Hello everyone.
I’m currently 60 years old. I consider myself late to the party in the sense that I started losing weight on Jan 1/2016, but after 5 months and ditching 70 lbs, I’m essentially at normal weight for the last 2 months or so, but it was actually in May that I developed an interest in fasting, fermented vegetables as probiotics to heal the gut, and now the idea of carb cycling along with fasting, and I’ve started doing resistance training to develop muscular strength and improve insulin sensitivity along with overall strength. I’m very very aware that most people who lose weight will eventually regain the weight, so I’m gearing up to fight the phase 2 aspect of it all, namely keeping the weight off.

My approach to lose weight was to use a low carb diet, eating mostly whole natural foods, and take sugar intake to zero, since almost all the sugar in the modern diet was added through processed foods.

I consider it significant that I’ve ditched a long habit of several decades of drinking diet Pepsi after I read about experiments that showed diet soda altering the gut microbiota of mice, and making them glucose intolerant, and then making the glucose intolerance disappear by treating them with antibiotics. I also was amazed to learn that antibiotics seems to cause weight gain in animals, probably through a disruption in gut microbiota.

So although I had lost my weight before I started eating fermented vegetables, I did notice that my allergy problems have vanished, and I think that that is because the probiotics is starting to heal my gut.

Because continuous low carb can cause a down regulation of thyroid hormones, i’ve started to eat my meals with a carb cycling approach, which is similar to the 5:2 diet approach in that it can avoid plateaus because of the cycling approach to eating calories and in my case also cycling the carbohydrates from high carb days, to very very low carb days. I’ll know more about that approach in the coming months from watching my own body.

Hi K-Lo,
Congratulations on reaching your goal. There are strong forces though that want to bring you back, so a person needs to be very vigilant in my opinion. The diet soda I’m sure had a big effect on me because I started drinking that stuff in 1982, and by the 1990s I was becoming a regular consumer. I must have drank about 30,000 cans of it altogether in my lifetime. I’m off it now for 2 months, and I won’t drink another can EVER. It’s hard enough maintaining normal body weight without working against myself.

I’ve also read Jason’s Fung’s book, and I watched all 6 – 1 hour videos on YouTube entitled the “Aetiology of Obesity”. From this stuff I learned about the importance of meal timing and fasting, and also what I already knew, the role of Insulin.

What is missing though is the role of the gut microbiome that seems to cause the carbohydrate intolerance.

Thus far for fermented vegetables, I eat Kimchi – I made my own, but I also buy it at Costco. I made my own Sauerkraut, but it’s not ready yet. I have 2 fermentation crocks full of that. I also fermented pickles in Mason jars, and I made some beet juice (called Kvass). The Kvass is the easiest thing in the world to make. Now I buy cheese that is alive – and made from unpasteurized milk, like they eat in France and Italy. It’s more expensive, but worth every penny for the health benefits. I also buy Kombucha at Costco, but because of the sugar that is still in there, I only drink 1/2 a bottle in a day. I plan on making my own Kombucha. I’m very excited by all this because already it seems to have cured me of my allergy attacks, and pretty much everything now in my gut is working nicely. I never used to be able to breathe in air conditioning, and now even that doesn’t bother me. My skin also seems better.

I’ve just started the carb cycling because I was at a 2 month plateau, although I’m not really fat anymore, but I can’t see the 6 pack yet because of a think layer of fat. But I eat 1 high carb, high calorie day, followed by 2 or 3 zero carb days lower calorie days. I consider zero carb days where the only carbs are from non-starchy vegetables. I might include a moderate carb day, if there are 3 zero carb days. And now I’ve started resistance training to help with insulin resistance. As far as I’m able to determine my insulin sensitivity is much much better over the last few months as a result of the changes that I’ve made.

On the high carb days, I eat about 15 calories/lb/day and on the low carb days, I eat 10-12 calories/lb/day. I’m not a very strong believer in calories in/calories out, but it does serve as a tool to estimate food intake.

I eat a sprouted grain bread, and either pasta, rice, or steel cut oats. But I could eat potatoes. Sweet potatoes would be better. In general I would like to go with the slower carbs like sprouted grain bread so that I don’t get an over spike of insulin. But I don’t eat sugar because 50% of that is going to just go to your liver and overload the liver and get spit out as triglycerides for fat storage. I might eat sugar ever few times just for some sort of celebration, and even then I’m careful about how much.

It’s very very easy to do a high carb day, and it’s like a party, and life is good, and it actually works to your advantage. It’s probably not for a beginner because they might be too insulin resistant, and when a person first starts losing weight, it’s easy to lose weight just by cutting out sugar and starch.

There is something to be said for making the eating pattern unpredictable for the body. But since I’m just starting, I plan my days very carefully.