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.
Mindset
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:
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!
Zealotry in Nutrition
Reading Robb Wolf’s recently published brilliant book Wired to Eat, I was immediately struck by the remark he made at the beginning. It touched on the theme that bothered me for a while. Here is a quote, and see if it sounds true to you as well:
Perhaps even more frustrating, however, was the tendency for folks who actually followed the Paleo diet to turn the general concepts into quasi-religious doctrine. Folks newly converted to Paleo tended to be quite dogmatic in the insistence that this was “the one true way” to eat. Often, these devotees had reversed serious health problems with this way of eating, so their enthusiasm was understandable, but not many people enjoy the company of or the message from someone who comes across as a holier-than-thou diet zealot.
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.
Mindful Eating Introduction
The concept of “listening to your body” is commonly mentioned and seems intuitive. In reality, though, it can introduce a lot of confusion if taken literally. Really, when our body says “Gimme more sugar!” – should we listen to it and obey? When we strive to eat till satiety, don’t we set ourselves up for a failure since we usually feel full noticeably later than we actually get out fill? Finally, when our body reaches for another handful of peanuts or pretzels in a bout of mindless munching in front of TV, should we listen to it?
Can You Fast?
Whenever I discuss my weight loss approach with interested folks, there is that dreadful moment that comes after we go over sugar/starch replacements and fermented foods. These two topics are usually received with curiosity and enthusiasm. Then we touch on the topic of intermittent fasting, and almost invariably doubt and anxiety appear. “Fasting? Isn’t it too radical? Can I fast?”