Thursday, March 26, 2015

where to start...?

...Because it's blindingly simple to begin turning one's life around in just a few days.

Just take a weekend and don't eat.

More and more data comes in all the time that if you try to lose weight by halving your food intake your metabolism goes down too, but if you fast that doesn't happen.  After just a few days of food-abstaining, fasting insulin sinks like a rock ... and then one's system begins to normalize.  Fat is drawn from adipocytes to keep one fueled, hormones adjust to spare lean tissue (without "exercise"), inflammation (from many causes) also diminishes -- it's nothing but a "win" situation.

There are those who say "women shouldn't fast" -- I call bullshit.  I suspect that SOME women feel badly when they fast IN CERTAIN WAYS but that other ways it's probably completely feasible.  I fully believe that many women also hear the sweeping pronouncement and take it as an excuse to not even try.

I get so tired of all the "this is better!" "no, THAT is better!" "no, you must do interval training!" "but you HAVE to eat X!"....  Noise.  Ego-stroking.  Pfui.

Take a good vitamin/mineral supplement, drink a lot of water (and maybe some coffee/tea), and every once in awhile (perhaps weekly) eat nothing for a day and two nights.  Or a couple of days.  Or maybe just eat in a six-hour window every single day.  Or alternate days, eating and not eating, without trying to limit quantity on food-days.

How much fasting you do will depend, of course, on whether you have a lot of weight you want lost, or if you just don't want to have to weigh and measure and time and look up info constantly in your daily life.  Our eating behavior in the twentieth century got really REALLY unnatural in those respects!  Very few people thought about how much they were eating before calorie-counting came to be the vogue.  Most people ate whole foods to the point that they weren't hungry anymore ... then they stopped.  But then people started counting calories, then counted fat-grams, then counted carb-grams.  What's next?

Some of us have found "the answer" for ourselves, and don't have any desire to change our patterns, but there are also those around us who still search.  There are a whole 'nother set of people, who don't want to do what they know to be effective and they ALSO keep searching, hoping to find a magic technique that will keep them from having to do something they hate.  For them, fasting could be the answer.

On those rare occasions when I indulge in such a way that I feel bad, fasting IS the high-road to getting back to normal.  It's the magic bullet that slays the monsters of inflammation, bloat, histamine-intolerance, unbalanced-hormones, and all their hydra-like siblings.  Fasting makes the extra water go away.  Fasting makes my body flexible, strong, and usable again. 

Fasting is where I begin.  And it's amazingly easy and painless, unlike the techniques most people use to stay fit.

8 comments:

  1. I've IF'd for well over a year. However, now that I'm trying 30 days of Zero Carbs/plant food, I'm thinking I don't need to IF, or at least not as much. Let me get a week or two under my belt, and re-evaluate. :)

    Great post!

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    1. thank you, Gwen! i agree -- when we go ZC we don't need to detox (which is what fasting does) nearly so much. :-)

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  2. Tess, I agree with you 100% as I've been doing this since the new year. Recently, this week, I've started doing zero-carb with the occasional coleslaw with my burgers only when I go out and I find that I fast anyway because I only eat when hungry. This is the longest I've been on track and I'm losing weight at my age. Also, when and if I get cravings I just stuff myself with meat like I did yesterday and I still dropped a pound on the scale this morning. I feel great.

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    1. that's wonderful, H! yes, the way i feel on ZC and while fasting is very comparable.

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  3. Many do IF and are happy
    Many just have more hours between meals and are happy

    Do we have to find our own way and be happy and successful in our weight loss?

    .... welcome back, hope your trip went ok for you.

    All the best Jan

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    1. yes, thank you! i'm at my daughter's house getting rested up and reading a lot. we have a fun weekend planned, and next week sometime i'll head back home. :-)

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  4. I agree, find out what works best for yourself and do that. Who cares what all these other no-yous think about what you are doing? ;)

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    1. oh, i know! :-) every once in awhile i listen to YET ANOTHER discussion of the same old things.... it's like hanging out with some VERY clever people at work/school, and then going to a reunion and seeing a bunch of countrified cousins who are living in the 1980s -- there's no way on dog's earth one can get them up to speed on all that they'd need to know to hold an intelligent conversation....

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