Well, got on the scale this morning and was a bit surprised by how much I lost. I was down about 2.5 lbs this week, my fifth on IF. Last week I only lost about a half lb so it all evens out and I'm still way under 2 lbs per week (which I think should be my max) for weight loss since I started losing. Seems like the losses are 0 to .5 lbs one week, then 1.5+ lbs the next week, then again 0 to .5 lbs the next, etc. Almost makes me think that I should only weigh myself every 2 weeks instead of every one, but I'm just too impatient and want to see that I'm making progress, even if it's .5 lbs. I didn't get to take my bp this morning, so I'll try to do that tomorrow. Still, it was a nice little New Years present!

Some of you also may be interested in this. I found a doctor who's written a short book about the same basic thing I do. I've read half of it so far and it's interesting although I haven't seen scientific references to studies yet. Then again, I'm reading the online version, which is free, and maybe the paper version has that stuff. Anyway, if you're interested in reading it, you can check out his site and click on the link in the upper right corner to download his book for free in pdf format:

http://www.fast-5.com/

This week I tried something slightly new. I planned to splurge a bit on one day (last Friday), when I knew that my father-in-law would be bringing us home-made cookies that his wife makes every Xmas. Since I've been IF'ing for a month and have been strictly lc'ing for over two months, and have also been extremely good this whole holiday season, I decided to give myself this one splurge. I can't say it was worth it. Sure some of the cookies tasted good, but nothing amazing, and it was really hard to stop after the first 10 or so. I ended up eating a lot.

Sunday's plan was for us to eat out to celebrate my FIL's birthday, but due to scheduling, it had to be done early - at 4pm. I normally start to eat in the evening between 6 and 8, so 4 would have meant cutting my fast time down at least by a couple of hours. I thought I could try shrinking my eating Window on Saturday to 1-2 hours and eating from 6pm to 7pm or 8pm, thus giving me at least 20 hours that is usually my minimum fasting time. But then I thought maybe I should try something new. I calculated that with the cookies I had eaten close to double what I normally do for a day, so maybe Saturday I should try eating nothing. I initially planned on this, but then decided to not be so extreme, at least this particular time. I wanted to get a few calories in and in particular protein so that my body wouldn't start consuming my own muscle. I ended up with a couple of cups of kale cooked in chicken broth and a can of tuna in water. According to fitday this was 236 calories and 36 grams of protein. So not exactly my normal intake of protein, but a decent percentage of it.

Despite the effort trying to come up with this "optimal" minimal meal, otherwise I was pretty much not thinking about food as I was not hungry at all, either before the meal or after, or the following day. I'm not sure if just that bunch of liquid and a bit of protein and carbs filled me up to stave off any hunger and/or if I would have eventually had some hunger later that evening if I hadn't eaten this. It's also possible that the additional calories eaten the day before gave me an extra cushion, I don't know.

A lot of people seem to have difficulty doing the type of IF where you eat 3 meals on day 1, then nothing on day 2, then 3 meals again on day 3, etc., mainly because they don't like going to sleep hungry. I wonder, though if you only eat one meal a day on your eat days if this makes things easier. I say this because doing so means you are conditioning your body to go for at least 20 hours between meals and so will never have occasion to eat a meal and then eat another within 5 hours. Perhaps keeping your body used to this more regular pattern of three meals - even though it's just every other day and not every day - means your body never fully adapts to the idea of extended fasting? I don't know, but it's worth a shot for those who do the alternate day type. Then again, there are some definite drawbacks with this approach. One is that if you are going to try to maintain your regular caloric intake over time, you will have to eat the equivalent of 2 days worth of calories for each meal. For me that's 3,000 calories. I've had a hard enough time eating 1500 some days, but then again, the day with the cookies was apparently 2500 calories, so it's probably possible, but it will take a lot of effort and planning, and lots of densely caloric foods. Secondly, though, you're not just fasting for 36 hours in this situation, but around 44. 44 hours seems like a long time, especially on a regular basis. I know there is no data on what the optimal period is, but once that's determined, there should probably be a kind of bell curve where we can see at what points (both on the short and long end) fasting becomes ineffective or even counter-productive and unhealthy...

I don't weigh myself till Thursday but I'm pretty confident that I'll lose, or at least stay the same this week...

Just hit 4 weeks of IF and am down another 3/4 of a lb from last week. Not significant, but it's a loss, not a gain, and I've kind of been alternating one week with a bigger loss and one with a small/no loss. And hey, I'm in the 150's for the first time in almost 3 years, which is a great psychological booster. I still feel like I have lots of energy, even not getting many 8-hour nights of sleep, as opposed to being pretty exhausted for the last few months up until IF, despite many nights of 8 hours or very close to that. I'm not having quite the problem of feeling overly full after I eat, but I've also not been obsessed with reaching my caloric minimum goal every day.

Well, just finished my 3rd week on IF. Last week I had only lost a half lb if that much, so wasn't expecting much this week. Got on the scale and I'd lost 2 lbs. So I've lost a total of about 4.5 over the 3 weeks on IF. Not bad! I also took my BP readings the average was lower than last time, although at least some of the drop could also be due simply to lower weight: 122/88 vs 130/89 two weeks ago. It looks like I didn't record resting heart rate a couple weeks ago, but I believe it was around 84, and this morning it averaged 81. So I'm definitely pleased with the results!

Otherwise I'm feeling good. I have a lot more energy, and simply don't get hungry until at least the 19-hour mark, but often go up to the point that I sit down to eat (20-24 hours) without really feeling that hungry. It's amazing to think I used to get pretty hungry at least once or twice during the day WITH food!

My main issues remain:

1) Getting ENOUGH food. 1500 calories doesn't seem like a lot, but it's hard to do in just one meal. I know I can stretch it out over a few hours, which I've done, but I also like to just be done with eating after a meal. It's seems odd to me having 20+ hours of fasting and then another 3-4 hours of grazing!

2) Related to #1 above, because I'm fitting all this into one meal, I often can feel overly full for a couple of hours at least, as my stomach tries to digest all this food! Spreading it out helps, so I guess I'll have to do a better job of that. Again, part of the benefit of not having to think about breakfast or lunch is negated by the fact that dinner has to be "managed" more carefully due to this issue and #1.

Oh well, but of course, these are by far anything significant. They are more minor annoyances than anything else. As a whole, I just feel good AND I seem to be losing. Another 9 days will mark a whole month on IF, so we'll see how the metrics look then. Luckily, I've maintained my willpower throughout the holidays have have only had tiny bites of a few deserts. Somehow the whole idea that IF is supposed to give you more freedom to eat more food and more carbs hasn't affected me. I've decided that I'm still eating low-carb and still trying to maintain a 1500 calorie intake. We'll see if I can maintain this through Xmas and New Years, though, since I'm going to have to deal with lots of both home-made and store-bought deserts in the next week or so!

I've now gone 2.5 weeks on my intermittent fasting regimen and am feeling good. I haven't lost that much weight - 2 lbs the first week but just .5 the second. But I think I may be losing more fat, as my BFP readings on the scale keep going down and my face/neck which to me is the most obvious external marker, seems a lot thinner. Stomach seems slimmer too. I generally have way more energy even when not getting the 8 hours (or more) that I needed to function well before doing IF. Food is no longer amazingly delicious as it was the first week, which I guess is a good thing, since it means less tendency to wolf things down without thinking.

I've had to eat out the last four days due to visiting family, but I've kept everything low-carb. I just am not sure how many calories I've eaten, but am going to attempt to estimate in fitday. I think if anything I've probably eaten less than my target of 1500 at least for half if not more of those meals.

My only "gotcha" so far has been actually getting enough calories in one meal, and also the fullness that comes with eating around 1500 calories at once! At least when I'm at home I try to stretch it out as much as possible over 2-4 hours, but when I'm out, I can't spend 2, let alone 4 hours at dinner! :)

Ok, well, just weighed myself and I lost 2 lbs this week. I'm happy, but I think I somehow psyched myself into thinking I'd lost even more. I just felt a lot lighter and thinner. But I think I should just be very happy, since 2 lbs is really the max that I want to lose per week, for stability and perhaps health reasons as well. Also, the previous week I hadn't lost anything, so I should be doubly happy that I basically thwarted a stall practically before it had started!

I'm also trying to track my blood pressure, which has been on the moderately high side for as long as I can remember. I don't think it's changed much if at all so far. It averaged around 130/89 this morning, according to my CVS automated monitor. Recently it's been maybe on average 135/92, so maybe it's a drop lower, but I really would like to get this down to 120/80, or even lower, since I believe Intermittent Fasting is supposed to markedly lower BP. Obviously one week is not nearly enough to have a big impact. I'll continue to take the BP on Thursday mornings along with weight and see if there's any progression over the next month or two. Let's hope!

Thanks, everyone, for your comments! I'll try to address them individually:

monet0239, I'm not sure what I can suggest regarding stalls. They seem to happen to all of us. There are different things you might try to "tweak" things. One might be to try a close to zero-carb diet for a bit, so just eat meat, fish, and eggs. Another tactic is to try increasing your carbs slightly. Have you been tracking your calories? I'm not sure what you are doing for exercise, but metabolism is mainly based on your weight, so as you lose, your metabolism goes down, because your body doesn't have to support as much weight. If you haven't changed your caloric intake or exercise, it might be a matter of your metabolism "catching up" with you. You might need to go a little bit lower on calories and/or increase your energy expenditure just a bit. Some people have had success breaking stalls with the Intermittent Fasting, which I'll talk more about below.

geevee, I'm only 5'4". I look and feel pretty good at 140, so 165 is definitely more than I should weigh, although I think most people wouldn't see me as fat or even much overweight at even 160.

borntocry, I still track everything with fitday and I have a sense as to what I want to eat for my total calories (around 1500). In other words, I don't give myself permission to eat anything and everything, just what I need to get up to around the 1500 mark (with the added specification of doing this with few carbs and a decent amount of protein and fat). I found that the first few days I was getting very hungry towards the end of the fast, and felt like I could keep eating well after I was done, but that's leveled off a bunch and I now feel almost normal when having a meal now, so it's actually harder to eat as many calories as I think I should. I'm probably going to try to eat over a 3-hour period when I can, so that I'm not eating everything within a half hour and then feel incredibly full for the next few hours. I think it depends on where you're coming from. I have a lot of will power and discipline right now, so I can easily forgo eating more even when hungry, if I don't think it's what I should do. Then again, a lot of people have found that doing this has actually made them less hungry, and less prone to binging - but these are people who do low-carb in addition to this, so if you don't, your experience may be different. In any case, for you or anyone else interested in this stuff, this is the article that got me started: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/?p=278. Make sure to look at some of the comments, which have a lot of testimonials from those who've been doing this for a while...

Wow, I can't believe it's been two and a half years since I've written an entry! For a year or so I was writing every day, but that was back soon after this site started in 2000. I don't know if anyone is still here from the "old days" but if so, hi! How have you been?

To summarize the last couple of years, well, me and my wife had our first child. She's wonderful, but pretty demanding of our time and energy, so this means keeping in shape is even more of a challenge!

I'll try to summarize my dieting history quickly and bring it up to the current day. I became overweight somewhere around age 10 or 11. I wasn't obese, but did go up and down a bunch, although I never went on a diet until I was in college. I did WW then (back in 1988), and lost the 20 or so lbs I needed to lose within several months. But within a year I'd gained that back. Subsequently I did lots of stuff in the 90's, mostly low-calorie, and some low-fat stuff. Sometimes I got to my goal, sometimes not. By 2000, I had gotten to my highest weight - about 183. I started in again on trying to lose and I found this site, which was very helpful in sharing my experiences. I did the same low-cal/low-fat stuff and did lots of exercising. I managed to get down to about 165 within a few months, but then stalled for 6 months. Another member here, Dannygirl (where are you? I would love to reconnect!), challenged me to try Atkins back in September of 2000. I tried it and it seemed weird. I didn't care for the book, but then I heard of another low-carb book called Protein Power. I read that and everything clicked, and I've been doing it now for 6 years.

A year after starting Protein Power, and having lost an additional 25 lbs on it, I met my now wife. Dating gave me less time to exercise and more time to eat out! I still kept to the plan, but stopped exercising and so over a year or so my weight crept back up to around 165. It stayed there more or less from then on. A month or so ago, I noticed my pants weren't fitting as well, and weighed myself (which I don't do often), and saw that I was 172. I decided to use that as motivation to get my act back in gear. As I said, I've been doing Protein Power for 6 years, but for the last 3 or 4, that's been more "in spirit" then "by the book." For the most part I didn't stray, but occasionally I endulged in desert here and there. More recently, my mother in law has been coming over on a weekly basis to spend time with our daughter and brings desert for everyone. Somehow I just kept caving into this temptation.

In any case, a month or so ago, I started back on the program very strictly and have been doing lots of walking during lunch as well as at the gym at least a couple days a week. I've managed to get back to 165, but I'm trying to get back to my goal of 140, as I think I will be healthier and feel better there.

Also, last week, I learned about this new eating method and have been trying it out. It is called Intermittent Fasting. It's good for people who have a lot of discipline, and right now I happen to have that, so I'm taking advantage! Basically, you can do it in a number of ways, but the idea is to go without food for an extended period (although not more than 24 hours). Some people eat from 6pm to 6pm and then fast until the following day and 6pm and then repeat. I found it easier to just skip breakfast and lunch each day and just eat dinner. I'm on my 5th day of this and so far it has worked pretty well. It's not a "diet" per se in that it's not meant specifically to lose weight, although you can lose weight on it. Basically it's a method that scientists have discovered, at least in animal studies, to have the same benefits as eating a Calorie Reduced diet (the only diet that is proven to increase longevity and many health markers in animals). Supposedly, the animals studied consumed the same number of calories as those that were eating normally, yet they received the same benefits as those with caloried-reduced diets. There hasn't been anything proven with humans yet, although there are a number of studies that seem to show health benefits from doing this short-term.

There are definitely some benefits with this that I've noticed. One is that you don't spend as much time eating (preparing, cooking, etc), since you're only eating one meal a day. Second, this means you are also saving money. Thirdly, once you do eat, everything tastes 10 times better. It's liked someone pumped the volume up on your taste buds! This can be good and bad. Bad because the better things taste, the more you want to eat them! Because I want to continue to lose weight, I'm continuing to track carbs and calories with fitday, and I'm continuing to stick with the low-carb way of Protein Power. But since I'm only eating one meal a day, I can be more flexible in eating carbs, so I'm able to eat slightly more carby stuff - like a bit of rice or sweet potato, squashes, or just more of the berries I normally eat.

I haven't weighed myself since I started, since I've only been weighing myself once a week - on Thursdays. So it will be interesting to see what the results are. I was concerned at first about "messing up" my metabolism. You hear all the stuff about "starvation mode" and you're metabolism slowing due to lack of food. But I can't find any studies about this, so it seems to be just a theory that has gotten repeated so many times that it seems like fact. The studies that HAVE been done, apparently, indicate that metabolism is primarily dependent on your weight, and other factors really can't have a significant impact. It makes some sense, since your body still has to devote energy to various functions no matter whether you have eaten food that day or not. But we'll see what happens. I'm committed to at least doing this for a month, barring any unforseen problems...

Anyway, it's good to see the newly designed site. I hope people here today are getting as great a resource as I had when I first started using this site so many years ago!

Well hello there. Thought I'd check in with everyone. Thought some of you who might remember me from the past might get a kick out of an update. Me and my wife bought a house in April and we've been moving in during the past month. We still have a lot to put away and more stuff in the way of furniture hasn't even gotten to the house. Also, I've never owned a house before and keeping the yard in decent shape seems like never-ending work! So mowing our 1/4 acre has given me at least a weekly exercise to do! Our house is right accross from a small park and in particular tennis courts in that park. I don't have a lot of friends who play tennis, or at least not who are close and have the time, but have managed to play a couple of times over the past month, so that's more exercise. I haven't been walking during lunch at the office, which I need to start up again, but the cicadas here have been a little crazy, so that's made it not quite as pleasant to be outside in general. I also want to get back to my weight routine, so hopefully when I get some free time in a couple of months (hah!) I will try to start that up again. As for the diet front, I still stick to the tenets of Protein Power, and within that close to the "purist" mentality, meaning eating only whole foods including meats, fish, veggies, fruits, nuts. Occasionally I will splurge on something I shouldn't, but I try to keep that to a minimum (once every couple of weeks maybe). I think I'm maintaining a weight that for me, while not ideal, is acceptable. I would like to make it down 10 or even 20 lbs, but I'm not at the point where I am compelled to expend a lot of energy just to do this. My health is good, and that's the most important thing, and from what I've read recently, it could be a lot more harmful to keep going up and down in weight than to maintain the same weight, even if it is over what the "experts" say is optimal, as long as it's not effecting your overall health or impeding your lifestyle.

I don't manage to visit this site very often, just don't have a lot of time, but you all are welcome to email me whenever you'd like, and of course, I'll try to check here while I have it in mind. Hope the old-timers out there are doing well and good luck to everyone out there!

Well, thought I'd check in again and say hi. I decided not to do the body challenge and here's why: I went to the mall to sign up last Saturday. I got there at noon and the mall had opened at 10. There was a line stretching and curling for probably the equivelent of a couple of blocks at least. That was just to get weighed in. They had already run out of their "kits" which included the free membership to Bally's. They said that you could fill out an application and they would mail one, but you had to wait on a long line just to fill out one of these applications! I just figured if it was this much of a mob scene, trying to get into Bally's for the next three months is going to be hellish! You'll have to wait 30 minutes at least to get onto any piece of equipment. I'm sorry, but it's just not worth it.

So instead, I'm just plugging along getting in about 45-60 minutes of walking per day and losing slowly but surely. I want to start my weight-lifting again soon, and bought the book I was using last year which I'd lent to my father in law and which he hasn't returned yet - I didn't want that as an excuse to not restarting. It's going to take a bit more motivation, but I'm hopeful that at some point in the next couple of weeks I'll get my act together enough to start :)