern of a trainer/fitness coach. You can't eliminate sugar and carbs instantly. You can't take someone who's drinking a sugary soda constantly throughout the day and tell them to stop that plus stop all other sugar they are consuming. It has to happen eventually, but they just won't have much success doing that cold turkey.
I quit smoking in 2008. I started back up in 2011. I quit again last year (2018). I can tell everyone reading this that quitting that habit was ten times harder for me than quitting sugar, but both are hard and I had help with smoking. I took Chantix which helped a lot with smoking. There's not a drug, at least none that I know of, that will make you not want sugar. I'm not sure why that hasn't been created, but it's definitely what we need to curve our obesity epidemic.
Sugar and carbs are such a major part of the American diet that it's difficult to cut them out completely. There's a lot of diets that revolve around low-carb, high-fat and/or high-protein. I don't think that the big concern should be "what do I eat since I'm not eating carbs?", I think it should be more along the line of "eat anything but carbs, where ever you can." Sugar and carbs drive hunger. It's SO hard to cut calories or fast when you are hungry. The first step should always be to remove as much of the hunger as possible, and that means to cut all sugar and carbs. That should be the primary goal of most diets. It's the only way to be successful. There's no way that I could go forty-eight hours without eating if I had just had a big bowl of ice cream and a slice of cake right before attempting it. In fact, I couldn't do a forty-eight hour fast if I'd had sugar in the previous 24 hours. Sugar and carbs DRIVE hunger because the insulin they cause your body to produce makes you hungry when it has processed the sugars you've given it. At least that's how it seems to me. If I have had any sugar, even if it was from a banana, my hunger is increased significantly.
If you want to lose weight or help someone else lose weight, the key to success, at least in my opinion, is to get sugar and carbs out of the system completely. It's very difficult to stop eating. It's hundreds of times more difficult if insulin spikes at all previous to that.
Friday, July 5, 2019
Overcoming Weight Plateaus
I keep referring to what I'm doing as "losing weight", but I'm really trying to lose fat and become healthier. One of the downsides to this is that I'm increasing my muscle while I decrease fat which causes my scale to read as if I'm not having any success. The truth is that I'm getting much healthier, but I can't see it from looking at my weight alone.
I'm currently around 235 pounds, which is still about 65 pounds above my goal. Remember from previous posts that I started at 256, so I've lost 21 pounds of weight. However, I went from a completely sedentary lifestyle to doing about 2 hours of cardio every day in the form of walking, jogging, and hiking. My calf muscles are huge compared to two months ago when I started Keto.
I've read a lot of good things about exercising your legs. One thing that is mentioned frequently is that your legs have the ability to rebound from intense exercise. They'll get sore, but they'll quickly get over it. My ability to run has become increasingly easier over time. I've also noticed that I can run longer distances without my legs hurting.
When I started walking regularly, I noticed that my ability to exercise became easier fairly quickly. I was a smoker for a long time so it was common for me to get short of breath when I would walk up my driveway, since I live on a hill. I can easily walk without getting out of breath now. So running isn't necessarily and issue when it comes to running out of breath. The problem for me is that I have 235 pounds of mass on top of my feet and that is dangerous when it comes to ankle and knee injury.
So, I've been trying to take it a easy until I get more weight off. That's a double edged sword though, because as I walk/jog/hike, I increase my muscles mass which adds weight even thought I'm losing fat. So I've watched my weight hover for the last couple of weeks even though I'm doing things in my diet that should promote weight loss.
Another huge thing I've noticed is that any sugar or carbs at all have huge effects on my ability to lose weight. My extreme zero carb diet was working at taking off the weight, but adding even a smidgen of sugar or carbs can cause me to plateau. There's a lot of factors at play, but I'm trying to approach everything that I'm doing with the best scientific approach I can. By that I mean that when I can see that something isn't working, I have to adjust and try something else.
So far, my body responds best to zero carbs. I felt a huge difference when I was doing that. I think I approached intermittent fasting incorrectly. So, it wasn't as beneficial as I thought it would be, but again I think it was my fault. I was going for 20 hours without eating, but then I was eating some bread and drinking some sweet tea (half unsweet) and I would even allow myself to have a desert from time to time. This showed me one thing. Even one meal a day, under 2400 calories, would stop my weight loss if it had sugar in it. I didn't gain weight, but I didn't lose weight either.
Keep in mind that this is while I'm averaging 3200 calories burned daily. That being said, if I was completely doing CICO, then I should have a deficit of around 800 calories per day at least. Truth be told, my calorie deficit is probably more like 2000 most days. At that rate, given the 3500 calories = 1 pound estimate that many people talk about, I should be losing about four pounds per week. That hasn't happened. I've lost and kept off twenty-one pounds over the last fifty days. If I was doing pounds per week, I'd be closer to twenty-eight or thirty pounds lost.
Keep in mind that this is while I'm averaging 3200 calories burned daily. That being said, if I was completely doing CICO, then I should have a deficit of around 800 calories per day at least. Truth be told, my calorie deficit is probably more like 2000 most days. At that rate, given the 3500 calories = 1 pound estimate that many people talk about, I should be losing about four pounds per week. That hasn't happened. I've lost and kept off twenty-one pounds over the last fifty days. If I was doing pounds per week, I'd be closer to twenty-eight or thirty pounds lost.
My conclusion, based on those numbers, is that I've probably increased my muscle mass by at least five or six pounds over the last 50 days through exercise. This may be optimistic, but I think it is accurate. I'm a little anxious to get the weight off, but at the same time, I want to be healthy while I do it. I think that I'm doing it correctly. Before this post, I was a little disappointed at my twenty-one pounds lost, but now that I think about it, I may have lost four pounds per week of fat and gained one pound of muscle while I did it.
So now I need to calculate how long it will take me to get to my goal given those numbers. It's simple math. I have a net loss of three pounds per week. I have around 66 pounds left until my goal. I have twenty-two weeks left until I hit my goal. So, by Christmas I should be there. I should be be very close by my 42nd birthday coming up at the end of October.
That's a very conservative estimate. Knowing what I know now, I think I can speed things up quite a bit by doing a low/no carb diet along with a 23-1 fast every day. I'm currently doing this and I can tell it's going to be huge in terms of effectiveness.
I've also increased my exercise routine. I've stopped going for walks outside of the house so much. I need to do some more of those soon, but sometimes that's not easy to orchestrate. I've relegated myself to my treadmill. I've also increase the incline on my treadmill so that I can keep my heart rate high enough to be considered cardio. That's another factor in all of this, my heart rate. I've dropped my resting heart rate so much that it's becoming increasingly harder to keep it in the cardio range. It's still easy mind you, but my heart rate is actually getting into a more normal area so I have to try harder and harder all the time. It's a good thing, but worth noting.
I don't know what the best solution is for overcoming plateaus, but I can tell you what works for me. I step back and evaluate where I'm at, where I want to go, and what isn't working. I know, without a doubt, that sugar is a terrible thing for me still. I'm pretty sure that my body needs much longer than I thought to heal from insulin resistance. I think that any small amount of sugar, even if it's mixed with 24 hours of fasting, is enough to screw up the benefits of fasting, at least for me in my current state. I feel like that won't be the case later on when I've reach my goal weight and I'm no longer insulin resistant. However, right now, I think my main goal should be to defeat the insulin resistance, and the only way to do that is to lose most of this stored fat, increase my cardio fitness, and stay away from the sugars and carbs.
To be honest, it's extremely difficult to stay away from some sugars, namely fruits, because some of those foods have a lot of other positive effects. Blueberries, for instance, are real good for me, but I can't eat them because of their sugar content. Bananas are another good example. I'd love to be able to eat a banana or two for the potassium, but then I'd be breaking my no-sugar rule. Coconut also has a lot of potassium, but again contains more carbs and sugar than I'd like to have in my diet at the moment.
Perhaps I'm being paranoid when it comes to the sugars, but I can say without a doubt that I felt a significant change in my body back in may when I was doing no carbs and no sugars at all. I really need a better name for "no carbs and no sugars". There's probably already one out there, but I'm unaware of it. Leave a comment if you know of a better term.
While I'm on the subject of no carbs and no sugar, I'd like to point out that I'm not talking about "net carbs" like you'd see on a ketogenic diet. I'm talking about ZERO carbs and sugar. I focused on that for three weeks. It was actually pretty awesome. I lost about sixteen pounds during those three weeks. Much of it early on was water weight. Then I plateaued. So I switch from that strict no-carb diet to try intermittent fasting. Now I'm combining them (just started this two days ago in full force).
Sometimes when you hit a plateau, you just have to step back and take a break from your serious diet. You shouldn't fall off the wagon so-to-speak. You should still eat healthy and not gorge yourself, but you should step back and allow yourself to take a break from any super strict diet, especially if you are hitting weight plateaus. I took a few weeks to test new plans, but the whole time I was watching my sugar intake and my calories in general. I definitely didn't stop my diet and then eat 4000 calories in a single day. Well I may have hit 4000 calories in a single day, but I was doing it while fasting most of the day or while exercising enough to burn most of it off.
So now I need to calculate how long it will take me to get to my goal given those numbers. It's simple math. I have a net loss of three pounds per week. I have around 66 pounds left until my goal. I have twenty-two weeks left until I hit my goal. So, by Christmas I should be there. I should be be very close by my 42nd birthday coming up at the end of October.
That's a very conservative estimate. Knowing what I know now, I think I can speed things up quite a bit by doing a low/no carb diet along with a 23-1 fast every day. I'm currently doing this and I can tell it's going to be huge in terms of effectiveness.
I've also increased my exercise routine. I've stopped going for walks outside of the house so much. I need to do some more of those soon, but sometimes that's not easy to orchestrate. I've relegated myself to my treadmill. I've also increase the incline on my treadmill so that I can keep my heart rate high enough to be considered cardio. That's another factor in all of this, my heart rate. I've dropped my resting heart rate so much that it's becoming increasingly harder to keep it in the cardio range. It's still easy mind you, but my heart rate is actually getting into a more normal area so I have to try harder and harder all the time. It's a good thing, but worth noting.
I don't know what the best solution is for overcoming plateaus, but I can tell you what works for me. I step back and evaluate where I'm at, where I want to go, and what isn't working. I know, without a doubt, that sugar is a terrible thing for me still. I'm pretty sure that my body needs much longer than I thought to heal from insulin resistance. I think that any small amount of sugar, even if it's mixed with 24 hours of fasting, is enough to screw up the benefits of fasting, at least for me in my current state. I feel like that won't be the case later on when I've reach my goal weight and I'm no longer insulin resistant. However, right now, I think my main goal should be to defeat the insulin resistance, and the only way to do that is to lose most of this stored fat, increase my cardio fitness, and stay away from the sugars and carbs.
To be honest, it's extremely difficult to stay away from some sugars, namely fruits, because some of those foods have a lot of other positive effects. Blueberries, for instance, are real good for me, but I can't eat them because of their sugar content. Bananas are another good example. I'd love to be able to eat a banana or two for the potassium, but then I'd be breaking my no-sugar rule. Coconut also has a lot of potassium, but again contains more carbs and sugar than I'd like to have in my diet at the moment.
Perhaps I'm being paranoid when it comes to the sugars, but I can say without a doubt that I felt a significant change in my body back in may when I was doing no carbs and no sugars at all. I really need a better name for "no carbs and no sugars". There's probably already one out there, but I'm unaware of it. Leave a comment if you know of a better term.
While I'm on the subject of no carbs and no sugar, I'd like to point out that I'm not talking about "net carbs" like you'd see on a ketogenic diet. I'm talking about ZERO carbs and sugar. I focused on that for three weeks. It was actually pretty awesome. I lost about sixteen pounds during those three weeks. Much of it early on was water weight. Then I plateaued. So I switch from that strict no-carb diet to try intermittent fasting. Now I'm combining them (just started this two days ago in full force).
Sometimes when you hit a plateau, you just have to step back and take a break from your serious diet. You shouldn't fall off the wagon so-to-speak. You should still eat healthy and not gorge yourself, but you should step back and allow yourself to take a break from any super strict diet, especially if you are hitting weight plateaus. I took a few weeks to test new plans, but the whole time I was watching my sugar intake and my calories in general. I definitely didn't stop my diet and then eat 4000 calories in a single day. Well I may have hit 4000 calories in a single day, but I was doing it while fasting most of the day or while exercising enough to burn most of it off.
I think it's important to stick to your diet, but if I'm trying a dietary change and I'm not seeing the results I think I should see, I'll definitely step back and look at things again. I've been posting about this experience over the last couple of weeks, and my conclusion to break this current plateau is to continue my exercise (actually increasing it some) while fasting 23 hours per day and then when I do finally eat, I'm eating no carbs or sugar. That's my dietary plan for the next week. I want to be in the 220s by the end of next week. That could mean 229, but that's still in the 220s. I'm hoping to be more like 222 by the end of next week. We'll see if this plan works.
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