Hello all! It’s so nice to hear from you again.

I’ve gone off the rails a bit this past month: no fasting and a three kilo increase which is all very depressing especially as my doctor will nag as I’m due for my 3-monthly blood check this week.

What to do, eh? Start again I suppose. It’s hard to post when you haven’t got any good news to report.
I will have to pull my socks up before I start busting out of my new, smaller clothes.

How are you all going to manage Xmas and the New Year? Too much feasting! Wonderful though.

I hope you have a really great time of celebration and love, a chance to meet friends and family and indulge your loved ones and yourselves (just a bit, mind)

Lots of love from Sue in Japan

Hello everyone just coming back to have another try, just got weighed and tip the scales at 330lbs,I am 62 years old and have taken early retirement,i live in Manchester uk, not sure what days to do my fast,i am open to suggestions.

Hi Silversue

Firstly let me say that my weight fluctuates. From my reading of a few threads, this is the norm. I choose to fast twice a week, Monday and Thursday, and I gave up all sugars and white foods and processed foods. I lost 17 kg over 6 months, and I lost 3 clothing sizes. I lived the new me for 18 months. Then gradually I began to make poor food choices and put back on 3 kg. I am now dealing with that by giving up all sugars and starches. No potatoes, pasta, rice, sugars, breads, pastries, cakes, sweets etc. until I lose the weight again. Then I can only have a helping of one of these per week.

Have you read Michel Mosleys Blood Sugar Diet? If your doctor is worried, the research in that book should jolt you into doing something about your health.

Is there a reason you say you’re off the diet? Have you read the original Michael Mosley Fast Diet book? The point they make is that this is really not a diet, but a way of life from now on. If you can begin to see that this is your new way of life, you will develop a different attitude. You have only to read many of the comments on many of these threads, including the Maintenance people.

Your aim is to stop seeing the eating of white and processed foods as the norm, and to start seeing lean meat, fish and vegetables as the new norm. Full fat white yogurt, avocado, and olive oil are all needed for satiety and health.

Even if you eat badly or eat too much every now and then, you can see that behaviour for the aberration it is. It should not be seen as a failure to diet. It is our food choice that puts the weight on. And also lack of exercise each day. Sugars and starchy foods are addictive, and they make you want more. Whereas nutritious food leaves us feeling satisfied for longer.

Fasting is for our health. It’s side effect is to help us lose weight, through a reset of our appetite, and to learn what normal portion size is, and to learn to love healthy food. I have halved the amount of food I eat since beginning to fast two years ago. I do not feel hungry all the time as you might think. Hope this helps.

Cheers, Bay 🌺🌺

Hi Bay,

Food for thought! I’m at the end of my weight loss challenge and I suspect I was just bored to death with it.

Doc wants four or five more kilos off to put me in a zone where I have more ‘wiggle room’ I suspect as I am already down to a BMI of 23.1 and my blood work is good. Also I live in Japan where everyone is slight.

All of your very good advice I would have to tinker with to allow for a dislike of most meats and most fish. I struggle to eat them once or twice a week. Whole grain foods give me the ‘runs’ and I love the white rice in Japan and potatoes.

So, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Thank you for recommending that book. I will order that and see if it will jog me back into sensible eating again.

Congratulations on doing so well!

Susan

Hi Mary & good to hear from you all and how things are….Since I got to my ‘goal’ last October I started doing a maintenance day by having juice & porridge for breakfast,soup (approx 100 cals)and small piece of fruit ie satsuma for lunch and then a vege curry or prawn salad for supper with no add-ons ie rice/bread etc( trying to eat no more than 600 cals a day)..That worked fine for a while but I found it difficult when it was really cold!! So what I’ve been doing since then is trying one day a week/fortnight to cut back a bit – keep off cake/choc etc and I seem to have managed it…I am still about 1lb over what I was back in October. I plan to go back to a maintenance day as it gets warmer and I can manage it!! I try to weigh myself every day too. I probably won’t stay in touch with this group and haven’t joined any others but have enjoyed reading and being part of it and I wish you all well, health & happiness. xx

Hi MaryWWriter,
I haven’t read all your posts here, there are so many, but I’ve read some of them. I’m also Canadian, about to turn 61. My wife and I started weight loss on January 1st. It was just sort of a coincidence not really a new years resolution to lose weight, but a goal to lose weight that just started on January 1st.

But my real goal was to figure out how I got fat – and I reached 237 lbs, on a small 6′ frame. Or actually I wanted to answer the question how people get fat in general – why people get fat. So it was book after book after book after book of reading, and following the science and now I have some ideas, but I also had to deal with the immediate problem of healing my body.

I had the classic male big belly, but I have done a good job thus far and I’ve ditched about 70 lbs, and the belly has vanished completely, but more importantly, I’ve made huge gains in reducing hunger – which is essentially the root of the problem.

By the time that I had discovered this 5:2 diet based on intermittent fasting, I had already lost this weight 2 months ago, but in the last 2 months I have done a lot of fasting to reduce hunger. There was one 3 day fast followed by a 48 hour fast that I considered reset a lot of hunger hormones. I was not the same after those 2 fasts, and then I did a month of just eating 1 meal a day, and no carbohydrates except that in non-starchy vegetables. After 2 months, there was no weight loss, but my waist size was about 2″ less on my jeans, so in that respect, I did lose some fat I think.

Anyway, how I lost my weight was pretty simple. I just completely eliminated sugar, and processed food from my diet, and eventually all grains. All that weight was gone in 5 months and that was before I did any fasting. But there were 2 big scientific papers that convinced me that the real root of the problem for me was my regular consumption of diet drinks, and their effect on my gut bacteria. The gut microbiota changes because of the diet drinks, and also because of a junk food diet, with a lot of sugar and refined carbs. It makes a person insulin resistant, and then every time they eat sugar or carbs, their insulin goes super high, and stays high. That of course makes hunger go through the roof, and it’s the big beastie in the room.

So by eating no sugar, fasting to restore the more normal mix of bacteria, ditching diet drinks, and eventually doing resistance training exercise, I think that I’ve finally healed my insulin resistance, and most of the hunger that I once had. Not only that but my taste palate has changed.

I also wanted to mention that I’m very very careful now to include fermented vegetables with every meal because the probiotic bacteria in fermented vegetables like kimchi and sauerkraut is in the trillions of beneficial bacteria, and a few forkfuls are equal to a few bottles of expensive pro-biotic pills, of which few make it to your colon for any benefit. So now I eat unpasteurized cheese, Kvass drink, kombucha, kimchi, fermented pickles, and sauerkraut. The more fermented vegetables you include, the more diversity you can include in your gut. If you have the wrong ratio of good/bad species of bacteria in your gut, it will make you fat, and also cause all sorts of immune problems. I’ve noticed that a regular allergy attack that I used to get almost every week or 2 weeks has now completely vanished, along with basically all gut problems – gone like magic. So if i had to suggest just one thing to someone wanting to lose weight, I’d say heal your gut. It’s not by accident that farmers notice that when they give antibiotics to animals they gain weight. Antibiotics will make you have long term weight issues, and take a long time to recover from. Most of the Yogurts these days on the market are just desert, and have few probiotics left in them. It’s easier and cheaper to just ferment your own vegetables.