Most of us have realised that it is not just how much we eat but what we eat and whilst we can lose weight without cutting carbs and sugar it’ll be very difficult indeed to keep the weight off.

Its possible to be successful without reducing processed carbs but it will be very difficult.

There is no magical pudding (no pun intended). There is a common theme with those that have been successful and are now in maintenance. Ask any of us and you’ll most likely get the same response. Carbs locked up in fibre, such as veggies, legumes, nuts etc. No problems. Processed carbs from refined grains. Big problem.

Sally,

You’re making generalizations with anecdotal evidence only. There are plenty of people here who have lost a lot of weight without ‘coming to a stop’ along the way, and who didn’t look for other ways to support weight loss but wanted to make healthy sustainable dietary changes, i.e. reduced added sugar and refined carbs.

I chose 5:2 because of the added health benefits of fasting, not solely as a ‘diet’. All diets work (so they say, I haven’t tried any others!), but keeping it off is the hard part. Well, not with intermittent fasting.

And I’m really really happy that I’m no longer a sugar and carb junkie 😀

Hi salllllly, not sure if I got the l’s right.

I currently live in Japan and it isn’t really practical to go low carb. I have reduced my portion sizes of rice and I’ve cut way back on sugar which is easy to do in Japan. However the Japanese diet is very carb heavy with rice or noddles forming part of almost every meal. Japanese also eat a lot of bread which I mostly avoid because I simple don’t care for it. Most Japanese foods though are low in sugar.

While living in Japan I’ve lost over 23kg (~50 lbs) over the last four years. The initial weight loss was just through smaller portion sizes and exercises, after about a year my weight stabilized down around 92kg. Over the next two years I wasn’t able to lose any weight and in fact gained 2kg. I exercised a great deal and did lose some fat but even last summer my DEXA scan showed me at 24.5% body fat.

In May I drastically cut back on sugar from about 50 to over 60 grams / day to less than 20 grams / day, excluding whole fruit. Over the next 4 months I lost 8 kg and my waistline trimmed up a lot, from 103 cm to 86 cm. Then the weight lost stopped. I added fasting and that has taken down another 4 kg over the last two months.

While I don’t have a high carb diet, it isn’t low carb either and blood work about a year ago showed very little ketones in my blood. Now with the fasting I probably have a little more ketosis going on, but it isn’t supported by a low carb diet.

The reasons I don’t eat low carb are:
1) It would be very expensive and difficult in Japan.
2) I don’t want to spend that much time on my diet right now.
3) While it would probably make fasting easier, it hasn’t been necessary.

Sally,

To answer your questions from a few posts back. There are inherent advantages in doing IF that you do not get otherwise. Our lifestyle and food intake are such that we very rarely rely on our liver to access stored fats. Like any organ in our body if we do not “exercise” it, it gets lazy. Would you expect to be able to run a marathon without training first? So what makes anyone think that not exercising your liver somehow makes it perform well?

It took me about a month before I was able to cope with water fasting. I noticed a big change at the 6 month mark. Water fasting is now very easy, that’s how long it took to ramp up my liver.

Why don’t people go low carb from the get go? Habit. Having said that I don’t think Im low carb. I just don’t get my carbs from processed grains. My carbs come from veggies, nuts, legumes. Processed grains are turned into maltose in your mouth before even swallowing that bite of bread etc. It is then turned into glucose as it enters the stomach.

Why do people lose weight to start with? Most of the initial loss is actually water and not fat. Your aim is to lower your basal insulin levels. IF helps lower your insulin levels which helps a lot. But then you level out at a new lower level and this is your new set weight point. Want to lose more weight? Then you need to lower the insulin level again. This is where proper food choices come into it. You want to avoid foods that spike insulin levels. Grain based foods are real bad for this. Don’t need to take my word for this, just buy a glucose meter and measure the response yourself. If I have bread for dinner the night before my morning glucose level will be 5.4-5.7 mmol/L. If I have no grain based foods my glucose in the morning will be about 4.7mmol/L. On a fast day it will be 4.0-4.4mmol/L

Hope that helps.

High fat and high sugar, the bliss point. Something food manufacturers exploit readily.

Just following up with what @bigbooty, @bronx and @happynow are talking about.

There is a vast amount of evidence that almost any calorie restrictive diet works initially. There have been fewer studies long-term but the ones there have been showing the long term results aren’t good and very few people actually succeed keeping most of the weight off in the long term. There are lots of theories as to why almost all diets fail, the main one pushed by the processed food industry is because people don’t exercise self control.

I know from personal experience that calorie restriction and exercise only take me so far in regards to weight loss. I exercised like crazy for two years and gained weight will continuing a calorie restrictive diet. Sure I could have lost more weight by cutting my calories insanely low. However I was already suffering from too much hunger. I just lacked the self control that food companies think I should have …

Now with fasting, the hunger is much less and I’m getting results. In fact I just checked and I’ve actually lost about ~5kg of body fat while gaining ~2kg of lean body mass since August. Those are insane results that just don’t happen with calorie restriction. I know many people consider fasting calorie restriction but it is more of feeding restriction. I don’t have to watch calories to burn fat, I just have to give my body prolonged periods of not eating.

Getting back to the thread topic. I think the main benefit of a low-carb ketogenic diet would be in making fasting easier. As others have noted, it took some practice for me before I could easily fast. I think that would have required a lot less practice on a low-carb diet. I don’t do low-carb because of where I live makes it much more difficult. Japanese are really into a high carb diet and compared to most countries Japan doesn’t have a weight issue. However it is difficult to live somewhere and not eat similar to how most people eat.

@barata, yes I started reading Dr. Fung’s blog months ago. At first I thought what he was saying was crazy but he bases his information on studies and provides the references. Now I know from first hand experience that fasting works.

Agree with what you said. Try eating 2000 cal of sugar each day and 2000 cal of veggies. See what happens after a month. Well that’s on the assumption that you can survive eating sugar for a month. Gut bacteria plays a big role in good health. A healthy person has over 6500 different species of bacteria. Someone eating refined crap has about 2000 species. Eating refined crap means all the nutrients are basically removed in your stomach. You starve your gut bacteria which live mostly in your large intestines. Not good.

HappyNow,

Thanks for the link, I hadn’t read that before.

I just read The Obesity Code and it was very eye opening. From personal experience I can’t say I agree with everything the doctor wrote, but it is going to be a good guide to try to follow.

There was a book in the freebie bin at work called “Why Diets Make Us Fat” by Dr. Sandra Aamodt, so I grabbed it. I haven’t read it yet but hope it’s enlightening.

Bronx

It seems to me that there is a difference between people who look at 5:2 (IF) as just another weight loss diet, i.e. two days restriction and five days normal (that ‘normal’ often being excess calories/sugar/whatever) and only until they’ve lost weight, and those who recognise their pre:5:2 lifestyle diet was unhealthy and unsustainable and actively want to embrace change every day, not just on two fast days..

Well I’m old enough and ugly enough that I no longer feel the need to please people by eating when I don’t want to or eating things that I don’t want to! It still surprises me that people are offended when you say no to free cake or don’t want to eat breakfast.

Ha ha Barata, sorry, but you can only take a horse to water. And in my experience, my OH takes notice only if another man said it 😀

@bigbooty, I’m only done one fast over 60 hours … most of mine are now 35 to 40 hours, just finished a 37 hour fast. I also did a lighter HIIT workout right before breaking the fast … I’m still trying to sweat out some extra salt I consumed. 🙂

@happynow I find that I do eat 500 to 1000 extra calories the day after a fast, the second day is pretty normal and when I have 3 days I’m normally eating less than normal. It seem natural. I’ve found that fasting has changed the way my stomach feels. However, I’m only two months in and only about 10 lbs down depending on what day I pick to compare, so I’m not sure if that could be considered successful yet. My line in the sand is if I can move down to the same pants size I wore my high school senior year. I have one size to go.

In general I think fasting is changing my relationship to food. Even when I’m “feasting” I’m more mindful and even thankful about the food I’m eating. That attitude is much more natural than it was when I was trying to lose weight by starvation. (Calorie restriction) I really like Dr. Fungs recent post. https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/difference-calorie-restriction-fasting-fasting-27/

The summary is spot on for me:
“So here’s your choices:

1) Caloric Reduction as Primary: less weight loss (bad), more lean mass loss (bad), less visceral fat loss (bad), harder to keep weight off (bad), hungrier (bad), higher insulin (bad), more insulin resistance (bad), perfect track record over 50 years unblemished by success (bad)

2) Intermittent Fasting: More weight loss, more lean mass gain, more visceral fat loss, less hunger, been used throughout human history, lower insulin, less insulin resistance.

Almost every medical society, doctor, dietician and mainstream media will tell you to use choice #1. I prefer to tell people to take choice #2.”

Some factors leading to calories reduction diets failing where fasts may succeed include:

1. Calory reduction diets retain constancy of eating, just at a lower level. Therefore the body is not forced to switch into ketosis (fat burning). So instead of switching to burning stored energy reserves (fat), the body simply reduces energy output to match the reduced energy input. i.e. Less activity, more tired, lower metabolism

2. Under calory reduction the body grabs proteins as an extra energy source to counter the reduction in other energy input. This results in muscles being depleted because of proteins being used instead for energy. The resulting lowered lean body mass means lowered metabolism. On the other hand, once the body has switched to ketosis under fasting there is no energy shortage, so no need to use proteins for energy, so no extra muscle depletion, and so no lowered metabolism.

3. Hormones react to calory reduction energy shortages in a way that strongly increases our desire to seek food. The equivalent hormone responses don’t happen when the body switches to ketosis possibly because there is no energy shortage when fat is being burned. This hormone difference is a long term difference between the two methods of weight reduction. i.e. the hunger pangs stick longterm under calorie reduction diets.

4. Calory reduction diets give us no break from our habit of eating the fake (processed) foods that caused our weight problem in the first place. Fasting gives our bodies this break. The fastest antedote to fake food induced insulin resistance is fasting. The next fastest is to stop eating them.

5. The body is naturally genetically adapted to fasting because fasting/sufficiency cycles have always been our natural state. We are not genetically adapted to constancy of food, much less a conscious choice of constant food limitation in the face of hunger.

Dr Jason Fung is the best resource I’ve found to explain these processes.

Losing weight without carbs is great. Maintaining it can be difficult though