Adventures in Health - Fasting Edition
 

Its been awhile since we've a good ol weight loss dynasty here. Those can be kinda plain though, so we're going to spice it up with a new, exciting additional element - fasting!

Backstory:

At my worst ever I was 360 pounds. I'm 6'4". I lost about 35 pounds in 2013 on a standard "eat less, move more" diet. But I was miserable the entire time. In 2014 I switched over to eating a ketogenic diet. Over 2 years I got as low as 245 pounds, got into the gym, everything was great. I had a hernia though, a bellybutton one, and once I started to get more serious about barbell strength training the risk of something bad happening with the hernia weighed more and more on my mind. I had hit my out of pocket max on insurance in 2015. I didn't need surgery for the hernia at the time, but no doctor I asked seemed to think it was a bad idea, especially given my insurance situation (I could get the surgery done for free), since I'd probably need it eventually. In the last week of December 2015 I had surgery. I was already struggling a little with my diet over Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the surgery recovery sealed it. I fell completely off keto and started regaining weight. I made a few half-hearted efforts to get back on track but mostly I just steadily gained weight back. I moved in January 2017, out of my mom's house and back out on my own after a very lengthy detour that started with me moving home to take care of my dad, who had cancer, back in 2006'ish. The move was really stressful and I actually got back on sodas briefly during it. At the end of January I settled in Fort Wayne, IN, back up to 335 pounds. I had every intention of getting back on keto once I moved. I tried, over and over and over. The longest I lasted was 3 weeks. On for a week, off for two. On for three weeks, off for 5. I kept trying though, and finally a little ways into June I got back on Keto and have, thus far, made it stick. I'm about 10 weeks in.

Back on Track:

The first month back on keto I wasn't counting calories or weighing my food, I probably enjoyed a little too much Halo Top ice cream. Around July 15th, after a full month of Keto I still hadn't actually gotten below 330. I was feeling better, but I wasn't losing weight. I made the decision to get back on MyFitnessPal, to start weighing every ounce of food obsessively. The weight started coming off immediately. On July 22nd I saw 329 on the scale, whew. With the added obsession required to buy a food scale and meticulously weigh and log everything I stuff into my face, I find myself starting to read the MyFitnessPal forums more frequently (there is a Low Carber Daily forum I am especially interested in), reading the keto subreddit a bit more(though I have a love/hate relationship with that place. Yes, low carb can be jarring if you choose to tell others about it. Yes, its frustrating dealing with doctors who haven't come around. But too many of them have a persecution complex about the whole thing). Anyway, the MFP low carb forums have a lot of sciency folks who enjoy sharing lots of things. One thing that I latched onto is Dr Jason Fung's work on Insulin Resistance and on Intermittent Fasting. I watched a 30 minute presentation of his on the subjects, ended up buying his book, reading his blog, and reading through the experiences of other experienced folks on fasting. I'll go into all of that more in future posts, this is just supposed to be an introduction :D


Intermittent Fasting:

Many folks on ketogenic diets do this naturally, without even trying. Keto in general seems to keep folks from becoming hungry. Seems to keep food cravings at bay. So a lot of people on keto just don't really eat as often. So a "16:8" intermittent fast cycle, which just means eating within an 8 hour window then fasting for 16, just kinda happens. This could just be known to many as "skipping breakfast". If I have dinner at 8pm, don't eat a late night snack, go to sleep, skip breakfast and eat lunch at noon, we'll, that's 16:8 intermittent fasting. 20:4, 23:1 are also variants on this. Basically they come down to eating one large meal a day, or a large meal and a snack or something in a short window. Many benefits of this are proposed but I don't know a whole heck of a lot about that. I just know when I'm on track with keto, I can wake up, start working, and I'm not really gonna get hungry until 3pm or so. So I make some bacon and eggs and slice up an avocado at 3pm. I'm not really doing it intentionally for a specific purpose of extending my intermittent fast.


Extended Fasting:

Until recently I'd never actually gone a full day without food. I'll go more into the posts I've read, the scientific studies I've seen cited, in the future, but, after reading a lot of Dr Fung's work and the other things he points to, I've come to believe that, at a minimum, periods of extended fasting are not going to hurt me. Potentially, there may be major benefits to be found, especially in myself as a Type 2 diabetic, benefits surrounding lowering insulin in my body, and lowering insulin resistance. A holy grail of "reversing diabetes" is something I've always been very eye-rolly about. I'm still skeptical, but, curious, lets say.



My first extended fast:

This is the teaser to keep ya'll coming back. I finished some chicken at 11:30pm on Thursday, August 10th. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday I drank water, ingested some lite salt for the electrolytes, and had a cup of homemade bone broth once a day. That's it. This Tuesday I ended up eating around 8pm. The past few days I'm back on keto like normal. On the morning of 8/10 I weighed 324.4 pounds. On Tuesday morning I weighed 312.2 pounds. Over the past couple days I've gained a bit of that back. This morning I weighed 314.5 pounds, still down almost 10 pounds from the beginning of the fast. I do not yet know if my weight has settled back in or if I am still "re-balancing" from the fasting process. I'll post a trip report of this fast soon, since I've got a bit of downtime before the next one.


Next Steps:

I see a new doctor next Tuesday, August 22nd. I haven't established a primary care doc since I moved to Indiana. I am going to get a physical and will discuss a lot of extra testing on top of the basic crap you get at a physical. I want to establish a bunch of baselines for my current health. Last time I was losing weight on keto I had some minor cholesterol issues, but blood pressure, blood sugar, and all other blood work was normal. Unfortunately, when I start gaining weight back I crawl into a shell and stop seeing my doctor too. I haven't had any tests or anything in 2 years. With the weight re-gain I expect my blood pressure is a bit high, my cholesterol numbers probably suck. Since I've been back on keto for over 2 months I suspect my A1C (key diabetic measure) is normal. I want to make sure nothing new has happened in the last two years.



Whew! Quite the introduction. I don't know if I'll update daily. I probably will initially, to document what a ketogenic diet means to me, to fully document my first fast, answer any questions, post some of the research posts and things that have led me down this path. When I start my next attempt at an extended fast, I'll likely update daily. That will probably be towards the end of next week, a few days after this doctors visit.

I'll tl;dr any of that introduction for anyone that wants it. I suck at figuring out what to cut out and write too much sometimes.

Lets get the standard FOFC weight loss chart going. I have a withings scale that sends all this to my phone. I weigh most mornings, after bathroom/before any food/water. This is usually around 10am bc of my weird schedule.

6/22: 334.5
7/22: 329.2
8/1: 328.1
8/11: 324.4 (technically 12 hours fasted - aka, a normal friday morning)
8/15: 312.1 (4 1/2 days fasted)
Current Weight: 314.1 (2 1/2 days of "recovery" post fasting).


So when you fast for an extended period of time, you drop a lot of water weight. You do also, of course, lose fat. It is my belief based on my reading that losing lean muscle is not a serious concern while doing this for someone as overweight as I am. I may even splurge for a DEXA scan to get more numbers on that. So the 12 pound loss during the fast is a mix of fat + temporary changes due to being in a fasted state. Its possible that my weight will continue to fluctuate weirdly for a few more days, but we'll see.

Good luck sir! I thought your story was one of the more interesting ones in the original thread, which I'm intending to start posting in again here. Good to have these kinds of reports going, but as I'm not doing the fasting thing(have in the past for spiritual reasons and it's a good idea IMO) it probably wouldn't fit here.


I don't think people who haven't struggled with this battle for years really fully understand how inspiring this here is. The unexpected setbacks can take so very many forms. Not giving up is a heck of a thing.

I'll raise a toast to an extended stay on the wagon this time around.

Thanks Brian, I appreciate it :)


So a little on my introduction to fasting.

Dr. Jason Fung - 'A New Paradigm of Insulin Resistance' - YouTube

What, exactly, is Insulin Resistance? - T2D 23 - Intensive Dietary Management

Someone linked the above video, its a 30 minute talk on insulin resistence and fasting. As a type 2 diabetic this hits me big time. The blog article linked below the video shows a description of how insulin resistance works.

The key takeaway ends up being... treatment of diabetes is mostly about regulating blood sugar, if meds do it that's great, or, we just inject even more insulin. But we still have this horrible insulin resistance, and we have more and more and more insulin in our systems with no let-up. Any diabetic knows what happens if they don't fix their shit. Blindness, neuropathy, feet get necrotic and get amputated. heart disease and stroke risks skyrocket in diabetics. Diabetics controlling their blood sugar with meds alone are not really helping themselves. They're still headed towards those problems later in llfe.

By eating a lower carb diet, we're basically giving this process a break. Insulin resistance can slowly relent, the amount of insulin being produced can eventually get back towards normal levels. A ketogenic diet, removing nearly all carbs from the diet, supercharges this process. You no longer really need any insulin b/c you don't have any glucose to process.

I've experienced the rewards of a ketogenic diet myself in the past. Great blood sugar control, insulin resistance reduction, I've never had a test for insulin itself. So I'm lacking some measurements here.

To add on to this, a very simple explanation you'll find in the video... when you eat, insulin goes up to trigger the process of storing glucose in the body. When you stop eating, aka when you fast, insulin levels go down, alllowing other metabolic pathways to open up that allow us to burn up stored glucose and stored fat if needed. That's a very simplistic explanation but it goes to the idea that when insulin levels are high its RIDICULOUSLY HARD to lose fat.

In the end, the resulting conclusion from the video above and from Dr Fung's book is that a ketogenic diet is about 70% effective at allowing the body to heal itself by reducing insulin levels long term, reducing insulin resistance in the bod and allowing fat loss, but that fasting is 100% effective. All that extra bodyfat that I'm carrying around gets referred to as "Strategic Energy Reserves". And the concept is pretty darn simple, don't eat, and your body will run off its reserves - aka all of your stored up fat. AND, just as importantly to me, your body will heal itself. Insulin levels drop, insulin resistance drops, and that is a state of normalcy that allows you to thrive.



There are lots of assumptions/questions about "what happens to my body when i'm fasting" that come up from this regarding metabolism and such, and I'll look up some of my other favorite blog articles about this later on.

My Ketogenic Diet

I have tons of shit to talk about here, so maybe I'll bounce around. The fasting stuff is all a little new to me, so yeahhhh. Lets talk about actually eating food, lets talk about the Ketogenic diet, and lets talk about FOOD.

The idea with eating keto is to get into ketosis, and to eventually become fully fat adapted. Your body gets its energy from fat. To accomplish this you reduce your carbohydrate intake dramatically. You do NOT replace those calories with extra protein. This is an extremely common misconception about keto. I eat the same amount of protein on a ketogenic diet as I do a "standard" low fat diet. I simply replace all those carbs with fats. I aim to eat less than 25g carbs a day. One orange is more than that, for reference. Fiber doesn't count, only digestable carbs.

I enjoy making my own food these days, but I don't put a ton of effort into cooking. I want simple meals. So, how do I eat virtually no carbs and all that fat with a similar protein level?

On a standard diet I'd eat.... on a ketogenic diet, instead I eat...

boneless skinless chicken breast ... chicken thighs with the skin on
the leanest beef I can find in the store ... the fattiest beef I can find in the store
vegetable oils .... olive oil, coconut oil, butter
no bacon ... bacon


I personally don't seem to have issues with dairy, so I enjoy my cheese. Some folks on keto struggle with dairy and cut it down or out. Small servings of nuts are great. Veggies are incredible. I eat tons of veggies. Avocados are life.


I eat the same breakfast every day. 4 eggs, cooked in butter, with a little cheese and salsa on top. 4 strips of bacon and half an avocado sliced up with salt and paprika on it. avocado with the eggs is literally heaven.

I alternate between fish, shrimp, chicken, ground beef, pork chops, and steak. In many of these cases I just have the item as main course w/ whatever seasoning I want, along with a large helping of broccoli or green beans or spinach. I keep it very simple most of the time.

Today I did mix it up a bit, b/c I often don't find just plain old shrimp fully satisfying. Here is tonight's keto friendly dinner!




shrimp soft tacos with sour cream, cheese, onions, green pepper, avocado, salsa. The tortilla is Mission brand "Carb Balance" whole wheat, it advertises 3g of net carbs. I'm always wary of products like this and I don't eat them often, but these do not seem to trigger a blood sugar increase in me or impact my ketosis. I still limit myself to one package a month (so about 3 nights of tacos w/ some food + leftovers).



I think when people think about Keto they think just plates and plates full of meat. And I do eat meat every day. So if you only eat fish or only eat meat a couple nights a week this might seem crazy. But I eat a lot of veggies too, I promise! Its just the carbs that are missing, that's all. I'm cooking for myself every meal. I might order in wings once or twice a month, or occasionally go to Chipotle. This time around though, in two months I've ordered wings in three times. Every other meal I've cooked for myself.


When I do all of this, I end up between 2k and 2300 calories a day, and weight falls off readily. My blood pressure drops. My blood sugars drop to non-diabetic levels. My cholesterol improves, more on that later MAYBE, cholesterol is more controversial than fasting in my mind, I may ignore it. When I eat like this I feel healthy, I feel like I can be a person in the world like everyone else. When my blood sugar is all over the place I feel like I'm constantly a slave to food.

5 Day Fast Experience

Expectations

So I decided to fast, but some friends were concerned b/c I haven't had my physical yet and seen my new doctor yet. So I made a couple promises to a close friend that I was talking to a lot throughout all this. I'd stop if I felt any issues more than just the need to ignore/overcome hunger, and I would not, under any circumstances, go longer than 7 days. General expectations and plans after reading the fasting book and from reading some folk's personal experiences: Day 2 is the hardest for some. Stay busy, don't give yourself a chance to sit around and be hungry. You may or may not be able to go at 100% but continue any workout routines. Fasting comes with practice. No shame in giving up on day 2 here, just keep trying. A lot of is psychological so knowing what you've dealt with before can make it easier.

Before starting the fast I went shopping at a couple local health food store and bought some grass fed beef bones to make homemade broth. Some people do water fasting only, or, most commonly, water + salt to keep electrolytes up. But the official recommendations in Dr Fung's book on fasting allow for green tea or black coffee and broth as well. I don't take diabetic medications and was already keto adapted so that was not a concern for me. Medications that require food can be issues, I take a couple things for rosacea, but nothing that I needed to worry about. So making the bone broth and just starting is all I had to do.


Day 1 - Friday

So my last food was around 11:30pm on Thursday night. Normally I go to sleep around 2:30am, wake up at 10:30 (being self employed is neat), start working at 11am, and make my daily bacon and eggs around 3pm. I do occasionally work through the entire work day without eating, so I experienced some brief hunger around 3pm but drank a little extra water and it passed quickly. Around 7pm I experienced a bit of a lack of focus and some more extreme hunger. I decided to have my cup of bone broth then. Friday night I spent on Twitch helping out my friends that stream and was more active than normal to keep busy. I drank about 3 1/2 liters of water every day during the fast. I aim for 3 liters daily anyway - I had a kidney stone last year and the #1 recommendation to prevent more is drinking lots of water.


Day 2 - Saturday

I slept very poorly Friday night. Woke up frequently. I'm pretty sedentary and introverted, I don't really have - nor do I want - a large circle of friends to go hang out with when I want to be distracted locally. I did a 3 hour stream on twitch myself, which requires a lot of focus and some intensity. I'm playing guitar and singing when I do this, full screen on camera, so if my focus is poor it would really show, but I got through that just fine. In the evening I went out and bought, among other things, a glucose monitor. I wanted to specifically see what was happening to my blood sugar during the fast. My expectation was blood sugars between 60 and 80. I was worried about Saturday because I'd read about it being the most difficult day for many. Also I didn't have work to distract me. But I actually found Saturday to be fairly easy. Any time I felt some hunger I drank some extra water. Every time I finished a liter of water and refilled my water bottle, I took 1/4 tsp of lite salt. Lite Salt = a mix of potassium and sodium. I use this on keto because potassium needs to be supplemented, you lose more water on keto and electrolytes go with it and you need more than normal of sodium, potassium, and magnesium all three. The Lite Salt helps me with that.


Day 3 - Sunday

I slept poorly again Saturday night. Though I woke up due to my cat making excess noise, and to the sounds of a wasp buzzing on the window right over the bed. I would have woken up to these things under any circumstances. I still made it through Sunday very easily. I mowed the lawn Sunday afternoon. This was the most notable positive experience that I had during the fast. I honestly felt lighter on my feet, the task felt easier, I did not feel any fatigue. I'm really out of shape. Remember that "crawl into a shell" thing I mentioned when I gained all the weight back? Yea, all the activity stopped too. So frequently I mow the back yard, take a break, weed eat the back yard, and that's one day, the next day mow the front yard, take a break, weed eat the front yard. I don't have a big yard, this is embarrassing. I have begun walking more frequently, but still... on this day I didn't feel fatigued at all after mowing the back yard and went straight into weed eating the yard too. First time this year I've done that. Hunger was met easily, I put off having my broth until late in the evening, trying to save it for a time when I felt bad, but it never came. I had my broth anyway that night.


Day 4 - Monday

Dr Fung's book talks about day 2 being the hardest. However, lots of personal experiences and writeups on fasting talk about day 4 and/or day 5 being the hardest. Day 4 was hard. I was hungry a lot. I wasn't just hungry, I was fantasizing about food. I drank extra water, had my salt, had my cup of tea, things to give me some taste and fill my stomach a little to try to distract. I did not accomplish much during the work day. I had a small amount of diarrhea when I woke up. I spent more time than is reasonable searching fasting forums for experiences with diarrhea while fasting. Its common. The reason for it is assumed differently by many. I don't remember Dr Fung's book talking about it. Most explanations generically talk about a cleansing process after the body no longer needs to deal with digestion for awhile. I don't see these explanations cited or sourced. I obsess over it a bit but I don't let it stop me because it just happened in the morning. Monday evening is another day where I am dedicated to helping my favorite twitch streamer for a 3 1/2 hour music stream. I did this without issue and it helped to distract me. At one point right around the time when work ended, I was feeling somewhat unwell. I went into the kitchen, weighed out 30g of walnuts, and stood in the kitchen for a few minutes thinking. I ended up having an extra 1/4 tsp of lite salt and decided if that didn't make me feel noticibly better I would eat. That was enough to get me through the rest of the day, and I made it through day 4, putting the walnuts back in the bag.


Day 5 - Tuesday

I slept poorly again. I woke up with Diahhrea again. I spend some time googling fasting and sleep. Its not uncommon for people to not sleep as much. The body isn't working as hard digesting. Cortisol is up a bit while fasting. I'll talk a little more about some of that stuff later on. But I'm not just not sleeping enough hours, I'm waking up frequently too. I'm not feeling like I need naps during the day, but its worrying me a bit at this point. Hunger today is not as bad as Monday during the work day. But I have diahhrea a second time and that's a little alarming, even though I see lots of others talking about the same thing and talking about it disappearing after day 5. Tuesday afternoon my mind is racing and I'm struggling to focus on work. I'm not lightheaded or faint or anything, I'm wired. Completely wired. I decide to get up and take a walk. Its the middle of the afternoon and one of the hotter days we've had up here in Indiana this summer. I also decided to buy some powerball tickets and walked further than I normally walk to make it to the gas station. My neck felt very hot, I didn't put sunscreen on there. Ooops. When I get home I feel drained, though I felt fine on the walk. I drank more water but I realized later that I didn't have any more salt and after more exercise in the hot sun than I'm used to I absolutely needed that. Instead I tried to take a nap. I couldn't fall asleep and my stomach hurt. More diahhrea. I distracted myself with netflix for a bit, but realized that I was being ridiculous. I had made a promise not to attempt to push through things like this until I've seen the doctor, and I had been prepared to fail on the second full day of fasting. This was a great success and I was having an awful evening trying to find a way to "tough it out". But many people have the experience that they need multiple 3-5 day fasts under their belt before they feel ready for longer fasts. Around 8pm I went and ate the walnuts I had planned to end my fast with. Refeeding after a fast can be an issue, though after only 5 days I don't think its a huge concern. Its after 1-2 weeks where it can be a bit of a problem, and 3-8 weeks where you really need to be gentle on your stomach. Still, I was careful. I slowly ate my 30g of walnuts, chewing them very well. I waited an hour after that and made myself a little keto friendly pizza b/c I was craving pizza in a bad way. Around midnight I made myself 4 eggs and ate them. Technically my fast was 4 days and 21 hours.



Wednesday after the fast was totally fine. My weight did not increase any compared to Tuesday morning. I was losing 3 pounds a day at that point while fasting though and I didn't lose anymore either. Wednesday I ate like normal, bacon/eggs in the afternoon and I roasted a whole chicken and ate some of it for dinner. Thursday I gained 0.8 pounds back and felt FAMISHED. I bought those tortilla shells Thursday, shredded the chicken up and made chicken tacos. I ate a LOT of chicken, plus the taco stuffs. Friday (this morning) I had gained another 1 pound or so back, and my hunger had returned to normal. These past few days I have not bothered counting calories, I've just eaten when hungry and eaten til full, possibly eating more than needed to be full sometimes. So that's where we get to the weight reports I made earlier. I've gained some weight back but am still almost 10 pounds down from before starting the fast.

I've asked about it on reddit in a fasting sub that is actually pretty active, and most people say it takes about 3 days after a 5 day fast for weight to normalize, but everyone is different. It could technically take a week. So I'll just see what I weigh tomorrow and not worry about it.


The people that report the diahhrea on days 4 and 5 like I experienced sometimes report it being much worse than mine. And they report that it is something that goes away with repeated fasting.


Final Thoughts

I feel like, given that I've never fasted for more than 24 hours straight before, the first few days were easier than expected. The fact that I eat a ketogenic diet helps. Everyone goes into ketosis fasting, you burn all your glucose eventually. That can be very jarring for some who haven't experienced the switchover before. Not having to go through that helps. Keto goes well with fasting, but not everyone who fasts eats keto when non-fasted. Then on days 4 and especially day 5, the difficulty ramped up in a major way.

Next Fast?

My Doc appointment and physical is Tuesday. While I will likely get fussed at a bit for not waiting for bloodwork results, If I begin fasting after dinner next Tuesday, then days 4 and 5 will be on saturday/sunday, and if I struggle on those days it won't impact my work. That is pretty much what I'm aiming for right now. I'm trying to plan my meals for the next few days so I don't have to throw any food out during this next fast. I usually buy from costco even though I'm cooking for one, I typically cook 3 days worth of food at a time so I have leftovers and manage the freezer appropriatly. I can still do that while planning around fasts but it changes the way i manage some stuff. I'll adjust.

I woke up this morning nearly 4 pounds heavier, so I clearly jumped the gun with the idea that maybe I was done regaining weight post-fast.

IF things normalize here, and there's still a chance that they don't... that would mean a drop from 324.4 to 318 over 9 days. We'll see what tomorrow is like, I'm still learning a lot about what to expect here ;)

My main goals with fasting are to improve my insulin levels and insulin resistance, the sciency stuff I linked a couple posts ago. But some accellerated weight loss from time to time would be nice and seems attainable.

This is fascinating. The few times I have tried to do a one day fast, I felt like the psychological barriers were immense.

Are there blood sugar testing devices that don't require blood? I've always wanted to know what my blood sugar levels are throughout the day - because I can go from ravenous and distracted to wiped out to wired and I wonder if I am doing a good enough job of keeping a reasonable balance.

I want to work on the fasting stuff a little too, but right now I am burning 1-2k calories per day from just exercise so its hard to say no when I am hungry.

Anyway - please keep this one going!

Great work Radii! You inspired me to start eating keto about 18 months ago and I'm still using a low-carb approach, primarily because I like the way it makes me feel (no blood-sugar swings during the day) and I like the way the food tastes. I've never tried fasting, will be following your updates and progress. Keep at it!

Subby, what are you eating during the day when you get hungry and feel like the blood sugar is low?

Any device is going to require blood, but there are devices for type one diabetics that you attach to your body that monitor your blood sugar.

https://www.dexcom.com/continuous-glucose-monitoring

Here's an example. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this is prohibitively expensive without insurance and medical necessity.

My best friend is a type 1 diabetic and she uses this CGM device plus an insulin pump device and is paying about $550/mo until she hits her deductible. But maybe the pump part of that is where a lot of the cost comes in? I've never really looked.

I didn't post daily updates the past couple days b/c I don't know what to think about anything right now. This morning I weighed 323 pounds and am only down 1 pound from when I started this fast. My blood sugar has been weird, but I wasn't checking it before my first fast so I don't know if that just means my diabetes has progressed and I have bigger problems than I did two years ago, or, something is happening b/c of the fasting to cause it. I am a bad collector of data.

I'll get some answers tomorrow and later this week with the doctor's visit. I'm now extremely curious to see what my A1C is going to be tomorrow.

I read a firsthand account from someone on the myfitnesspal low carb forum who recently completed a 7 day fast. A few days after the end of the fast she had gained weight. It was water weight for some reason, and about a week later she had a "whoosh" of about 11 pounds lost in a short period of time. So I'm not sure if I've been overeating since the fast, or, if I'm just holding on to a bunch of extra water for a bit.

Anyway, all that said, I've been reading more and chatting with some folks who created a fasting discord server to try to support each other and have put together my plan.

I really want my bloodwork that I get tomorrow to be done in a normal state... ie I've eaten the night before but am not in the middle of a multi-day fast. It seems like that should give me the best "baseline numbers". But after tomorrow I don't have any reason to hold off on my next fast.


I'm eating like normal today, and will be beginning my next "extended" fast after my last meal tonight. I'm not setting a specific goal for it. If I don't make it to a week I don't want to feel like a failure. I'm just going to go for as long as I reasonably can. I will be weighing myself every morning, checking my blood sugar daily, and I will be taking measurements daily. I'm not great at measuring myself, hopefully I can get better as I do it more frequently.

Once the extended fast is completed, I will move immediately into Alternate Daily Fasting (abbreviated ADF). This is also known as "42 hour intermittent fasting". On ADF I might eat my last meal at around 8pm on a Monday, not eat at all on Tuesday, and then eat my first meal on Wednesday around 2pm. Last Wednesday meal at 8pm, don't eat Thursday, eat around 2pm Friday. I intend to do this for the foreseeable future, until I'm at a healthy weight with a healthy person's bloodwork.


I won't be restricting calories on my eating days, at least not below TDEE the way one might on a normal diet. But if I have large issues with hunger I may find that I need to count calories so as to not gorge myself.

While I'd love to lose weight faster doing this, the end goal is to reverse diabetes, if that is actually possible, or at least, restore my insulin resistance to non-diabetic levels. I have no expectation of how long this might take to happen. I've been diagnosed diabetic for about 8 years now, and have very possibly been diabetic for up to 12 years, and was feeding myself sugar non stop another 8 years prior to that. I believe I can undo a lot of the damage I've done, but I don't expect it to happen quickly.

Fasting Physiology - Part II

Some discussion on insulin and insulin resistance here.

Good luck, Radii. I'll be reading a long.

My wife and I started on Optavia, the latest version of Medifast, last week. So far, she's down 8.5 lbs and I'm down 11. Plan to stay on it for 2 months and see where we are. We've done Weight Watchers and lost weight, but needed something different to change things up. So far, it's working. The biggest adjustment is eating 6 times a day. What you can eat isn't bad and the one meal you chose for yourself is a protein and a lot of veggies, no carbs. We were talking about doing that anyway, so it hasn't been a big adjustment for our meals. The biggest adjustment for me has been cutting out the sweets.

Know you've got some moral support from the West coast. :)

jebus, I think I need to go home. I sight read the title as Adventures in Health -
Fisting Edition and was curious what the health benefits of that would be.

Good luck! I think you have a better plan than that one.

That's a totally different type of cleansing.

I met with my new primary care doc today. This is always nerve wracking since there are still a lot of doctors who think that somehow the best way to treat diabetes is with loads of medicine and 250g of carbs a day... just... "healthy" ones. Everything went great though. When I asked for a doc at this large facility up here I asked for "someone young". That seems to have worked out. My new doctor is very supportive of any kind of low carb strategy to manage diabetes and is all aboard with keto. He also approves of fasting and referenced anti-aging benefits that come with occasional fasts. He said that he could tell I've done my research and is supportive of experimenting with fasting as long as I keep an eye on my blood sugar and am careful with low blood sugars. With the amount of time I've been on keto so far I'm pretty much "immune" to blood sugar lows, but I will be checking a couple times a day.

He did put me back on Metformin, which I'm ok with. Its the front line med for diabetics and I have seen lots of articles over the last few years talking about all kinds of benefits that it offers, I never had any side effects while taking it, and it doesn't cause blood sugar lows so it shouldn't cause me problems with fasting.

I don't have any bloodwork results yet, we'll get those in a few days, but I'm thrilled to have found a supportive doctor. I honestly believe that every diabetic should be working to reduce carbs in their diet, whatever kind of diet they do, but some doctors will fight that. My issue isn't in doing the right things when I'm trying to take control of my health, my issue is that when i fall off track I fall WAY off track.


Day 1 Fasting

I finished dinner around 8:30pm last night. With that begins an extended fast. I have no set end date for this fast, this is a "lets see how long I can go" fast. My record is technically 4 days 21 hours. I still have the impression that it can take a few tries before it starts to come easier, so if I only make it to around the 5 day mark again, that will be ok. If it works out though, there is no cutoff that I'm putting on the duration of this fast. I think it'd be awesome to make it to a month, but that's probably not realistic. ;)

Starting Numbers

Weight: 321.7
Chest: ~53"
Waist: ~57"
Hips: ~52"

THOSE NUMBERS ARE SO GOD DAMN BIG. I carry almost all my weight in my gut, its embarrassing.

I have attempted to take these measurements myself. I have zero confidence in these numbers. For now, I'm going to take measurements every day and report on them just to try to get better at it and to hopefully start doing it the same way every time, as the relative change is what really matters.


When I weigh in tomorrow morning, I'll report on anything noteworthy with the rest of today as far as fasting/hunger/anything else goes.

Expect me to lose a lot of weight very quickly while fasting. Possibly as much as 3 pounds a day at least for the first few days. This weight will not all stay off, only about 1/2 pound of fat loss is expected per day. The rest is due to dumping water and hormone changes during the fast.

All right, Radii, let's do it. An intermittent hunger strike, perhaps, until the NCAA admits they have no jurisdiction in the UNC case? ;)

Radi I am pulling for you bud. I started back on my journey as well on Sunday. Not fasting like you are, but will be following along and rooting behind the keyboard!

haha perfect, I'm in. :D



Thanks, and good luck!

Fasting Day 2

Yesterday was pretty easy. I hit the 24 hour mark for my fast at 8:30pm. I did feel some moderate hunger off and on between 8pm and 10pm. Hunger tends to pass if you ignore it/distract yourself from it. Its not something that grows and grows and grows and you just get more and more hungry until you can't ignore it and eat. You frequently will get hungry around the times you normally eat, whether you need to eat or not. I try to drink a little extra water around these times. I also allow myself 1 cup of green tea and 1 cup of bone broth a day if I feel I need them (Dr Fung's book which I'm basing most of this from also allows for black coffee but I cannot stand the taste of coffee so that's out for me). Yesterday I had neither.

I took a 25 minute walk last night around 7:30, no issues doing that. The weather was great here yesterday, around 75 degrees for my walk.

At the time of my weighin this morning, I'm a little over halfway done with day 2 - 39 hours fasted.


Weight: 319.2 (-2.5)
Blood Sugars: 115 last night, 110 this morning. These are good numbers, but while fasting they will drop into the 60-80 range eventually. The longer I can hang out in that range the better. 60-80 is a bit low and if I was eating carbs would be a concern. But while fasted and while on keto as long as I have no symptoms of hypoglycemia and as long as it doesn't drop much lower than that, its not a concern.

Measurements:

Chest 53"
Waist: 56 1'2"
Hips: 50"

I almost feel like I shouldn't even post measurements for awhile. Daily reminder that I'm REALLY BAD at measuring myself and these values are likely just variance in how I've done it. Hoping to get better at this so I can use it as an accurate measure over time.

Some of my bloodwork is back already. Metabolic panel is normal. Tests for kidney problems in diabetics are normal. My A1C is 5.2, which is already back in a "non diabetic" range after just a couple months back on keto. The cholesterol tests I requested are being sent to another lab so those aren't back yet.

My fasting blood sugar was 149 yesterday which is high and bugs me, but I'm doing all the right stuff and I'm now checking my own blood sugar again so I won't be surprised by anything anymore. This is all good news. The cholesterol test will be a train wreck but I want to see the numbers and hopefully over the next year of weight loss to come I'll be able to see them improve.

Fasting Day 3

I'm currently halfway through day 3. Fasted for ~63 hours as of this post. Day 2 is supposed to be the worst for some people. Not my experience so far. I went for a half hour walk after work yesterday and got to the 48 hour mark (8:30pm last night) pretty easily. Some hunger, and a couple times I did feel a bit fuzzy... not lightheaded, just, a lack of focus. A little extra salt fixed that immediately.

On Wednesday nights I stream music on Twitch from 10pm-1am. I hit a huge wall around 11:30 and ended up stopping a full hour early, at midnight, and just going to bed. I *think* it was as much due to the lack of sleep the last few nights (another reference to a freaking wasp nest in my bedroom wall, a night in a hotel, and 3 nights with little sleep as a result) as it was a lack of energy or any issues from fasting. I got a much needed good night's rest last night and so far this morning am feeling good.


Weight: 317.5 (-4.2)
Blood Sugar: 80 this morning.

Didn't take measurements this morning. Of that 4.2 pounds lost I'd expect maybe 1.5-2 are fat loss from the caloric deficit that I hope to stay off once the fast is complete. This is based on an estimated TDEE of around 2950 calories/day.

I cannot imagine going this long without eating. You are incredible. Really interested to see where your cholesterol numbers are.

Thanks subby :D


Some sciency stuff:

Fasting and Autophagy - Fasting 25 - Intensive Dietary Management


laymans understanding - autophagy is the body's process of cleaning up and getting rid of old and damaged cells. This process works best when fasted.




My - again laymans - understanding is that we are not necessarily talking about multi-day fasts here. That "intermittent fasting" - which can be as little as "skip breakfast", can show benefits here.


Two different reasons to bring this up specifically today and for me:

1) Google "Alzheimer's Disease Type 3 Diabetes" and have fun reading. And, if you're diabetic, scaring yourself shitless perhaps.

Alzheimer's Disease Is Type 3 Diabetes–Evidence Reviewed


So yeah, lets eat our low carb diet (and if you're a reader here, you don't have to eat keto like I do, just lowering from the horrible standardized recommendations by the FDA and sadly, the ADA (american diabetes association) can help a ton). And lets add in some occasional fasting to promote proper cellular behavior. Not getting Alzheimer's would be GREAT, thanks.


2) It's completely anecdotal at this point, but Dr Fung reports: "As an aside, in my clinic where we do a lot of intermittent fasting, I have not yet sent a single patient to the plastic surgeon for removal of excess skin, even though weight loss sometime is over 100 pounds"

This autophagy process working so well from intermittent fasting is suspected to be a reason for this. Essentially "cleaning up" all of the unneeded skin cells when you're not a fatass anymore like me.

I've been overweight for a LONG time, older people have more loose skin issues typically than younger, I would seem to be the type of person more likely to have tons of loose skin and to need surgery for that if I ever do lose all the weight and keep it off. Is it possible that a fasting regimen makes me less likely to need this? I sure hope so.

I ended up breaking my fast tonight. I felt a bit tired tonight and laid down and took a short nap, when I woke up my blood sugar was 60... which happened on my 5 day fast without issue, but in this instance it was accompanied by some prety strong low blood sugar symptoms - shakiness and some tunnel vision feeling that feels really shitty. I'm curious why that happened here and not during my first fast, but I'm not about to fuck around with it, so I ate something - some walnuts to break the fast and I'll give my stomach a bit of time then I'll make some eggs.

I ended up going almost exactly 3 days this time. The only reason to try to push myself for longer fasts is the desire to see if I can accellerate weight loss, but I'm less likely to sustain this over the long term if I push myself too hard.

So I'll eat tonight, and eat tomorrow, and then go into this cycle of Alternate Daily Fasting - ADF, which I hope to make my new normal for some time. I want to get into a good groove with that, and then will try another "lets see how long I can go" fast in a couple weeks.

Weight: 316.8
Blood Sugar: 155

I'll be eating today like normal, only, I didn't expect to need to end my fast after 3 days so most proper food is frozen right now, so I might be having wings tonight (oh no, the horror).

The post fasting blood sugars bother me, but given my good overall A1C that has to be some kind of artifact from the fasting (if I regularly had morning blood sugars in the 150 my A1C would have been closer to 7, not the 5.2 that I actually got). I see "cleansing" generically referenced in a lot of places when I read about fasting, the body releasing old crap that's been stuffed into cells and not needed in a very long time, but I would expect that to have been fat storage and perhaps the ever present "toxins" that are hard to quantify, I guess I would not have expected sugar?

But I'll keep monitoring that. Anyway, food today, no food tomorrow. Weight might do weird things as I adjust to this process. I'll try not to care about this :D


In general, the idea for ADF - Alternate Daily Fasting - is to eat until full on your eating days, and fast on fasting days. I had been calorie counting - eating about 2300 calories a day, but I don't want to eat at a deficit on my eating days. I'll be calorie counting but not trying to necessarily stop myself at a given point, just doing it for tracking/informational purposes.

Weight: 318.2
Blood Sugar: 105

I definitely overate yesterday. But, despite all the references to tracking calories, the restaurant I ended up ordering wings from doesn't have calorie info and I didn't bother trying to figure it out. Still, I suspect I ate at least 3500 calories yesterday, maybe 4000. I didn't even need to, I wasn't that hungry, I just ordered more food than I needed but insisted on eating all of it anyway, b/c that's what I do.

Anyway, I am not going to try to guess anything about my weight. I just ended a 3 day fast and am just going into this alternate day fasting, I have no idea what my body is going to do. My weight could bounce around weirdly for the next week or two and it wouldn't surprise me.

In theory, I started a fast at 321.7 pounds and it lasted for 3 days, I should have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 9000 calories worth of fat, so I should keep about 2 1/2 pounds off for good and go down steadily if I succeed at this new ADF regimen. But reality doesn't always match that in the short term.

Today is a fasting day, my first one in ADF. After my 5 day fast a couple weeks ago I was VERY hungry 2-3 days after the fast ended. Today could end up being very difficult, but I really want to go ahead and establish this routine right away.

Very interesting info. You're definitely being more aggressive with the fasting than I intend to be, but this has been a good reminder of the health benefits of it -- and a good amount of info that I wasn't aware of. Hopefully you'll find a groove somewhere in all the experimentation.

Thanks Brian :) I am attempting to be pretty aggressive for sure, I keep reading that this gets easier with practice, and since I have so much weight to lose, I can afford the practice time ;)


Weight: 317.8
Blood Sugar: 104


Speaking of practice... I actually did not successfully fast for the entire day yesterday like I intended. I got EXTREMELY hungry around midnight and ended up eating around 800 calories. Still a very calorie light day and still a 24 hour fast, but calorie restriction is not the goal here. This kinda goes in line with what I said about feeling insanely hungry the few days after my first 5 day fast, and I just didn't have the willpower to ignore it.

Eating today and I'll try again tomorrow.

Hopefully I'm under 320 for good now, a nice little milestone. Also my starting weight was 334.5 so I'm down 15 pounds now. Neat. 7 1/2 weeks until I have to get on a plane, losing as much as I can in that time is a pretty big motivator at this point.

Weight: 319.3
Blood Sugar: 112

Weight still fluctuating wildly. As much as I want to make judgements on every individual measurement, it could still be a week+ before that settles as my body adjusts to all the weird intake (or lack thereof) lately.

http://deadspin.com/how-to-roast-a-c...720.1501006504

Because I followed the sage advice here:


I have once again failed to weigh and measure my food to see how much I ate yesterday. It felt like I ate a fucking ton, though, in reality I ate around 1100 calories in bacon/eggs/avocado and then roasted a small organic chicken and ate more than half of the meat on the thing but less than the entire thing.


Anyway, today is a fasting day. Unlike my previous "fasting day" on Saturday, I'm hoping to actually successfully fast :D


My hunger levels were extremely high both Saturday and Sunday, days 2 and 3 after a multi-day fast. The same thing happened after my 5 day fast too. We'll see what today is like and if I have the willpower to make it to breakfast time tomorrow to eat.

Weight: 316.4
Blood Sugar: 70

I did successfully make it through yesterday fasting. I got pretty hungry around 10pm but by that point in the evening was committed to making it through and never really considered eating anything. Blood Sugar of 70 when I woke up doesn't bother me since it wasn't accompanied by low blood sugar symptoms. Weight continues to fluctuate hilariously.

I haven't eaten yet today, even on multi-day fasts I am just not interested in eating in the first few hours after waking. I'll make my bacon and eggs whenever I feel hungry. I should be able to get a better feel for my calorie intake today. Everything I am planning to eat today is easily weighed/measured/logged for calorie counting.

EDIT: My cholesterol test results are back, but on the mychart site it just says "results have been scanned" and I don't seem to have online access to them. I'll deal with that when I have some free time, might not be today though.

Weight: 316.2
Blood Sugar: 114

Weight about the same two days in a row! Neato. I think my hunger levels are evening out as well? I did weigh/measure all of my food yesterday, and I ended up at 2600 calories. When I'm trying to lose weight via regular calorie restriction, I just aim for 2300, which based on estimates should see me losing 1.5 pounds/week. With ADF, I'm no longer aiming for 2300, if I was going to put down a number it would probably be 3000 calories, which is about what I believe my maintenance amount to be. But yesterday I ended up full and satisfied at less than that, despite zero food the previous day. That's a good thing.


For those curious about my eating habits:

Bacon/Eggs/Avocado for my first meal - 987 calories. I made an omelette w/ the eggs and put green pepper and onion in it.

I was hungry a few hours later and made a "keto pizza" using Joseph's Lavash Bread, a thin flaxseed/wheat thing that ends up being 8 net carbs (16 total/8 fiber) for a whole sheet of it. pizza sauce/mozzarella/onion/green pepper/pepperoni on it, ended up around 625 calories.

I finished off the rest of the organic chicken that I had roasted along with a couple servings of green beans (180g weighed out frozen) and some more onion, b/c I roasted some onions with the chicken. Since I had no idea how much chicken was left on the carcass, and I had no idea what my hunger levels would be like, I went ahead and cooked some pork chops that I had pulled out of the freezer as well and ate one of those. All of that estimated at 990 calories.

One problem, onions have a lot of carbs and I ate onions with every meal. The lavash bread only has 8g carbs but thats still 8 more than I need. All in all I actually ended up at around 50g net carbs yesterday, about double what I aim for, and I have always appeared to be extremely sensitive to carbs, my ketone level on the ketone urine sticks is way down. Those aren't the most accurate things in the world but it seems about right. A day with 50g carbs is fine but I don't want to do it on a regular basis.


Anyway, I'm going to refrain from making any sort of judgements about what it means that my weight didn't do something crazy today, or that my hunger was stable on a day after a fast, because as soon as I type anything about what that might mean something new will happen tomorrow to invalidate any guesses. Lets just see what happens :D


No eating today. I'm supposed to stream on twitch from 10pm-1am tonight. The end of the day is usually the most difficult. We'll see how that goes as well.

The keto subreddit does running "6 week challenges" to try to help encourage folks. It's basically just setting 6 week goals and logging them in a spreadsheet. This is the first one I participated in, the final weigh-in is today. Here's how I did.




The 12 pound drop between weeks 3 and 4 was my 5 day fast. Weigh-in happened to be on the day that I ended the fast, my lowest weight right before I gained a lot of the water back. 16.3 pounds in 6 weeks, I will take it!

I think the next one starts right away? There's 7 weeks left until TwitchCon in Long Beach, CA. No pressure or anything, but holy shit if I could get down to under 300 pounds before that I would be so fucking happy.

One last post since this is a brand new study that you're sure to see a bunch of news articles from soon:

Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents






The whole world doesn't need to go on a ketogenic diet. But there is some serious conspiracy theory level shit out there that caused the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Yes, every individual is responsible for their choices, including me. But 30 years of demonizing fat has fucked things up, on a population level. Demonizing all kinds of fats caused decades of "low fat!" products which just mean "omg look at all of this added sugar". Fat isn't bad, people. Trade some of your "low fat" carbs for fats and live longer.

This is just one study but it feels like a really big one, and there are tons of others over the last 15 years pointing in the same direction. Again, the extremes I take are not necessary, this is just what works for me. Eat meat, eat veggies, go vegan if you'd like, its all good and viable. But holy shit the FDA recommendations from about 1970 to 2010 have fucked up the first world.

/end rant.

Weight: 314.2
Blood Sugar: 74

I need to remember to take my blood sugar after eating at some point today. Eventually I really want my morning blood sugar to all be under 100, even the ones after eating days, but that might take some time.

I successfully made it through yesterday fasted. I got tired real early for me last night. No issues through most of the day though.

Eating today. Some TMI: The last couple days of eating after fasting days I've had some nasty diarrhea. That's an issue with people on longer fasts if they aren't careful about eating, but I didn't expect it to be an issue on one day fasts. In searching I see a lot of people having this problem if they break a fast with eggs. I, of course, typically eat bacon and eggs as my first meal of the day. Today I'm having a cup of broth this morning and will have a handful of walnuts an hour or so after that to try to prevent those problems. We'll see.

Oh and for overall trends:

6/22: 334.5
8/1: 328.1
8/8: 326.3
8/15: 312.1 (after 5 days of fasting, artificially low)
8/22: 321.7
8/30: 316.3

These numbers are wild b/c of the 5 day and 3 day fasts I did. Lots of extra water weight comes off in the fasts, and there are weird rebounds after before things settle in, so we're really looking for more long term trends here than hoping to lose 2 pounds a week or whatever.

One last post for today since its the last day of the month. Between my two slightly longer fasts and beginning this alternate day fasting, there were 10 days in August where I did not eat. That's crazy!

Even crazier, IF I can keep up with this alternate day stuff, and if I try one longer fast during September, there will be between 15 and ?? (likely 20 top end but who knows) days in September where I do not eat.

How are you feeling?

The same as usual for the most part, some of the gradual improvements that start to come with weight loss. A little more energy when I exercise or ability to do a bit more when I need to do yardwork, etc.

On fasting days I do seem to get a bit run down in the evenings quite a bit faster. That's slowed down some personal projects slightly and I'm paying attention to how that feeling adjusts over time. If that never improves I may not aim to continue this alternate day fasting for the entire duration of weight loss. But I'm expecting it to improve and for now am committed to this through my trip in 6 weeks as long as I continue to see results.

No issues with anything important though, work productivity and how I feel during the day has been fine the whole time, except on the final days of those two extended fasts, which is why they ended when they did.


I have so many advantages though. I'm single, live alone, no kids, work from home. So I'm free to really experiment with anything and if I have a shitty half day here or there as a result, no problem. Someone with a family and more responsibilities than me might experience what I'm calling minor inconveniences and decide its totally not worth it to them.

Do you think there is ever a point where you will get to just having fewer meals in a day with longer periods (like 12 hours) between each meal? Is there any proven benefit there? I've always liked the idea of eating two big meals at 8 and 8.

Layman's understanding alert, take with a grain of salt:


For someone who is already pretty healthy, 12 hour fasting periods are nice. Dr Fung kinda describes a fed and fasted state like an on/off switch. When you eat certain mechanisms turn on in your body. Insulin production goes up, fat storage happens. When you're not eating, insulin in your body drops and the door opens to use body fat for fuel. A balance between those helps keep you healthy. So eating two big meals at 8/8 is gonna be WAY better than the "eat 6 small meals a day" bullshit.


As far as the "supercharged" benefits that I've posted about with fasting, specifically with anti-aging properties, I don't think 12 hours is enough.

The Sweet Spot for Intermittent Fasting – The Mission – Medium

That article is pretty interesting if you've got the time to read it all.




That image shows the insulin drop at certain time points fasting. All of the benefits of fasting, including the autophagy process which is probably what someone like you would be most interested in, seem to ramp up as insulin levels drop. So 12 hours doesn't really buy you a lot there.


When you start reading about intermittent fasting, 16:8, that is, fasting for 16 hours and eating all your calories in an 8 hour window, is typically seen as the shortest viable period to experience any benefits.


I don't think this really has to be done daily to potentially gain from it. For someone who is already healthy, emulating one of the many types of fasts that are done for spiritual/religious reasons once or twice a year is possibly really damn good for you. Or maybe having an early dinner on Friday and skipping breakfast on Saturday when you don't have a lot going on to stretch yourself towards that "sweet spot" of 18-24 hours fasting on occasion.


I don't really think there is any sort of consensus on any of this though, and you can quickly find people smarter than me talking about some of this reaching fad status if you start going deep into google searches.

About my own personal goals:


When I eat keto I skip breakfast. I mean, I eat my bacon and eggs with glee, but I do it when most people would be eating lunch. It just kinda naturally happens since my hunger is generally reduced on keto. So that 16:8 fasting is what I kinda naturally lean towards already, I imagine that might continue once I get to a healthy weight.

I could maybe see doing a 2 day fast once a month just for health benefits once at a healthy weight. But I dunno, everything I'm doing now is so focused on repair and fixing shit, its hard to say where I'd land once I actually do that :)

That's interesting research. Makes me feel even better about the plan of 1 day a week(32-34 hours) that I'm working towards ever so slowly.

Awesome, good luck!

Weight: 313.5
Blood Sugar: 99

Great numbers after an eating day. I did sleep in a bit and took these measurements later in the morning than usual FWIW. I only ate around 2300 calories yesterday, I really wasn't incredibly hungry. I ordered a couple things from netrition.com and tried them all out yesterday... a sugar free/low carb BBQ sauce (ok in small amounts to add flavor, if I use too much I find a bit of an aftertaste though), Mama Lupe brand tortillas since the ones I can find in grocery stores spike my blood sugar more than expected and I don't trust them, the Mama Lupe brand was recommended, and Everything Bagels from Great American Low Carb Bread Company, a brand that I've seen a lot of people rave over.

I ended up making a bacon egg and cheese bagel and then an hour later having a couple soft tacos with the tortillas and some shredded pork. The bagel and the tortillas both claim to be 2g net carbs each. Both of them tasted excellent, the bagel especially. An hour after the tortillas my blood sugar was 104. There was zero spike from them. The bagels can be frozen and prepared easily 1 at a time directly out of the freezer so if I make it through the rest of them without any sort of blood sugar spike I may order a few bags to keep them around.

I'm usually a pretty strong advocate against going overboard with replacement style foods on keto, so I should probably be at least a little careful here about following my own advice that I give to others, but at the moment I find myself super excited about the idea of breakfast bagels.


Anyway, today is a fasting day. I don't have a plan fully set in stone yet, but I'm thinking of starting my next "fast for as long as you can" fast on Sept 13th. I've intended to give ADF a full two weeks to see how this settles in. There's a chance that I'll get excited and jump the gun and do it starting Sept 6th instead though. For now I like Wednesday start dates as I stream on Wednesday night and have guitar/voice lessons on Thursday, getting to do those on the first couple days isn't too bad, and my most difficult days seem to be days 4 and 5, a Wednesday start allows those days to fall on the weekend if I need to be a vegetable on those days.

:thumbsup:

Weight: 312.3
Blood Sugar: 94

Fasted yesterday, will eat today. Yesterday work was good, and after work I ended up mowing the yard and dealing with some weeds outside so I worked outside for a solid hour or so (its not a huge yard). I did feel pretty fatigued around 8pm, ended up napping and then staying up super late.

So right now I'm down about 7 pounds in a week of ADF. That's definitely not correct. Its possible that my "start weight" of 319 for this ADF experiment was artifiicially high bc of weight bouncing around from my previous fast. Its possible that I'll have a gain as my body adjusts to the every other day without food? Who knows. I would expect to be losing about 3 pounds a week on average for now.

Anyway, not much to say today!

Weight: 313.9
Blood Sugar: 114

Odd day yesterday. I didn't eat much early on. I had a couple of those low carb bagels, two bacon egg and cheese bagels, the total calories came in well under what I usually have when I make my full breakfast. Blood sugar still unaffected. More pork soft tacos for dinner, blood sugar again unaffected, but by like 10pm I'd had less than 2000 calories and had no hunger at all. I stayed up really late chatting with some friends though, the north korea stuff happened and stayed up even later talking about that, and got hungry at like 3:30am, since I'd eaten so little (over 1000 calories less than my TDEE and on the days before/after my calorie intake is gonna be 0... yeah, felt odd) I went ahead and made some food.

Anyway, stayed up super late, ate super late, slept in today. None of this is a problem, just all info relevant when watching the weight fluctuate. And as I mentioned yesterday, I've lost more weight in the last week than can reasonably come from fat burning.

Today's a fasting day. Eating on labor day, but I'm not cooking anything special for the holiday, I have leftovers in the fridge that I don't want to go bad and they're sitting in there longer than usual since I am only eating every other day.

Weight: 313.9
Blood Sugar: 74

Interesting to see the weight not move after a day of not eating. Yesterday was a fasting day, it was quite easy. I was slightly tempted to eat out of boredom for a little while, funny how that happens. And how frequently I'd give in to that eating out of boredom but not hunger urge on my way to getting fat.

I slept earlier and better last night as well.

Even though I've gained and stayed steady the last couple days, I'm still down more than expected based on very rough energy calculations.

I don't think I've mentioned that cholesterol test in a little while. I called about it last week, they can't put it on the online site for some reason, so they are mailing me a copy. I'll get it this week sometime.

I think I'm going to start updating every other day instead of daily, just once for every ADF "cycle". As it becomes a bit more routine there is less to say.

I am still intending to start my next multi-day fast next Wednesday, Sept 13th. I will update that daily.

Tuesday Weight: 314.3
Blood Sugar: 109

Weight went up (or stayed the same) for a 3rd day in a row. I did eat a good bit on Monday, maybe I went over TDEE. I had some prepared pulled pork I bought from costco and I just dumped what was left on my plate, I have no idea how much it was, just wanted to get rid of the leftovers. I also finished the day off with some Halo Top ice cream which is wonderful stuff but I really should be careful about keeping it in my house very often :D


Wednesday Weight: 311.8
Blood Sugar: 85

Fasted on Tuesday. I had a little upset stomach in the morning, and didn't sleep great, so I felt really shitty to start my day. Things got better throughout the day though and it ended up just being a normal fasting day. I got tired early and slept early and ended up having a very good night's sleep. Woke up this morning to 2+ pounds having whooshed away after those three days of stagnation, so that's neat.


I think I've been saying "6 weeks til TwitchCon" for a full week now :lol: :lol: but today it is actually exactly 6 weeks to go til TwitchCon. Stalls can always happen (though they are supposed to happen less on a fasting regimen), but getting below 300 in the next 6 weeks feels likely. Could I get to 290? That's about 3 pounds a week.

I've been using Wednesday as official weigh in day for a "6 week challenge" that I'm participating in on the keto subreddit, so I'll do that here as well.

6/22: 334.5
8/1: 328.1
8/8: 326.3
8/15: 312.1 (after 5 days of fasting, artificially low)
8/22: 321.7
8/30: 316.3
9/6: 311.8

Looking great! So close to getting below 300!

Go Radii!

Quit making me look bad!! I mean, great job, keep going you sadistic bastard you.

haha thanks guys.

Cholesterol results still not back.

I'm having a Coronary Artery Calcium Scan on Friday. This is a measure of calcium found in your arteries and can detect cardiovascular damage/risk before symptoms. Between the way I've eaten most of my life, diabetes and family history with heart disease if this can help me determine if I'm already at higher risk for a heart attack younger than most I'd like to know it. Its not so much related to diet changes as me getting obsessive and proactive about everything once I start trying to get healthy.

I'm also having a DEXA scan next Tuesday. body composition, lean body mass vs fat, is the result of this for me. Its one of the more accurate tests available but not perfectly accurate. Discussions about protein being burned along with fat during fasting and lean body mass loss came up on a low carb myfitnesspal forum that is closed and that I like an awful lot. Everything I've read about keto and fasting both say that its more sparing of lean body mass than regular diets because of the fact that in ketosis you are burning fat for fuel and have easier access to your stored fat b/c of a bunch of metabolic pathway shit that I don't understand. But I love data and can afford to indulge, so lets to get a DEXA scan now, and lets get another in 3 months, or maybe after 30 pounds lost, and track changes. Wheee.

EDIT:

Insurance doesn't cover any of this. Artery test is $50, DEXA scan $75. Artery test does incur some radiation, its a CT scan. I don't know if its something I would want to get regularly but I've had very few x-rays/CT scan stuff over the years so I think this one is fine. DEXA also involves some radiation, but I found some numbers saying that you have to have 180 DEXA scans to equal the amount of radiation from one set of dental x-rays. So I'm totally ok getting that re-checked at regular intervals for my own curiosity

Thursday Weight: 311.5
Blood Sugar: 97

I ate on Wednesday, so after 3 days of weight going up or stalling we're back to a "normal" (?? - still dunno what's normal) pattern of hanging about even after eating and losing a lot on fasting days. I had a great day of work and on Thursday's I have both guitar and voice lessons so I went out for those. Once I got home I was insanely tired and just fell asleep for two hours. I'm used to getting more tired on fasting days and going to bed earlier, but that was a bit much. Woke up after the extra long nap and was alert and awake for awhile though.

I had lots of thoughts about eating and really had a desire to not only eat but to order a damn pizza or something. That was all psychological though (as opposed to the fucked up state my body gets in with what feels like very real sugar cravings, or with the sickly feeling that comes from low blood sugars where i AM likely to crave), and I was able to ignore it easily.


Friday Morning

Weight: 308.9
Blood Sugar: 64
Chest: 51.5
Waist: 54.5
Hips: 49.5

Another huge whoosh in weight today, first number I've seen below 310. Blood sugar is 64 after a fasting day but no low blood sugar symptoms. Basically everything feels great. I also decided to take measurements for the first time in awhile. The last time I did those numbers were 53/56.5/50. A reminder that I suck at making my measurements consistent but that is the type of improvement I'd be hoping for with the weight loss. I can't tell a difference in the mirror, so its good to see numbers. I have had people tell me they can tell a difference and I do believe them. Just hard to see in yourself.


Today is an eating day. I have my Coronary Artery Calcium scan at 2pm today and probably won't eat before then. The only requirement for it is no smoking and no caffeine though. I'm pretty nervous about it. Its supposed to be a pretty darn good measure of heart disease and risk. Not a 100% definitive answer, but I treated my body so badly in my 20s and early 30s, so it certainly crosses my mind that if my luck were bad I'd be exactly the type of person to have a heart attack much younger than most. Knowing is better than not knowing though.

I had my CAC test today (the cardiovascular scan), results not available til monday though. DEXA scan is on Tuesday. I'll just make one giant post Tuesday detailing cholesterol, CAC scan, and DEXA scan and revisit it as needed as updated numbers come in.

Can't wait to see these. Hoping for some good news!

Great work and results so far, Radii, and looking forward to the health results. Best wishes!

Great job, Radii. My wife and I are going through a healthier living and weight loss journey ourselves. Thanks for sharing yours. The information has been very helpful.

Thanks so much everyone :)

Saturday:

Weight 309.0
Blood Sugar 97

On Friday I had my cardio scan in the afternoon and wasn't hungry yet, so I didn't eat anything before I left the house. I ended up eating out after the test, a salad and chicken wings. I didn't eat anything small beforehand. I've read that it shouldn't be necessary to do anything special after such short fasts (only about 40 hours or so), but, I have had some bad stomach issues on my first couple ADF days where I went straight into my normal 900'ish calorie meal after 36-42 hours of not eating. So I'd been eating a serving of walnuts a little while before making breakfast. Friday - no light anything before the salad/wings. For dinner I made soft tacos with some ground bison meat from costco, something I've never had before. That night my stomach was all fucked up and I just felt genearlly completely shitty. Whether it was b/c I didn't break the fast gently, or b/c of what I ate dining out, or from something with dinner i have no idea.


Sunday:

Weight: 307.9
Blood Sugar: 64

Saturday was a fasting day. I woke up Saturday still feeling pretty poorly. Walked to CVS and bought some pepto. I ended up going about my day like normal, after debating calling off a scheduled twitch stream, and debating just going to bed super early instead of doing some work I had planned in the evening. Also debated eating and maybe just resetting for a few days before getting back to it. But in the end decided not to do any of that and made it through the day alright.



Today is an eating day. I haven't been up long, but I'm feeling fine so far, so hopefully Friday night/Saturday was just some one-off thing. I'm going to make sure to drink a good bit, as I haven't been drinking quite enough the past few days, and will eat normally, and am expecting everything to be normal today.

I'm in a discord server for fasting, support/information group basically. Three people in there are doing 25+ day fasts successfully, one just finished a 30 day fast and posted before/after pics. Insane and impressive stuff.

On the other end of the spectrum, a very different kind of "impressive":

"is it bad to eat ice cream cones (no ice cream) during a water fast? It only tastes like plastic and it doesn't fill me up. Is that still okay?"

Its possible that this person is trolling but based on other questions/conversations I've seen them in, I would currently bet against it, and I think this was an honest question.

Monday check-in:

Weight 308.4
Blood Sugar 90

So I had felt really poorly Friday night and Saturday. I was debating ending ADF for a few days if I continued to feel badly Sunday. If I were to be getting sick, I want to be eating to give my body the energy to fight off anything. But Sunday was indeed better, I was extra hungry and probably ate a bit over TDEE. Another possible sign that maybe I had a brief bug and was over it.


Tuesday check-in:

Weight: 305.9
Blood Sugar: 64

Another huge drop after a fasting day. I had a lot to do yesterday and as soon as I stopped in the evening felt insanely hungry, but it passed. All good.




So, I unexpectedly have friends in town Friday and Saturday. Found out yesterday. They're going to be staying with me. I kinda owned NOTHING (well, very little) when I moved up here, and have not fully furnished the house and have just bought enough in many areas for myself. I'm totally not prepared for guests. I have a lot of things I want to get done Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday nights before they arrive. Since I find myself less than 100% in the evenings on fast days, and find myself sleeping hours earlier than usual on fast days, I may not fast anymore the rest of the week, to make sure I have the time and energy to get everything done.


I'm not 100% sure though. Today is a normal eating day, and I'll try to get as much work around the house done this evening as possible. If I make enough progress I might fast tomorrow anyway. There's really no urgent need to push myself, other than the vanity of wanting to lose every pound possible before TwitchCon in October. But I'm obviously in a REALLY good groove right now with this, so if I can continue through one more cycle I'd like to.


I was also intending to start my next extended "fast for as long as I can" fast tomorrow. But I of course want to hang out and eat with my friends this weekend, so that's getting pushed to next week.

August/September Test Results

Lets talk data. I saw my new primary care doc towards the end of August. I requested a lipoprotein NMR test for cholesterol. It provides more details than the basic cholesterol panel. When I had this test done back in NC, I would also get the "regular" numbers, HDL/LDL/Triglycerides. Unfortunately, I didn't get those results here. I don't think triglycerides are measured at all in the results I got. The NMR test breaks down "number of particles" and "particle size". Risks are assessed based on those numbers.

Large HDL: 4049 (HIGH RISK: A reference range of 4334-10815 is given, but optimal is 9386+, high risk is less than 6996)
LDL Particle Number: 1498 (MODERATE RISK. Optimal is less than 1260, high risk >1538)
Small LDL: 389 (HIGH RISK: optimal 162, high risk > 217)
Medium LDL: 408 (HIGH RISK: optimal <201, high risk > 271)


The only reference I have to when I was on keto in the past was that my LDL Particle Number was around 1900. So that's neat. But yeah, even without "regular" cholesterol numbers my cholesterol is shit and hopefully these things all improve with weight loss and activity.

The shitty thing is that I *am* comfortable with the HDL and Triglyceride results on the normal test. It's LDL that I have a problem with the basic number, and value this additional data. Oh well.



CAC Scan - Coronary Artery Calcium Scan


My CAC Score: 0

YAY! I'm at the youngest age where the test is even potentially useful, and for your average even semi-healthy adult its probably not useful til 50+, but I've been obese most of my adult life, I've lived on fast food for most of my adult life, and been sedentary most of my adult life. One parent and two grandparents diabetic, one grandparent with heart disease. So while an average 40 year old SHOULD have a score of 0 easily, I really needed to let go of the nagging wonder about whether or not I have already catapulted myself to my doom.



DEXA Scan

You already know I'm fucking fat, so no need to be too embarrassed here, but still. Its fucking embarrassing.

My weight on the scanner was 304.4 pounds.

Fat Mass: 146.9 pounds
Lean Mass: 149.9 pounds
BMC (bone mineral content): 8.5 pounds
Body Fat %: 49.7%

WOO BOY. That means that I have likely very recently... within the past week maybe, dipped below 50% bodyfat.

DEXA scans will log a higher bodyfat % than most any other measure. Hell, my stupid scale this morning said my bodyfat % was 39%.

I've got a followup in exactly 3 months, December 12th, for another test. Proponents of Keto say that a ketogenic diet does an extremely good job of sparing lean body mass during weight loss. Proponents of fasting say that fasting naturally spares as much protein as possibly to save lean body mass. As I'm currently losing weight at a pretty darn rapid rate, I'm extremely curious to see how my body fat % changes over time, but for now, most importantly, what happens to my lean mass over time.

One other interesting note. I have a mirror, and I can look down, so I already knew that I carried most of my weight in my gut, and that's really bad for lots of measures showing belly fat is the worst kind of fat. But whatever, the numbers are hilarious:

Upper Body: 59% fat (~100 pounds of fat/69 lean)
Lower Body: 36% fat (~31 pounds of fat/54 lean)

fat guy legs! super strong to carry all the weight higher up.

WHEW. That's all for now. The CAC scan if I were to eat healthy and lose weight I probably wouldn't need again until I'm 50, though I'll ask my primary care doc about that next time I see him. There is not insignificant radiation involved after all.


Cholesterol should get tested again in November, primary care followup is then. Dexa scan in 3 months. We'll refer back to this post to see how each progresses.

I did end up eating yesterday. I'll just end up eating keto through Sunday with friends in town, so we'll pick this back up early next week. Since I've been losing so much more than expected with ADF so far, I'm very curious to see if eating for 6 days in a row causes any changes.

Also, yesterday was weigh in day:

6/22: 334.5
8/1: 328.1
8/8: 326.3
8/15: 312.1 (after 5 days of fasting, artificially low)
8/22: 321.7
8/30: 316.3
9/6: 311.8
9/13: 306.1

Yeahhhhh, about that. I ended up getting off keto for 3 1/2 days. Stress eating and ordering a pizza Thursday night as I desperately went about trying to finish getting my house ready for guests, and then just eating whatever Friday/Saturday while they were here.

Sunday is where the mental gymnastics begin. We were initially going to go out for breakfast before friends had to drive back out. But they ended up making plans to meet someone for an early lunch part-way through the drive, so we didn't do breakfast and just chatted for awhile at the house before they left. So instead of saying "great, make some bacon and eggs, go buy a steak tonight, get back on keto in a really enjoyable and easy way", I end up thinking to myself "wellllll, I had already pretty much committed to one last cheat day when we were going to go out for breakfast..." and end up at a super shitty chinese buffet.


Too bad I didn't stay keto for this, as I remain curious.


This morning I weighed 312.5 pounds. 7 pounds of mostly water weight gain for someone my size just getting off keto is normal. If I only ate keto and didn't start back up with fasting, I would expect to drop back to 307'ish pretty quickly from the water weight. But right now I'm most interested in weighing less than 300 pounds when I step on a plane to fly to LA next month, not in those types of experiments.

Once I hit "submit reply" here I'll be going to make myself some bacon and eggs, tonight I'll probably go buy a steak and cook it for dinner.


Getting off plan for 3-4 days is really not a big deal. It will almost certainly happen for a week at TwitchCon as well. Getting back on before shit spirals out of control is the important part, so lets do that.

I intend to eat today and tomorrow just to re-establish keto, and then fast on Wednesday. Whether that will be where I pick up ADF again, or whether I go forward with my original plan to begin an extended fast on that day to see how long I can go, not sure yet.

Giggling at the phrase 'mental gymnastics'. Very accurate for this kind of thing. You got this as long as you get back into the groove; it'll just be a barely-noticeable speed bump in time.

Two days back on keto, so all is well. My weight settled in at 314.2. That's still a normal water weight gain after getting back on carbs for a bit. I'm eating today, as I have some food that will almost certainly go bad if I don't. I'll fast tomorrow, but am still undecided if I want to ADF for a bit or just go straight into an extended fast.

Weight: 311.0
Blood Sugar: 114

I'm definitely back in ketosis now after 3 days of low carb eating, rewarded with a 3 1/2 pound drop in water weight. I still don't feel great, I'm not sure if I'm going to fast today or not.

Good job getting back on track. That is literally the hardest thing about eating for the best. It's natural to go off the rails.

Thanks!

It really is. Once I get in a groove I can stay keto for a very long time, but every slip up feels really dangerous. There is no way I'm going to stay keto at TwitchCon for an entire week, and Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up too. I've got to be able to navigate that and stay on track.

When I first got off track I talked about it in a fasting discord server that I'm in (discord is similar'ish to slack, that's basically just a live chat fasting support group type environment), and I talked to two close friends of mine that have been really supportive and promised to send them pictures of everything I ate on Monday and Tuesday. Of course, nothing stops me from just... not doing that, or lying, or whatever, but in this instance it helped.

Weight: 306.8
Blood Sugar: 105

I fasted yesterday, after being 100% certain I was back in ketosis. I lost 4.4 pounds, 3.5 of that is likely water weight, given the 0 calorie intake some fat too. The lowest weight I saw before I got off track last week was 305.9. I'm almost back to where I was, I'm quite pleased about this.

I... don't really have a plan now. I think I'm going to fast today as well. I'd been intending to start an extended fast before last week's distraction anyway. So, I guess I'm doing that?

I read something yesterday about metformin inhibiting gluconeogenesis, the process of converting (basically) protein into energy. The vast majority of energy for me on keto comes from fat and ketones, but there's still a little of this going on. Does this explain me needing to quit my last extended fast on day 3 with low blood sugar symptoms? Maybe! I'm going to try not taking my metformin during this fast, lets see if that makes anything different.


I've got a couple "high quality, organic" chicken carcasses in the freezer, I'm going to make chicken broth this evening and will have a bit every day to see if that can help me feel less shitty over the next few days of fasting. My last food was Wednesday night around 10:30pm. So I'm 37 hours in now. My record is 5 days, I'd hit that Monday night if I can make it. ~80 hours to go.

Weight: 305.1
Blood Sugar: 80
Current fasting duration: 63 hours

I was really freaking hungry a lot yesterday, but got through it, and hunger was really the only issue. I was actually solidly alert and stayed up pretty late (compared to my alternate day fasts where I had been finding myself getting tired very early compared to normal). I decided to try having a small amount of coconut oil in my green tea in the evening, along with a bit of artificial sweetener b/c I actually find the tea to taste pretty crappy without it. My hunger spiked like CRAZY but once that passed I felt like I perked up big time. I added less than 100 calories in the coconut oil, but I'm not sure if that is enough to mess up autophagy and other fasting benefits. Obviously ingesting 100 calories or less means that a good bit of the weight loss from yesterday should actually be fat. Hopefully about 3/4 of a pound of fat a day given my weight and estimated TDEE and stuffs.

Anyway, I'm currently feeling just fine, I'm about to go play music on Twitch for 3 hours which I *really* couldn't do if I felt like shit or couldn't focus, so I'm very happy so far.

My last fast ended late on day 3 with a bad feeling of low blood sugar. I'm really hoping that not taking my metformin will prevent that from happening. Lets see how the rest of the day goes.

Fasting Duration: 88 hours (3 1/2 days)

Weight: 300.7
Blood Sugar 63

So I'm past that 3 day point where i had really bad low blood sugar symptoms the last time I attempted an extended fast. Ditching the metformin maybe made a difference? Or maybe my body is just adjusted to the lower blood sugars from ADF so its not giving me all the warning signs.

Days 4 and 5 were very very difficult on my only fast that went this long, the 5 day one in mid august. So far today I'm feeling good. I did have another cup of tea with sweetener and coconut oil in it yesterday, again less than 100 calories in. Its possible that messes with autophagy, but the insulin/IR stuff and obvious weight loss should roll on just fine. I'm pleased so far.

Tomorrow I'll be under 300 pounds, but based on my experiences so far I expect to re-gain a bunch of this once I end my fast, so I won't be "safely" under 300 for a bit. I'm still looking forward to it though.

Fasting Duration: 108 hours (4 1/2 days)

Weight: 299.5 pounds
Blood Sugar: 61

Day 4 was muuuuuuch easier than the only other time I've gotten this far. I have a work deadline today and put in about 5 hours of work after the early slate of NFL games yesterday and was just fine for the most part. I had a mug of chicken broth in the afternoon, a cup of tea with the same sweetener and <100 calories of coconut oil in the evening. Twice during the day I did feel a bit poor, I felt kinda sluggish around 4pm, that's when I made the chicken broth, I dumped some extra lite salt in the broth for some electrolytes. Later in the evening I got a pretty bad headache. Downing some extra water, making my tea, and drinking a few large swigs of pickle juice helped that subside after an hour or so and I felt fine the rest of the evening. Pickle Juice (and pickles themselves) have tons of sodium, so I usually keep a giant jar of pickles around while eating keto.

Its neat seeing a number under 300 on the scale, but if I were to have to end this fast today, I'd easily gain some water weight back to go back over 300.

In the afternoon on day 5 is when my longest fast fell apart. That day I just started feeling like complete garbage and wasn't able to fix it. So far today I feel 100% fine, I need to be able to focus for this work deadline, and right now I am completely able to like on any normal day, I'm not dragging in the slightest. We'll see what happens throughout the day. I don't want to look too far ahead, but I'm starting to get my hopes up that this might last awhile and bring about some really great results.

Note that I didn't mention hunger at all in my recap of yesterday. I did get hungry a couple times, but it was not a significant issue at all.

Incredible results. Amazing to me that you can even function after going that long without eating solid food.

Woohoo!

Congrats! Keep up the great work.

Thanks Subby and rjolley!

Fasting Duration: 132 hours (5 1/2 days)

Weight: 297.4 pounds
Blood Sugar: 63

I was able to focus on work fully yesterday and that was great. In the late afternoon, I got this really intense feeling of very nervous energy. My last fast that ended on day 5 the same thing happened. That day I took a long walk on an extremely hot day to try to deal with it, came home and crashed, completely drained, and couldn't function anymore and called off the fast.

Yesterday I took a walk as well, but it wasn't as hot and I didn't try to burst out all of the extra energy. I just thought I should move around and do someting and see if it would help. I also asked specifically about this in the fasting discord that I participate in, others that have fasted for 20+ days haven't experienced the same thing, but the general suggestions were something to do with stress/anxiety and suggestions for deep breathing/relaxation/lie down. So when I got home I did some deep belly breathing which is great for relaxation... even though I really don't think that this was just anxiety manifesting itself. But that's still never a bad thing to do.

Regardless, this time I didn't completely crash, and things returned to normal after an hour or so. It was just a rather weird sensation.

I did some reading:

https://idmprogram.com/fasting-physiology-part-ii/


So maybe for me this was simply a weird spike in adrenaline.


The increase in growth hormone is another one of the reasons fasting is said to have "anti-aging" benefits. Neat.


Anyway, other than that one instance, which I was able to manage, yesterday was pretty standard and pretty easy.


So this is longer than I've ever fasted before. Many people once they get past 5 days find it to be smooth sailing for quite some time. I read an account of a 7 day fast from someone on the myfitnesspal low carb forum who had an easy time on days 4-6 and crashed on day 7 and had to stop. We shall see what happens now for me!

The relationship between fasting and growth hormone secretion seems almost too good to be true. Is this a generally accepted fact or is it something that has been observed but needs more study?

Fasting Duration: 157 hours (6 1/2 days)

Weight: 295.4
Blood Sugar: 60

I like how my blood sugar has stabilized in the low 60s and that I feel completely fine that way.

I was hungrier yesterday, and really thought about food a lot. But I was also bored. Yesterday was a pretty light day after the deadline rush of Monday, so i just didn't have a whole lot i had to do. I guess I ended up sitting around dreaming about food instead of making myself be productive :D But there were no physical issues of any kind. I felt fine all day.

Last night I slept much better and that is clearly helping today. If I make it til 10:30 tonight I'll hit a full 7 days fasted!!! I'm pretty amazed at how this has gone so far.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/fasting-and-growth-hormone

The "Fasting to increase growth hormone" section references a few actual studies.


This is another study referenced in that dietdoctor entry:

Fasting enhances growth hormone secretion and amplifies the complex rhythms of growth hormone secretion in man.


I haven't tried to rabbit-hole past this yet I don't know what pulsatile vs non-pulsatile is, but these results seem to make it sound like growth hormone was very clearly increased in general. That's the conclusion made by the article linking to it as well. This only had 6 subjects, it should be noted.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337

Here's the last study referenced in that dietdoctor article that seems to show similar results over 2 days of fasting. The full article is not referenced in this one.

This increase in growth hormone is given as a reason (THE reason, perhaps?) that lean mass is not decimated during fasting.

just a quick note to say that i made it through the rest of the day with ease and have now officially been fasting for a week, WOO!!

Fasting Duration: 182 hours (7 1/2 days)

Weight: 293.2
Blood Sugar: 54

That blood sugar took a little dip this morning, but I still feel ok, and I've seen others report the same.

Yesterday was the easiest day yet. It was a wasted day, I got sucked into a few conversations online throughout the day and hardly did any work. Oops. I did take a walk in the afternoon and streamed music for three hours on twitch and everything was totally fine.

Last night I stayed up very late to catch up on league of legends worlds (which is in china, damn timezones), so I have not slept enough today, we'll see how that effects me.

Fast Duration: 205 hours (8 1/2 days)

Weight: 290.6
Blood Sugar: 56

Yesterday was rough. A few years ago before I got into physical therapy and mindfulness and got a lot of my issues sorted out I was going down a fairly bad path, and felt under a ton of stress all the time, I developed a nervous tic that was pretty bad/annoying and was stress related. It mostly went away once I got those issues under control. Yesterday afternoon that nervous tic started happening non stop. I brought it up in the fasting discord and got a response of "oooo, that's a cleansing process, just let it happen!"

There is a tendency in some things like this that can reach "fad status" and seem to go against the norm to not see any negatives ANYWHERE. In this case EVERYTHING is "healing" or "cleansing". Nah man, sometimes your body tells you that's all for now, simple as that. There is something to "cleansing" though. For someone like me who gained weight over a very long period of time and who has been fat for a long time, there's a lot of shit stored in fat cells that's been there for decades, and unusual responses ARE possible when some of that gets released. When I first started having deep tissue massage in physical therapy after having let my back tighten up for a decade of sitting + inactivity, there were a couple times where - an hour after a massage - I would have a crazy out of nowhere emotional reaction, a huge wave of sadness or something. I discussed this with my psychologist and she said that is a thing that definitely happens to a lot of people and the idea that you are "releasing" some emotional shit that was going on that got stored up whenever the physical problem started is actually a thing. I'm good with that theory.

So there's SOMETHING to the idea of "cleansing", but at the same time, its not the answer to everything. You know what else happens during a fast? Your cortisol levels go up. Cortisol = stress hormone. So maybe I've just hit my limit to what I can handle this time around as far as the hormonal changes that come during a fast.

I had to go do a very small bit of stuff in the yard last night, like 10-15 minutes of work outside, and I was just overwhelmingly tired after it. Because of the earlier stress reaction? Or because this is my body telling me that its time to end the fast?


I've dealt with a few issues on this fast but most of them were temporary (no longer than 1 hour). This was quite different. In the end, I decided to just go to bed early, and see if things are different today. So far today I feel fine, but, my experience with fasting so far is that when I'm gonna have issues, they're going to come later in the afternoon or early evening.

If anything happens today, that will be my signal to end the fast.

Alright, fast over. 210 hours is the final count! I'll eat not very much today, slowly reintroduce some foods, and over the next week or so we'll see where my weight settles in. I hope I got low enough to stay under 300 for good, but either way, this has been pretty awesome! I'll get back to ADF as soon as it feels reasonable to do so. My last two extended fasts I felt an INCREDIBLE amount of hunger on the 2nd and 3rd days after breaking the fast, and i'm going to go a little slower breaking this one due to the duration.

You can fuck yourself up breaking a fast. Google "refeeding syndrome". So you want to re-introduce foods slowly. I had a cup of broth an hour ago, and then had a handful of walnuts that I chewed up way better than i normally would heh. Most recommendations say to go with juices and stick with liquids on the first day, but I'm more interested in breaking my fast with Not-Carbs to limit the initial insulin response. Since I've actively been keeping my electrolytes up, the insulin stuff is really the only thing I'd worry about.

The odds of problems are very small for a fatass like me. I've seen lots of people talking about breaking a fast with a steak or a pizza and they just get the shits really bad. But still, trying to do things right :D

So I may not post daily for the next few days, I'll report on water weight gain, and once I get back on ADF we'll pick up the every other day posting there.


My initial goal for twitchcon was to get under 300, I think that's a guarantee now unless I have some kind of awful blowout. If I can get back on ADF in a reasonable amount of time I think its very possible to get to 290 before that trip now!! (my flight out is on October 18th)

How's October going?

I failed to account for the MASSIVE amount of stress and anxiety I would feel leading up to my trip. Two weeks before the trip I had to write down a to-do list of things to accomplish before I left, and I immediately felt sick. I stopped sleeping more than 3-4 hours at a time and was a nervous wreck. I don't really understand why, I went last year and it was great, but the "anticipation anxiety" was real. I was off and on with keto during that time period. The trip was amazing, but I did stay off keto there too.


I didn't avoid updating here during that b/c I wasn't doing well though. I'm pretty sure I'm not going be active here anymore. I may start a blog somewhere on the fasting stuff since I'm still very much all in on making tons of progress over the winter. Or maybe I'll come back here to update once a month or something :)

I'm currently at 312. I'm not going home for Christmas or Thanksgiving. But the hype with all the musicians at TwitchCon has me looking at starting to make some weekend trips over the winter to find people to play with and to continue to improve. But I'm only going to do that if I can stay on keto for the duration of a short trip like that.

We'll see about a Dec 1 checkin or thereabouts :)

Hope all is well my man. Check in if you get the chance.

I'm still in the same spot here, figured I'd give a very brief update since I decided to log in for something :D

My weight has shifted between 305-315 for most of the last 4 months. At this point I feel like its entirely psychological. I can lose weight with fasting, and I can lose weight with calorie reduction when its done via a low carb diet. My doctor is pleased because I have been on keto about 75% of the time over the last four months, so my bloodwork numbers look great, but my weight isn't dropping because when I'm off track I'm a train wreck calorie-wise.

I feel like the #1 thing I need to work on in my life is not turning to food for comfort or in times of stress. In the last 4 months I have cut my mother 100% out of my life after a string of major incidents with her, have spent a month travelling, and have spent $2000 in three different stretches at the vet eventually and unfortunately ending in putting my cat to sleep a few days ago. My way of coping with these events is the current story of my weight loss efforts - because my way of coping with these things is with food.

Its funny, because I had sort of recognized that before I stopped posting here - by stating a few times that was really looking forward to the winter because I expected it to be a nice, boring time with no distractions where I could focus heavily on work and weight loss.


When I've been off and on with keto I've approached things a few different ways, sometimes ignoring fasting and just wanting to get steadily back on keto with calorie restriction for awhile, and sometimes jumping right back into fasting. As far as whether it keeps me on track, it doesn't *seem* to matter.

I have decided that longer fasts are not for me at this time. That the "alternate day" fasting can work very very well for me. Even with my overall weight unchanged, I did set a goal for 2018 to fast for 75 total days this year. I have fasted for 12 so far over the first 3 months, but never two days in a row. Those fasts are all in the 32-42 hour range, I believe I'm getting some benefit from that even with my volatility otherwise.


The one thing I can say is of the 30'ish pounds I lost last year, for all my struggles, I haven't re-gained it. That's a positive. But at some point I can't just sit at 305-315, gotta keep moving in the right direction.

^^ any updates on this? It's great to know that you've maintained your weight. Do you think 5.2 fasting diet is effective for a beginner or it should be longer? I want to do this to detoxify my body and lose weight.

That was helpful. Thanks!