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
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.
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!
Allergy Be Gone
This development is from the so-called NSV (Non-Scale Victory) series. As you know, I started my weight loss drive with LCHF+IF in March of last year, so this spring is the first one I get to experience in my new state of weight and health – 50+ pounds lighter and non-diabetic anymore.
A few days ago I suddenly realized that first time in many years I have no annual allergy symptoms. No sneezing, no itchy eyes, none of this every year spring nightmare.
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.”
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.
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.