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.
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