How did I end up doing it?

Previously I did a 42 hours fast. After that I returned to doing the usual 19 hours intermittent fasting with 5 hours eating window. But I thought to myself that I could do even better and try a longer fast to loss even more body fat as a result. So I tried and finished a longer fast which was scheduled to be 66 hours, but in the end ended up being 68 hours. The fast ended with a big surprise that I’ll discuss later.

Initial setup

Fasting length

From 4:20 PM on Monday, Nov 21th to 12:20 PM on Thursday, Nov 24th.

Fasting progress

Detailed progress

Same information as a graph

Final result

After 63 hours of fasting at 7:20 AM, Nov 24th

A big surprise

The fast has been finished successfully. This time it was more difficult than 42 hours fast. What is funny I did 26 hours more this time, but weight loss was the same as during 42 hours fast.

• Initial weight was 78.1 kg (172.18 lb), body fat 24.8 %
• Final weight is 74.4 kg (164.02 lb), body fat 23.4 %

How did I end up doing it?

I am doing Intermittent Fasting for 23 weeks now. Starting from about 18th week my weight loss plateaued and I needed to do something to get it moving. So I recalled that I can try doing extended fasts which are fasts longer than 24 hours. Well, I decided to do 42 hours fast that starts on 6:00 PM and ends after 42 hours on 12:00 PM.

Initial setup

Fasting length

From 5:40 PM on Wednesday, Nov 9th to 11:59 AM on Friday, Nov 17th.

Fasting progress

Detailed progress

Same information as a graph

Final result

After 42 hours of fasting 12:00 PM

The fast has been finished successfully. Overall feeling is good. Nothing special to report except for crumbling belly feeling yesterday in the evening.

• Initial weight was 77.2 kg (170.2 lb). Final weight is 74.7 kg (164.7 lb). That’s after drinking a cup of water and a cup of coffee which added about 0.4 kg (0.9 lb) of weight.

Again the same observation

Initial setup

Weight at 14th hour of the fast just before going for a walk/running was 75.8 kg (167.1 lb), body fat 23.9 %.

After walking

After walking/running for 66 minutes on 14th hours of the fast and doing 6.67 km (4.14 mi), weight became 75.3 kg (166 lb), body fat 23.8 %.

Overall weight loss 0.5 kg (1.1 lb), body fat 0.1 %.

Now, after 5 months of measuring weight to fat loss dependency,
Speaking of myself, I know that losing 0.1 % of body fat corresponds to 100 gram (0.22 lb) of fat loss.

Net body fat loss

So net body fat loss is 100 gram (0.22 lb) and the rest of 400 gram is water (sweat, breathing) and possibly energy that went on heating the body, since I walked at 5 degrees centigrade (41 F) with only T-shirt and light jacket on.

Why Calories In equals Calories Out is wrong again

According to tracker calculation below I burned 378 calories, which is 378 / 9 calories in 1 gr of fat = 42 gram of fat loss.

Again, it contradicts what my scale is showing, which means that Calories In = Calories Out theory is wrong. But we knew this already.

Intro

There are a number of posts that I wrote about books and how they helps us change our lives and ourselves. The books below literary helped me to change my body composition and shed dozens of pounds of fat that came from eating sugar, sweets, starchy foods and drinking soft drinks, in short, what we call nowadays Ultra Processed Food.

It seems to me they could be helpful to some of you who wants to make a change.

Books on fasting I read and recommend

I sorted the books based on how I liked them the most.

1. FAST. FEAST. REPEAT by Gin Stephens
2. The Obesity Code by Jason Fung
3. The Complete Guide to Fasting by Jason Fung
4. Why We Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman
5. The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda
6. Fat Chance by Robert Lustig
7. The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes
8. The Intermittent Fasting Revolution by Mark Mattson
9. The Every Other Day Diet by Krista Varady
10. Delay, Don’t Deny by Gin Stephens (it was her first book on the subject. In comparison to her second this one has more personal info about Gin’s experience with IF)

Books on nutrition that I read, but they were not that easy to make it through

1. The Case For Keto by Gary Taubes
2. The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz
3. Metabolical by Robert Lustig
4. Swallow This by Joanna Blythman (I’ve finished only 3/4 of this book. It turned to be quite boring)

There is a difference

There is a big difference between Intermittent Fasting (Time-restricted Eating) and a diet (Calorie Restriction).

In the Flipping the Metabolic Switch: Understanding and Applying Health Benefits of Fasting (Obesity, 2018 Feb., 26(2): 254-268) paper by Mark P. Matson et al. they are defined as follows,

• Intermittent Fasting (IF) – This eating pattern involves fasting for varying periods of time, typically for 12 hours or longer.
• Calorie Restriction (CR) – This eating pattern involves a continuous reduction in caloric intake without malnutrition.

Your typical diet

During regular diet when caloric intake is restricted a few things happen to your body.

1. The body tunes down your metabolism. As a consequence you can have a feeling of cold, mood change and feeling of tiredness.
2. Due to lower Leptin hormone, which signals to the brain that you have not enough stored energy, you start feeling continuous hunger.
3. While at first you lose some weight (mostly muscle), in the end after struggling with the diet you gain your weight back, but more. After all 99.5 % of diets fail.

As for Intermittent Fasting

While you fast for at least 16 hours, which allows your body to deplete glycogen stored in muscles and liver, your body will switch from using glucose as a main source of energy to using ketones produced by liver from fatty acids (fat).

1. When this transition happens your body is perfectly happy, there is no feeling of hunger.
2. Metabolism is actually elevated and you feel good.
3. There is almost no loss of muscle mass, but a connective tissue. Instead what is lost is the fat that was stored by your body. And if you do resistive training or walking while fasting there will be actually muscle mass gain!

Conclusion

So diet and fasting are complete opposites of one another.

One thing to mention is that it takes time (a number of weeks) for body to get used to fasting.
And even then you still could feel hunger in evenings due to naturally elevated level of the Ghrelin hormone. So it’s not simple, but doable and has such health benefits, not mentioning fat loss, which makes it beneficial in the long run.

Processed Food is a blocker for weight loss

When you eat sugary and starchy foods, aka Processed Food your glucose level in the blood is high, as a consequence Insulin hormone level is also high. When it’s high fat is stored.
If you eat more than 3 times a day and have snacks between the meals Insulin will stay high. So fat will continue to accumulate in the body. Fructose in processed food is very harmful too, but it’s for another post, meanwhile check what Dr. Robert Lustig has to say about it.

Solution

Drop Insulin level by constraining when you eat, which is called eating window. I have on average 5 hours eating window and 19 hours of fasting time.

Research shows that having 8 hours eating window could be enough for body to switch to burning stored fat.

My emphasize is on the word could. This is because it’s not enough to follow 8 hours eating window. Because if you do, but continue to eat Processed Food, fasting for 16 hours could be not enough to use all glycogen stored in muscles and liver. If this happens your body won’t switch to burning fat at all.

So weight loss algorithm is simple

1. Have at most 8 hours eating window and 16 hours of fast time.
2. Eating sugary and starchy food during eating window prevents you from losing weight during 16 hours fast.
3. Walking or doing resistance training at the very last hours of the fast, when body switched to using stored fat as energy speeds up the fat loss even more.

From time to time I talk to people who started doing Intermittent Fasting with the goal to loss weight, but they don’t know how and why it works. Moreover, they are not even interested to gain this understanding.

I strongly disagree with this approach to Intermittent Fasting. Without such understanding it’s difficult to stick with Intermittent Fasting in the long run because you can lose your motivation very quickly.

Also, without knowing what you are doing you and why fasting works you don’t know what to adjust to keep losing fat when the weight loss plateaus.

Instead strive to understand how and why fasting works by reading books, papers and videos that explain scientific basis of the fasting.

For example,

• Books by Gin Stephens, Jason Fung, Benjamin Bikman, Mark Mattson are a good place to start
• YouTube videos by the same authors
• Scientific papers about Intermittent Fasting (Time Restricted Eating) at PubMed

Mission accomplished, the weight is 75 kg (165.3 lb)!

• Today is the day when I achieved my initial goal of 75 kg (165.3 lb) of weight. Body fat is at 23.7 %.
• It is a weight loss of 15.6 kg (34 pounds), since the beginning of fasting on June 13th. It took 20 weeks to get here. From 90.6 kg (200 pounds) -> 75.0 kg today. Hooray.
• Well, the scale also showed 74.9 kg at first.

Up to date results

This post is a continuation of the posts where I wrote about my progress following Intermittent Fasting eating regimen. I remind you that my end goal is a body fat of 20% and later 15%. Today I will provide a status update at the end of the 20th week.

This week I had a flexible eating window, which on average was 5 hours long. And on average I ate two meals in that eating window.

My current weight as of 2022-10-29 is 75 kg (165.3 lb) and body fat 23.7 %.

• Weight loss so far: 34 pounds (15.6 kg)
• Body fat loss so far: about 6.3 %

Legend

• Fast Hours stands for how many hours I do not eat anything except for drinking water, black coffee or tea (no milk or sugar).
• Eating window hours stands for the hours where I have two meals. I have no snacks between meals.

Same information as a chart

Detailed weekly regimen

• Here come this week statistics. As you can see weight fluctuates during the week, which is expected.
• What’s important that week over week there is a tendency for weight to decrease.

Useful references

Video

Intermittent Fasting with low carb diet works much better.

Link to the paper – Time-restricted eating with or without low-carbohydrate diet reduces visceral fat and improves metabolic syndrome: A randomized trial

Gaining weight with science

If you want to become fat and quickly then there is nothing like a scientific approach to follow to achieve this goal.

It is known that sugar, fructose and starchy food consumption is the best possible way to go. Eating foods that contain these ingredients causes Insulin hormone level in the blood to be high. If you eat frequently Insulin stays high for prolonged period of times. Insulin is the hormone, when elevated, that directs fat cells to store incoming energy as fat. When Insulin is low, the reverse is happening and your body starts tapping into fat storage (but we want to gain fat here. Aren’t we?).

When and what to eat to gain fat?

Now, armed with the science we know what to do. Eat sugary, starchy foods, aka processed foods, and do it as frequently as possible. Let’s say 6 times a day for simplicity.

Breakfast

Well, start eating as soon as you wake up. Don’t forget to select cereals with the highest amount of sugar possible. Add skim milk, honey and maybe maple syrup to the mix. Finish with a big glass of orange juice and maybe a cup of latte with sugar. Why not?

Snack time

Now, that you anticipate your lunch it’s time to eat a snack, any chocolate or energy bar will do. Don’t forget to drink a cup of tea or coffee with sugar or even sugar free sweetener, they cause the same Insulin spike, so never mind.

Lunch

Hooray, lunch time is here and it’s time to focus on pastas, pizzas, potatoes, you name it. Remember that catchup and sweet chilly sauce is the best to add a lot. Why not? At the end of lunch, for desert, indulge yourself with croissants with chocolate or jam while drinking tea or coffee with honey. If you don’t feel like drinking tea or coffee, then soft drink, diet or not makes the day.

Snack time again

It’s difficult to wait for a dinner, time is crawling. Solution? Eat some more snack bars. The more the better.

Dinner

This meal is almost like lunch: pasta, pizza, rice, potatoes, sweet sauces, lean meet etc. At the end it’s nice to have a cheese or chocolate cake. This time cappuccino with 2-3 teaspoons of sugar makes the day.

At night

It’s late at night and it’s time to open a fridge and get some beer and bring a pack of chips. You are watching your favorite show on TV or on the Internet. Don’t be shy, having one more beer and some more chips is okay just before going to bed. This will ensure that your Circadian Rhythm goes awry and you accumulate as much fat as possible during your sleep.

Next day

Repeat all over again.

P. S.

What I wrote above is a sarcastic description of how to become fat. Sadly it’s a Standard American Diet (SAD). If you want to lose fat, then stop doing everything mentioned in the post. Fasting can also help a lot.

Food for thought

• I see that after loosing 14.4 kg (31.7 pounds) within 4 and a half months current weight loss is comparatively small.
• As can be seen in the graph below the fastest rate of weight loss was during first 8 weeks of the fasting. And loss rate was 1.3 kg/week (2.87 lb/ week).
• Then during 8 – 13th week the rate of loss became less steep, 0.46 kg/ week (1 lb/ week). So this rate is almost three times slower.
• Finally from week 13 to week 20, the rate became even slower,
  0.24kg/ week (0.53 lb/ week). Which is six times slower than the initial rate of weight loss.

So beware that initial weight loss can be blazingly fast for you, but then plateau.
I went from 200 lb (90.6 kg) to 167 lb (76.2 kg) today. As a result of this weight loss I look already quite slim, so maybe my body doesn’t want to cooperate 

Useful references

A book to consider

Why We Get Sick by Prof. Benjamin Bikman.