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.
obesity
Resistance Training in Maintenance Mode
In the last part of The Time Machine Diet I described, among other things, my exercise routine that included HIIT cardio workout and resistance training regimen. Over the last couple months, I changed my resistance training routine, and this post is an update to that part of the Maintenance Mode.
Light in your eyes and your internal clock
For a while now I am experimenting with modification of the light around me. I am sure you are aware of the dangers of blue light, so I will limit the theory part to a very brief remark and refer you to the relevant sources for more. Mostly I want to report on practicalities of what I’ve done and the outcomes.
Theory:
The whole underlying premises is this. Our body is regulated by the internal clock that sets the hormonal rhythm. The orchestra of cortisol, melatonin, and many others determines how we sleep, how zillion of processes in our body work and, ultimately, how healthy we are. When the conductor is drunk, orchestra is out of tune, and that’s when the problems start.
Cheat Days – Yay or Nay
Cheat days – one of those topics that pop up constantly and cause flare-ups almost every single time. As much as all nutrition-related topics tend to cause strangely disproportional emotional outbursts, some matters stand out even more, and this is one of them.
Every time someone asks for a guidance or offers an opinion, you are likely to see one of these:
How to Lose Sweet Tooth
Getting off a sugar train is one of the most difficult things for many of us. There are good reasons for that – drug-like nature of the sugar impact, and gradual loss of sensitivity to the sweet taste, leading to ever-increasing dose . There is no lack of advice how to diminish cravings for the sweets, with various strategies, replacements etc. In this post, I would like to focus on the logic underpinning all these approaches and tricks; understanding of the mechanism will help you pick those that work for you or construct your own approach.
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.
Exercise for Weight Loss – Needed or Not?
If you read my posts regularly (or any LCHF/keto/IF authors, advocates, and community boards for that matter), you know I don’t believe in CICO approach (CICO stands for Calories In Calories Out, as in “eat less and move more, and you will lose weight”). So intuitive, so common, so broadly believed – and dead wrong. If you still have doubts about that, raise your hand and I will gladly point out a few sources that help see why this approach doesn’t work. Or just look around – see many people who managed to implement that idea successfully despite many decades of it being promoted?
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.