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Weight Loss

Weight loss is the name of the game and for many fast weight loss is the name of the game. The truth of either game is not that it is that hard to loose weight, it is just hard to keep it off. It is easy to do something for a little while, like diet or exercise, but when it comes to doing it for the long term people have problems. So, I will propose a few simple solutions.

Knowing that your body reacts to whatever you do it and that it will strive to maintain balance it is important to realize that if we do something for too long your body will normalize. This is why prolonged dieting does not work, after awhile your body will set itself to work off of the lower amount of calorie. It will do this by dropping weight, fat and muscle to a level that it can maintain with the fewer number of calories. So it is in your best interest to keep your body guessing as to how many calories you are going to consume. This means that eating that pizza on the weekend is fine on occasion. So, to make my point a little bit more clear, vary your diet, cycle your carbs, fat, and protein. Keep your body guessing. Realize that if you want drop a few pounds all you have to do is diet for a short period of time and then refeed.

Next solution, take a look at my intermitted fasting experience. I didn’t find that it worked too well for me, but it help many people with weight loss. It also helps clean you out and detoxify your body. The fasts do not cause most people to slip into any type of starvation mode because they are of a short duration. The most important factor here is that you must resist the urge to binge on the days when you are not fasting.

One of the most simple approaches to weight loss is to simply eat in a reactive state. Let me explain a little further. If you go out and gorge on Friday night, skip breakfast and maybe lunch on Saturday. If you hit the gym hard, eat a big meal. The key is that you are giving your body what it needs or you are withholding what it doesn’t, it is all based on what you have been doing in the past 24 hours. This is a great way to approach the holidays.

Juice fasting is a great way to manage weight as well, it can be great for weight loss or for just a detox, and it will make you feel great. You can juice fast as long as you want, just make sure you have lots of fresh fruit and veggies and a high quality juicer. These are not cheap, but they do last forever. Doing a juice fast will often give you more nutrients in a single meal than many get in an entire week.

Fast weight loss can be achieved with any of these methods, not to mention weight loss or weight management. They key is to implement them into your long term plan and not play the yo-yo weight loss game.

Intermitted Fasting Wrap Up

This is a wrap up for the intermitted fasting experiment that was for the large part unsuccessful. I did manage to fast a couple of times and I did learn some things along the way, so, not all is lost.

The first thing I learned is that fasting is not as hard as one might think but it does take a high level of discipline and it is emotionally taxing. The emotional part I did not expect. One the nights before a fast I would look towards the next day with trepidation. Fating is not fun. It removes you from social situations and there is something frightening about not eating. Eating is such a normal human function that denying ourselves that function triggers some powerful emotion. I can see how fasting can be used for spiritual purposes for the simple fact that you almost must rely on something more powerful than yourself to complete a fast.

Next, I learned that fasting causes me to loose discipline. It takes so much discipline to remain on a fast that when I return to eating I am spent. I don’t have the energy to tell myself no and my body says yes! Depriving yourself of food when it is available is not natural but realizing that you can go without if need be is an important realization. I think there are some blood sugar issues and bodily functions at work here that cause compensation mechanisms to kick in and make self control very difficult. I cannot say that I went nuts on my eat days but I certainly did not exercise the discipline that I would have liked.

Routine is important. Dieting is a huge challenge and one thing that makes it much easier is routine. If you get in the habit of eating the same thing or a similar amount every day it becomes much easier to sustain that diet. If you change that diet on a regular basis and from day to day you mind and body do not know how to react. Intermitted fasting is the definition of making drastic regular changes in diet. It puts you on an emotional roller coaster with not routine to fall back on. It is not keeping it simple it is making something more complex than necessary.

Intermitted fasting effected my life much more than I care to admit. I am at work in an environment where I have the same routine day in and day out. Very little changes for weeks at a time and I find it very easy to develop routines and stick to them. Keeping a workout schedule has always been simple, but I found that with intermitted fasting I had to work my routine around the days that I was eating. Fasting puts a big hole in your week. Days that I fasted feel almost as if they were lost.

One positive that I recognized was that after the first meal coming off of a fast I felt fabulous. I was amped, it felt like I had chugged a couple of red-bulls but without the jitters. I felt alive and healthy. This post fast high is almost enough to do it again, considering that my fast would be broken right before bed this was kind of disappointing. I would be interested to see how it feels to break a fast first thing in the morning.

I feel that if I had remained on the diet long enough to go through a couple more fast sessions I would have lost some weight but not without having my routine suffer and my emotional state get wrecked. I would not suggest intermitted fasting to anyone looking for a simple way to loose weight.

Intermitted Fasting Day 15

So, I have disappointingly fallen off of the intermitted fasting challenge. I am not surprised it takes a lot of discipline to fast for a whole day every few days. I think from here on out I will only attempt to fast every 4th day.

I found it emotionally draining to consider fasting so regularly. Though it does not seem that hard it is stressful. And on thing I have learned over the years is that good stress or bad stress is still stress.

I also found myself getting semi depressed. It could have been related to external factors or it could have been related to the fasting I am not sure. I have found in the past during periods of excessive dieting that my emotional level took a plunge. I am not surprised one bit that I started feeling down. Food is a quick way to a man’s heart and depriving him of it can have pretty disastrous results.

One thing I have noticed is that my lifting workout has gotten significantly more difficult from before I started the fast. I would be surprised if I lost significant muscle on my first day or two of fasting but I can’t argue with the numbers. Being able to to significantly less weight on certain exercises is a good indication that you are getting weaker and loosing muscle.

I am having a hard time controlling my diet. Not excessively so but I have gotten out of the diet mindset and it is hard to get back into it. Fasting also seems to lead to some pretty severe cravings for starchy unhealthy food and because of the significant deficit I was creating I was not too worried about any type of starchy carbs.

I guess the only thing to do now is simply jump back in head first and fast for another day. One great thing about intermitted fasting is that it is intermitted and it can be structured however you see fit.