I’ve played around with fasting over the years from week long lemon juice/maple syrup/cayenne fasts to weekend juice fasts to day long water fasts. I’m a 59 year-old male who exercises pretty regularly but could stand to lose a pound or two.
IF has been all the rage for a while and fasting two days of the week is one of the varieties. However, it seems that the two fast “days” are actually more of a 24 hour period that allows you to eat one low cal meal.
I Googled a bit and haven’t found a program in which you actually fast for the entire day which works out to more like 32 hours from dinner on day 1 to breakfast on day 3.
My thinking is that 32 hours is better than 24…but I can see that it could be worse if that makes the dif in shutting your body down.
I’m also thinking that just a few of the right kind of calories on the fast days could do more good than harm…maybe a little lemon and maybe honey in my water.
Finally, I started this last week and made a bit of a mistake breaking my fast with a little too much of the wrong kind of food…fresh roasted beets if you must know
Any thoughts on foods that treat an empty stomach with a little more respect?
The latest “craze” in fasting to lose weight is to eat all your meals before 4PM and then fast for the rest of the day. Supposedly it works wonders, but I have not done it.
It stops being a “fad diet” when it becomes a lifestyle.
I’ve been doing 20/4 IF for nigh on 15 years now. Dinner is my only meal of the day. I eat roughly between 6pm and 9pm. I’ve also done extended fasts, up to 5 days with only coffee to maintain energy.
Recently I’ve been toying with adding the 5/2 routine to my 20/4. I’m finding it harder than I anticipated, mostly because the first day or two of an extended fast are the hardest (mentally), so the 5/2 feels quite punishing for me. That said, I find it best to eat nothing during a true fast (24 hours or more). It’s entirely subjective but my thinking is that whatever minimal thing you choose will be unsatisfying anyway, so why even bother at all. At the end of the day, you’re fasting to reduce caloric intake in order to lose weight and maintain a healthy body mass. There are additional long term benefits and I think you maximize those by fasting, not teasing your body with a 100-200 calorie treat. IMHO.
The lemonade – maple syrup – cayenne thing (Master Cleanser) has been around for a long time and periodically becomes popular.
My (ex)wife was the supervisor of a large medical lab. She said the lab could always tell when the Master Cleanser was making the rounds because people started showing up in the emergency room in a coma from metabolic acidosis.
An extremely simplified explanation: The body is normally pretty good at getting rid of toxins. This diet claims to get rid of toxins, but actually reduces the bodies normal defenses because the toxins don’t have the normal food to attach to on their way out of the body.
IF and keto-based diets are a bit of a different animal than most fads, though. They’re not really being pushed by anybody trying to make a buck, and a lot of their support comes from pretty self-aware communities of folks who’ve tried a lot of things. Diet modification is hugely important if you want to lose weight, and these two techniques (along with strict calorie-counting) seem to be a little more possible for folks to stick to and live around than most of fads that have come around before.
I used a very lazy version of IF ( no carbs before noon, small protein-heavy lunch, and no calories after 9 PM ) for a few months last year and managed to lose fifty pounds. It’s not a be-all-end-all by any stretch, but it was a lot more effective than any other plans I’ve tried and was a lot easier to mentally stick to. I fell off the wagon in November when cold & flu season started, but trying to get back on the horse.
Thanks for the feedback. Two weeks so far. Too be clear, I wasn’t looking for small treat to try to satisfy my hunger but rather a nutrient/vitamin/mineral or combination thereof that might be beneficial.
Seems like it’s a calorie deficit diet in disguise. I’m losing weight at the moment and after trying to sift through the infinite amount of contradictory information came to the logical conclusion that if a diet works it’s because of calorie deficits. Seems most of these other diets just try to obfuscate that for some reason or another.
Did you eat a large portion of the roasted beets? I’m wondering if what irritated your stomach was how much of it you ate, rather than the food itself. My husband and I just started doing IF (the eat-fast-eat variety, where you go from dinner to dinner without eating in between). He was thinking about making steak as our first meal, but was hesitant because he thought it might not be wise to break the fast with something that heavy. I told him I thought I’d be fine eating steak, as long as I didn’t stuff myself. And indeed, our first dinner was steak, potatoes, and some kind of green vegetable (I think it was green beans, but it might have been broccoli or mixed veggies). I didn’t eat all of my steak or all my potato, though I did eat all of my veggies, and my stomach (and my husband’s stomach) handled it just fine.
