This post was originally intended to be a simple explanation of how I managed to loose 70 pounds over the course of a year. As I was writing, I ended up including a lot of background information in the hope that it will help those that struggle with weight like I did. Weight loss and better health is possible and itās not hard if you understand what is going on in your body.
Over the past year I have lost 70 pounds. Wow, that was fun to say! People that havenāt seen me in a while (which is pretty much everyone…thank you Covid), inevitably ask how much weight I have lost and how i did it. Iāve already answered the first question – 70 pounds! – for the rest of this post I will answer the second question – How did I do it?
Intermittent Fasting – the very short answer is I adopted an eating regimen called intermittent fasting. What is intermittent fasting you ask – great question! Actually, intermittent fasting is something we all do everyday. From an eating perspective, our days are broken down into the time we are eating and the time we are not. If we arenāt eating, we are fasting, so we intermittently fast throughout the day with our longest fast usually being while we sleep – have you ever wondered why the first meal of the day is called break-fast? Great – so we already fast every day – what does this have to do with loosing weight? Another great question! Read on…
Our bodies are designed for feast and famine. When food is plentiful, we eat more than we need and store the extra as fat. Our bodies use this fat to get us through the lean times – pretty cool. Problem is, there really are no lean times anymore (at least not in our society) so we dutifully eat more than we need and our bodies dutifully store away fat for a rainy day – that never comes – and we get fat. So loosing weight is just cutting back to force your body to burn that extra weight right? Isnāt that what every diet ever has done? Not so fast – If it weāre that simple (Itās actually simpler) all those other diets would have worked…
If your like I was (and I would venture to guess that Iām not in a minority), you eat quite a bit throughout the day. You get up and immediately have breakfast, then a few hours later you may have a snack, then lunch, then maybe a little bite to get you to dinner, then maybe something while you are watching tv (and of course being from the south, plenty of sweet tea)… This might not even add up to a lot of calories, and you may think you are āeating healthyā, but itās this constant barrage of food that is making you fat. What? People say to eat six times a day to keep your blood sugar from tanking, how can this be a problem???
Insulin – Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. Itās purpose in life is to get sugar out of the blood and into the cells. Your cells canāt store large amounts of sugar so any excess gets converted to fat to be used later. You see, every time you eat something, your blood sugar goes up. Your body has to maintain blood sugar in a pretty close range or bad things happen so when blood sugar starts to rise, your body tells your pancreas to get on it. Your pancreas starts pumping out insulin, forcing sugar into the cells, your blood sugar drops, you get hungry again, eat, repeat…. This is where the idea of eating several small meals a day came from. The theory is that if you can just keep eating, you wonāt experience the swings in blood sugar caused by this process. OK, so my body is doing what it is supposed to do – getting sugar out of my blood and into my cells, whatās the big deal? Well, in short, eventually your cells get tired of being bombarded with insulin all the time and they become resistant to it. This is a condition called….
Insulin Resistance – when your cells stop responding to insulin, your body reacts by producing more of it to overcome the resistance ( because bad things happen if the sugar hangs around in the blood). The system can stay in equilibrium for quite some time like this with the pancreas pumping out ever larger amounts of insulin while the cells resist ever more. This can (and does) go on for decades. Your weight slowly creeps up, you start to put on fat around your mid section, you develop weird skin conditions like skin tags, rashes etc, but all this time, your blood sugar numbers look normal – nobody ever tests blood for insulin levels… Over time you blood sugar levels will start to slowly creep up but the doc says itās nothing to worry about – you should try to loose a few pounds and get more exercise… Eventually the numbers creep higher and you are officially pre-diabetic. Your doctor gives you some pills – guess what they do – stimulate your pancreas to make even more insulin. After a while even the pills donāt help so your doctor puts you on insulin to supplement the massive amount your body is already making!
Wow, that was a long paragraph about some scary stuff but what does it have to do with me losing 70 pounds? Well hereās the deal, once you have insulin resistance (Iām sure thatās where I was I never got to the point of high blood sugar) there is always insulin floating around in your bloodstream. Remember insulin is basically a fat storage hormone – as long as itās floating around your body isnāt going to burn fat…this is why it is so hard to loose weight by simply cutting calories. Your body needs energy to function but it literally canāt get to the energy it has stored because insulin is in the way! So can you fix insulin resistance? Yes! You can! The key is to give your body a break from constantly processing food. This gets us back to ….
Intermittent Fasting – So we already determined that we all fast every day but if the fasting time isnāt long enough, your body isnāt finished with the last meal (or snack) before the next one comes along, causing insulin to stay elevated (and preventing fat burning). So the key is to extend the time between eating to allow insulin levels to return to normal and give your body some time to burn fat. So how long do you need to extend it? It varies, but for meaningful results, probably at least 12 hours. So letās say you eat dinner at 7PM, if you donāt eat anything (no snacking, no sweet tea) until 7AM the next morning, you have just fasted for 12 hours! Good for you! If this doesnāt work for you, you may need to increase your fasting time. A convenient way to do this is to simply skip breakfast. But wait – Iāve always been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. OK, remember breakfast is break-fast – nobody said you have to break your fast as soon as you get up in the morning (or that you have to break your fast with cereal and toast). By skipping…delaying breakfast you can increase your fasting time by several hours which will provide huge benefits to your body.
But I get super hungry! The main reason people get overly hungry when fasting is that they are eating to many carbohydrates. Eating carbohydrates (it doesnāt really matter what kind) will cause insulin spikes as we have discussed. One of the goals of fasting is to re-train your body to burn fat. If you are eating carbohydrates all the time it canāt do that so your fasting times will not be pleasant. Also realize that it will take some time to adjust to (particularly to delaying breakfast) but you will get used to it in a couple of weeks.
But Iām already eating healthy – I thought I was too! If you look at government recommendations ( remember the food pyramid- yeah) you should be basing your diet on….Carbohydrates! Turns out we have an obesity epidemic that started about the time the food pyramid came out… So that Granola bar your having for breakfast or snack – lots oā carbs that are derailing you. That hearty bowl of oatmeal – same. That pasta your having for dinner… Current research indicates that a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates is superior to the food pyramid (which recommends the exact opposite). Iām not suggesting you need to go full Keto, but cutting back on the carbs will help you a lot.
So What did I do? In August of 2019 I started experimenting with skipping breakfast. I actually started by reducing my breakfast to a banana (note, this is the wrong thing to do, turns out bananas are pretty much pure sugar). I did see some results from this however and decided to start skipping breakfast. I started seeing consistent weight loss doing this and slowly started cutting carbs in my diet. I didnāt really do any formal exercise for the first several months. At some point I started walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes a day and later I added some simple calisthenics. So currently, I exercise first thing most mornings (I tend to take the weekends off), I drink black coffee (black coffee does not break a fast), I eat lunch around 11:30, and dinner around 6:00 (fasting for ~18 hours). I still eat carbs in moderation and limit simple sugars. Thatās it. I think the key is consistency – so if I do these things regularly I feel like I can have birthday cake when it occasionally crosses my plate – cause you gotta live a little. Oh, and chocolate – I have a couple of pieces of dark chocolate ( Iām talking the 95% stuff or sometimes even 100% ) every day. It works for me….
Other Benefits – 70 pounds is a pretty big benefit but it gets better! I used to have an on-and-off problem with breakouts on my face. At some point I noticed that these had ceased to happen. I had also started to develop a few skin tags on my neck, which are largely gone now. Turns out many skin problems are caused by inflammation which is caused by chronically high insulin levels. Reducing inflammation also has many cardiovascular as well as other benefits. In addition, I have much higher energy levels, my brain is clearer, and I donāt have the ever-present urge to eat that I used too. Probably the biggest surprise for me was how much size I lost around my waist. Belly fat is one of the hallmarks of insulin resistance so it makes sense that reversing insulin resistance would reduce belly fat but the extent of it was still surprising to me. For those of you that have known me for a while, you know that I used to be an avid bike rider, riding 100+ miles per week burning literally thousands of calories. Even with all this exercise I struggled with belly fat. With intermittent fasting, belly fat is no longer a problem for me – my waist size is smaller than it has been in 20-30 years!
Autophagy – Another interesting side effect of fasting is a process known as autophagy. Basically autophagy is a process where the body repairs itself. You see, digesting food takes a lot of energy and when your body is doing that, it doesnāt do much else. When it doesnāt have food to digest, it can get rid of damaged cells, etc. Some research has indicated that this may prove positive in boosting immune function, and reducing diseases such as cancer.
Resources – There is a vast amount of information about this topic on the web and in books. Here are some of the best resources I have found helpful to learn about this stuff. If you are at all interested in exploring intermittent fasting I encourage you to get started by looking at some of these resources.
- Dr. Ken Berry – Dr Berry is a family practice doctor based in rural Tennessee. He is a big advocate of fasting as well as the ketogenic/carnivore diet. He is also author of Lies My Doctor Told Me – Medical Myths That Can Harm Your Health. His YouTube channel has a wealth of information and is one of my go to places for information. One of the things I appreciate about Dr. Berry is the way he backs everything up with clinical studies. If I lived in rural Tennessee, Dr. Berry would be my doctor.
- Dr. Jason Fung – Dr. Fung is a Canadian nephrologist and the author of several books including The Obesity Code. While treating his diabetic kidney patients, Dr Fung began to realize that standard therapies didnāt solve his patients problems so he started looking for alternative therapies. His research led him to fasting/low carb eating. He has many videos online most of which are linked on the Diet Doctor website. I like thhe fact that Dr. Fung has used his methods on actual diabetic patients with positive results. His advice is also very practical and easy to incorporate into real life.
- Dr. William Davis – Dr. Davis is a cardiologist and author of the Wheat Belly. Much like Dr Fung, Dr Davis realized traditional therapies werenāt helping his patients get well. He focuses primarily on eliminating grains from the diet as well as fasting. His YouTube channel is here.
- Dr. Eric Berg – Dr Berg is actually a chiropractor who has spent the last several years focusing on holistic medicine. He is a wealth of knowledge on all things diet and health. He is a big proponent of the ketogenic diet and fasting. He regularly posts to his YouTube channel here.
- Dr. Sten Ekberg – Dr Ekberg is another chiropractor focusing on holistic medicine. He also posts regularly to his YouTube channel.
I realize this was a super long post. If you made it to this point, congratulations and thanks for hanging with me. My hope is that this may help someone see their way to meaningful weight loss and better health. You are what you eat is an accurate statement but when you eat may be even more important. I have struggled with weight for a large portion of my life and I truly believe fasting/low carb is the right way to manage not only weight, but many other aspects of health as well. Feel free to post questions or comments below. I would love to hear from you!
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