It has been 24 months since finishing active weight loss drive and switching to the maintenance mode. Readers of The Time Machine Diet know how it was formulated – food, meal timing, exercise and all that. Naturally, a lot has changed since then. I described most of the changes as they came. It’s time to put them all in a single post for your convenience – and mine, since I will be able to refer to a single post instead of tracking down scattered bits and pieces. So here it goes.
Intermittent Fasting
After-Holiday Weight Loss Experiment
Ever wanted someone to stage an experiment for you and find out how to shed unwanted holiday pounds while not being miserably hungry and spending hours in a gym? Well, despair not. I am your guy.
I planned this experiment from November of 2017, tweaking its idea and design throughout the whole December. There are several concepts converging in it and several questions I wanted answered. The concepts in no particular order:
Navigating your way through nutrition wars
Imagine that you observe a conversation between a few knowledgeable folks discussing their views on hot nutrition topics. They are professionally involved in these matters; they are researchers, clinicians, doctors, professors, influential bloggers, published authors etc. You start reading their exchange in hope to pick up nuggets of wisdom to apply to your own situation. Things start out cordially, and you look forward to gaining valuable insights.
Podcast with Jimmy Moore
This is going to be a very short post. My podcast with veteran health podcaster, blogger, international speaker, and bestselling author Jimmy Moore from “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb” just got published at Fasting Talk With Jimmy And Friends. Hope you enjoy it!
Cholesterol, Triglycerides and Weight Loss – Non-Scale Victory
Before we get to the essence of this post, I must warn you: you are about to go down the rabbit hole. This whole field of knowledge is full of controversies and contradictions. Everyone knows there is this scary substance in our blood called cholesterol, and we need as little of it as possible, right? Oh, and everyone also knows there is bad cholesterol and good cholesterol, right? Well, just start researching it, and these seemingly commonly acknowledged notions suddenly become so very non-obvious, you might regret ever getting interested. However, we are after real health here, right?
Potato Diet Experiment
If you are from the low carb camp, your brow just went up. Yes, you read that right – potato diet. What on green Earth is that, you ask? Well, you probably heard of egg fast, fat fast or bacon fast – days or weeks of eating just one foodstuff. This is it – potato diet is like potato fast. My eternal curiosity got me to try this weirdest diet of all, for the whole of 3 days. I was interested to find out about it for a while, ever since I’ve read the theory behind it, many personal accounts of success, and even a lukewarm endorsement from the #1 low-carb website in the world, believe it or not.
Calories, Macros and Weight Loss
Battles are raging on the internet. Flames are all over these scorching hot topics. Do we need to count calories or can we eat to our heart content, as long as macros are right? Which macros are right? How much fat? Is there a limit to consuming fat bombs and putting butter sticks in our coffee? To every meek “I do everything by the rules, yet don’t lose a single pound” there is a scolding “You must be doing something wrong, because it worked for me,” cheerful “Continue doing it, it will work,” or consoling “You are getting healthier, that’s what matters.”
Mental Tricks for Intermittent Fasting and LCHF
I am not big on motivational speeches aimed to encourage someone to undertake better WoE (Way of Eating) or Intermittent Fasting. The reason is simple: I believe folks have to decide that staying (or becoming) healthy, looking and feeling good, keeping their limbs and eyesight etc, is higher on their priority list than enjoying Coke for 15 seconds. If someone’s priorities are so screwed up that the (questionable) pleasure of drinking sugar is more important than long healthy life, nothing I can say will change that.
Having said that, I am all for helping those who have their priorities straight work out useful mental tricks to overcome the addiction and initial hurdles. Over a year of doing this and writing about it, I seemed to have collected an array of such tricks, enough for a small book on rewiring your brain to make the transition easier.
Among those hurdles, two are very common. Let me offer my approach for getting over them.
Weight Loss and Blood Sugar Progress, Visualized
This is an update to the older post with new blood sugar test information, showing the progress since publishing the book. As a threat of regaining the weight and holding the blood sugar in check remain a concern for many, I thought such an update would be helpful.
How to Break Weight Loss Plateau – New Fasting Protocols
In some situations, your tried and true weight loss methods seem to stop working. Sometimes you run into a plateau – a phenomenon well-known to most of us who embarked on a weight loss journey. Sometimes during maintenance mode, you notice that your weight starts creeping up and, despite your best efforts, you seem to be able to stop it from gaining but not to bring it back down. Often this is caused by our body adjusting to your routines and setting its thermostat to a new set point, as we discussed here. If you run into one of these situations, I suggest trying one of the fasting protocols shown below. They are intended to surprise your body, shake it out of complacency, break through the plateau and restart the weight loss process.