Sorry for your loss Ply 🙁 Thinking of you and in awe that you can keep up fasting during this tough time xxx

I’m sorry to hear of your loss ply, may he rest peacefully xx

Thank you, DeeLite.

Jojo, I know you have it in you to resist the temptations and power through the challenges! You are one of the most determined people I have never met!

1,108 calories today. Fiber One breakfast with dried plums and almonds, creamy tomato curry soup for lunch, grilled swordfish with Greek salad for dinner. Next fast day on Thursday. Completely exhausted. Xox fast trackers!

Trying sleep but I’m too tired! 😉

Hey JoJo
I’m still trying to think of something to replace eggs occasionally.

Perhaps 200g of large microwaved mushrooms? 88 calories!
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/9182/2

Very good for selenium, has zinc, and low calorie.
My glucometer barely moves , even though their macro nutrition is 55% carb, 9% fat, 36% protein . They are still good for a low protein calories.

I think mushrooms pair well with asparagus another low calorie nutrition dense food
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2311/2

I have just completed my second week and already lost 4 pounds. I lost 2.4 in my first week and 1.6 in my second feeling so pleased.

Hello, Helen, and congratulations! Keep up the good work!

Hi everybody, I have been trying to rest and recover from minor CFS/ME setback due to adjusting to new schedule, but had another fasting day yesterday when I lost too much weight and felt like cr*p this AM, am really not happy about this! I want to be able to fast at least one day a week while in maintenance, for the health benefits, and because it used to make me feel good, but over-eating on the other days so I can fast doesn’t feel good, and it seems like I have to be in the upper end of my maintenance range before a fasting day or I lose too much weight and really, really don’t feel good!

SAMM, I am trying to find references to scientific studies of health benefits of 16:8 without calorie restriction without success. Do you know of any? simcoeluv? I figure maybe I could try 16:8 instead of 6:1, but, since I’m normally a breakfast eater, would like to know that it’s actually worth the effort.

Sorry for being such a downer! Will catch up with all your posts later.

SAMM, thanks a million. Get some sleep! I’ll survive ’til tomorrow 😉 Just miss fasting. Maybe that’s the BDNF?

jojo, thanks for looking for answers when you can — have to run off to a bit of work this afternoon — my body has been gaining and dumping 2-3 pounds of water weight each direction every day or two for the last week and a half, it seems like! Good thing I decided on a maintenance range or I would be driving myself nuts. Try to remember that water is not fat, even though the number on the scale is not what you want to see. Having to take medication with adverse side effects can definitely be tremendously frustrating. Congratulations to your daughter 🙂 and to you for helping her!

Franfit:

“SAMM, I am trying to find references to scientific studies of health benefits of 16:8 without calorie restriction without success.”

I am not aware of any evidence 16:8 has any health benefits.

The most common one you hear about is getting into the fat burning mode by not eating for that length of time. As always, whether or not that happens depends on a lot of things, and it may or may not be true. Old Atkins diet people know keto strips can be used to indicate a fat burning ‘mode’. They find getting in a fat burning mode depends both on their bodies and what they have eaten. Some people easily switch from blood sugar to fat burning and can do it in 24 hours or less – some take much longer. And even those that switch easily may not switch for a long time, depending on what they have been eating. Think of runners doing ‘carbo loading’. A high carb meal may keep the body in blood sugar for 24 or more hours – the longest I’ve seen is 40, but I’ve never really studied it. You have a much better chance of getting into the fat burning mode in 16 hours if you eat a very low carb diet. But just 16 hours between meals (or more) would not necessarily be helpful for fat burning.

Someone wrote a book on the 16:8 diet that makes hard to believe claims on the cover. When you get into the book, it is really a daily reduced calorie with exercise diet. I think that is where most of the discussion started. I think it is available on Amazon.

There have also been studies sort of using 16:8 with lab mice. But if you hear about them you have to remember a mouse has a different metabolism than a human and the human equivalent of a mouse not eating for 16 hours would be measured in several days without food for a human.

It appears to me that most that ‘do’ 16:8 or whatever actually use it as a eating reduction mechanism – they use the 8 or 6 or 4 as a way to try to limit their eating. However, I have seen 21:3 lead to weight gain – because you can eat as much of whatever you want in your ‘eating window’. I have seen no evidence that eating say 1500 calories in 8 or 6 or 4 hours, instead of three or four meals and snacks from waking to bedtime, has any proven health benefits.

But, as they say, whatever works!

Ply sorry about you family’s loss. It sounded like he had wonderful support from hospice and a loving family. Glad it does not seem to have set you back too much and you are powering on.

Regards to all. You are an amazing bunch.

simcoeluv,

“I am not aware of any evidence 16:8 has any health benefits.”

Well, that would explain why I can’t find the evidence, if it doesn’t exist.

My goal is to fast without weight loss. Theoretically, I should be able to do 6:1 by over-eating by an average of 200 calories (12.5% of TDEE) per day on the six non-fasting days. This should be easy; I’m sure people do it all the time.

It’s not easy. I apparently am not over-eating by even 100 calories per day, and yet feel like I’m eating an awfully lot.

I miss fasting. I think IF does have health benefits, at least it seems to make me feel better, and now I’m struggling to find a way to do it! Oh, well, maybe 15:1? Two fasting days a month? Or one every three weeks? Or one 36-hour fast every six weeks, or one 72-hour fast every three months? What are my options that are likely to do me some good? Losing more weight is not an option. Just maintaining my weight loss would not seem to be as good as IF for blood glucose control, insulin sensitivity, decreased IGF-1, increased BDNF, etc.

jojo, I think SAMM was describing for me how he did 19.5/4.5, since I asked him about 16:8, I don’t think this is what he’s doing now.

franfit:

Seems you have come up with a good reason to be overweight – one can get the benefits of fasting without having to worry about weight loss!

A good lesson for newbies, especially if they are in a hurry – take your time or too soon you will be wondering how to get the benefits of fasting without losing too much weight. What a problem.

There is one BBC program I wish a lot more people would watch that might have your answer (tongue in cheek) – it had thin people eat 5000 cal. a day for a month. Some gained double digit body fat percentages (but some did not gain much at all). If you were unlucky (lucky?) and gained, you could take a few months to lose it back and do it over and over! And think of all of the food you could eat (enjoy?) say a month or two a year.

Not kidding about the program, though. Its called “Why Are Thin People Not Fat?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-A0iHSdcA The link is a little cumbersome but worth the bother.

I’ll think about your problem and get back to you – but not necessarily with a good answer! Its one of those I wish I had your problem things.

Jojo im on discovery phase of diabetes.

every morning I eat something to see how I react to its glucosemeter score . And then I eat alot of vegies and walk likecrazy. Not fasting a t this time. But im at 42lbs of my 100 lbs goal. By september 2018 ill be 50 years old. I plan to go back to fasting no later than september 1st. 2014 Fasting give me better numbers. So I plan to get to goal in the safest way.

However im walking and very active. Lifting walking and stability ball. Eating fish and eating sen sensibly.

I plan to make a fat attack week. Tgars safe for my glucose numbers. The fat attack weeks seems to keep me from returning to my old ways.

Thank you for your kind support, Luvtocook! You know that Ii covet your name!

Well today I am back to 55kg, *sigh* but I have had a few days of more intensive workouts and my muscles are really sore, so I am assuming some of that is water weight. Today i am fasting again and I am peeing like crazy so hopefully the scale will show different tomorrow. I just really want to hit 53.8 again on Saturday for my monthly weigh In!

How is every one else doing today?

Good morning, fast trackers 🙂

deelite, it probably is water, especially given the intensive workouts and sore muscles. Every time I would see a new (lower) number on the scale, the scales would bounce right back up again for a few days before I’d see the new, low number again. And in maintenance my weight bounces around within a 4-pound range like crazy, most of that has to be water. You *will* see 53.8 again, and I hope it’s by Saturday 🙂

SAMM, I think that exercise is also beneficial and in a similar way. I can only increase it gradually, have had difficulty implementing my new PT routine due to CFS/ME acting up, have to rest enough first, then start again. With the walking, I had to increase to 10,000 steps very gradually, when I did them last summer it left me exhausted for several days. I *will* get this figured out somehow, it will just take some time.

SAMM, I think it’s really good that you’re checking your own reactions to foods with your glucometer. What do your fasting blood sugars look like these days?

I like what you wrote about aromas. A really great one (although not great for weight loss) I use at holiday times is to make hot apple cider in a crock pot. I pour some apple cider into a crock pot in the morning, add cinnamon sticks, whole cloves and allspice, and a bit of freshly-grated nutmeg, plug it in. It fills the whole apartment (or house) with the most wonderful holiday aroma all day long, then at the end of the day we have a delicious hot drink treat (and it is a treat, when apple cider has been hot all day long it gets very sweet!) Or you can start it the night before, wake up to the aroma in the morning. It’s very festive.

jojo, I have been adding a snack of nuts. Also serving myself larger portions of my chocolate-vanilla-coffee-flavored Greek yogurt and letting myself have a bit more ice cream.

simcoeluv, remember, 5:2 did not start out as a weight-loss diet 😉 I enjoyed watching that video, would encourage others to do so. It shows you how different people react differently to eating extra calories, some people gain a lot of weight quickly, some gain very little, one guy even managed to gain *muscle* rather than fat while just lying around, no exercise involved at all! Wish I was him! 😉 Remember how those poor people looked when they were stuffing their faces to get in the required number of calories? That’s how I feel when I over-eat. Not good. Just really, really, really not good. My weight gain was due to medical problems, medications, and pregnancy. Once on, it was hard (almost impossible) to get it off. But without those things, I don’t usually gain. I did gain ten pounds when my son was put on a calorie-dense diet as a toddler, encouraging him to eat it. But those ten pounds came off easily. Thinking it through now, I think the fifty pounds that I put on in only a few months when I first got really sick was probably due mainly to increased cortisol production. Just suddenly being more sedentary couldn’t have put it on that fast, and there’s little doubt that my adrenals would have been pumping out more cortisol along with epinephrine, norepinephrine, and a few other things in response to blocked renal arteries. But what is surprising me is that, after kind of insisting that my weight stay in the 150s for several years, my body is not trying desperately to get back there. It already seems to think that my new, lower weight is right for me. Part of this might be that I’ve increased my activity level so much that my TDEE seems to have gone up rather than down after losing 40 pounds, I still need to eat the same amount or even more just to maintain. That might be something to research, if that’s why exercise seems to be important for weight maintenance, you don’t have to eat less than your baseline amount to maintain and thus don’t feel deprived. It probably only works if the exercise you choose doesn’t increase your appetite. It would never have occurred to me to eat more just because I went for a walk. I think that, if I wanted to gain weight, I would have to add processed carbs to my diet and get the whole blood sugar surge/insulin surge/hungry two hours later cycle going, and that’s so horribly unhealthy that I would not even consider it. My diet isn’t low carb, it’s only relatively low in processed carbs compared to the average American/industrialized world diet, my son still likes to cook with white flour and pasta and I still eat ice cream with sugar in it, but if I started eating processed carb between-meal snacks I imagine I could put on weight eventually without felling stuffed. But since one of the main benefits of IF is to lower blood sugar and insulin levels, that would just be ridiculous.

HELEN, congratulations on your weight loss 🙂

bergenblarter, how are you finding fasting? I think that increasing my walking really helped with my weight loss. I lost 40 pounds in 40 weeks and am now in the process of trying to figure out maintenance.

amzta, how is it going?

LUVTCOOK, is your life settling down? Are you able to start fasting again?

jojo, I remember when it seemed like it was going to take me such a long, long time to reach my weight loss goal, how impatient I felt about it. That was good, because it kept my nose to the grindstone, kept me walking through the horribly cold, snowy, icy winter we had here. So I think it’s good you’re harnessing that impatience in such a goal-directed way, you *will* reach your goal 🙂