The FastDay Forum

Hello all. Coming late into this discussion. I haven't read the last page after @Tracieknits entry. Reading up to there I kept on thinking about Amanda Sainsbury-Salis's Don't Go Hungry Diet. And then Tracieknits, brought it up.
This is an excellent set of ideas to run with along side 5:2. As Tracie says, it's about focusing in on how hungry you are and eating to that measure. One of the things she recommends is scoring your level of hunger before and after eating. So, before eating you will be 0 : not hungry; -1 : slightly hungry ( I could wait awhile before eating); -2 : quite hungry ( I would like to eat something, a snack or a light meal); -3 : very hungry ( I'd like to eat something substantial right now) or -4 : Ravenously hungry. ( I could eat anything!) And then after eating you have to rate your satiety level. So +1 : unsatisfied (I still feel a bit hungry and I'd gladly eat something now.) +2 : Just satisfied (My body is relaxed an comfortable and if I ate any more I would still feel comfortable but I don't need any more.) +3 Elegantly satisfied (My body is relaxed and comfortable but if I ate any more I would begin to feel over satisfied.) +4 Over satisfied ( I know in my heart of hearts that I've eaten more than my body wants and I feel uncomfortable) Amanda argues that those of us who are over weight have lost touch with our bodies and we don't eat to our hunger signals. We eat for other reasons. She recommends keeping a daily food diary - the Success Diary, she calls it, in which you asses your hunger level and satiety level before and after every thing you eat. I have done this over a 3 month period and it did indeed give me insight into my behaviour around food. She says that when you eat when you are hungry, stop when you've have enough, you will lose weight. Your body loses weight, as has been said here, in steps. You lose, then you maintain, then you lose a bit more. As well as trying to eat when you are hungry, she also advises a diet of non processed foods, as much as possible - so eat fruit but not fruit juice for example, lots of vegetables. Also she believes it's important to eat a big variety of different foods so that you get all the nutrients your body needs. And exercise. So in the food diary, as well as looking at your hunger/satiety levels you also record what you eat so that you can track how much processed food, the range of fruit and veg you are eating. So it's not about counting calories. It's not about cutting out whole food groups. It's about really focussing in on how your body feels and if you feel like you really want something, that's what you should eat. She talks about junk food which she calls 'fun food', I think and talks about 'having a party in your mouth'. It's ok to do that but you don't want to party all the time. It's a treat, not an everyday thing.
This was my method of weight loss before doing 5:2 and I'd given it up and replaced it with 5:2, but now I think they will work together. When I started 5:2, I wrote to Amanda about it and she wrote back, very encouraging. But writing about this here, makes me want to re-read her book and go back to keeping a Success Diary. 5:2 has really helped me hone in on what hunger feels like. I think I'm going to try to keep my Success Diary on the non fast days for a while and see if my weight can shift a bit more. Let's go! Whatever method works for us in 2015.
And also, @wildmissus, your weight at the start of 2015 is lower than at the start of 2014, so there's progress! And also I agree with all the comments about winter. It is so hard to feel inspired about Not Eating when it is cold. Just hang in there, maintaining and feel pleased that you can do that until the summer comes along. But for me, who has been maintaining at a weight higher than a healthy BMI for a year now, I need to see if I can shift some weight while it's summer here. This is my opportunity.

[Tracieknits]

Thanks @SallyO. I do think they work very well together, they're very complimentary methods of learning how to change from an obese person to a healthy person, imho. Of course I'll let you know how that works once I finally get there.

You may lose a lot of weight at first but much of it and sometimes most of it will be water weight loss that comes from having burnt off your glycogen stores. They come back as soon as you eat over 70-100 grams a day, depending on your size. But it is really nice to extinguish that hunger that many of us get when eating carbs and to learn how much of our hunger is generated by eating those carbs.

Hey, @peebles, I'm thinking about trying this ketogenic diet plan or a modified version briefly, in hopes that it might help my "bad" cholesterol numbers. But I'm not sure I can incorporate it into my normal daily life (which does involve going out to eat, and making dinners that hubs will like too, etc). But if I do try it, your comment that I may lose a lot of weight spooks me. I don't want to lose any more than a pound or two (still marveling that I could say such a crazy thing, but I'm 5 to 20 pounds lighter that I was for my entire adult life up to 2013). And frankly, the notion of eating 1400 calories that is nearly all fat and protein, well, seems very unpleasant.
Any comments?

@Sallyo, The one issue that arises with the kind of mindful eating that you describe is that people who have something wrong with their blood sugar will be physiologically ravenous shortly after eating, because that is what swiftly moving blood sugars will do to us. So asking, "Am I hungry" gives the answer, "Yes!" And eating just makes it worse.

So I think the issue here is that there are different reasons why people become overweight, and if the problem is comfort eating, emotional eating, this strategy is very helpful. If the problem a metabolic one, it wont' help, and the person often will blame themselves for gluttony because they are getting that continual hunger symptom. There is one last issue which is that some people are heavy because they are abuse survivors and the fat which makes them unattractive keeps them safe. Those people need a whole nother kind of help to be able to diet successfully.

@wendyjane, If you are already at or near your best weight, the weight you lose on a low carb diet will be anywhere from 2 to 4 pounds of water weight. As with any other diet, it becomes very hard to lose weight unless you have a lot to lose. But if you don't enjoy eating meat, cheese, eggs, and dairy it isn't the diet for you. I did it for many years out of necessity--it was the only way to control my blood sugar. I managed to find things to feed my family that we all enjoyed. They ate things I didn't, but they got out of the habit of having a lot of bread, potatoes, and dessert at every meal which is positive. My son went on to open a restaurant that specializes in delicious meat sandwiches, so he wasn't traumatized. <g>

Eating out I used to eat at our local Chinese restaurant where there are lots of dishes that are mostly veggies with a bit of meat and I'd enjoy the spareribs, too. Pizza, I would get with meat and veggies but wouldn't eat the crust. I'd bring rotisserie chickens to potlucks since many of of our friends were vegetarians and I had to bring something I could eat. Nuts work, too, some better than others. And I learned how to make pancakes out of whey protein powder and macaroons and a couple other things that were eatable. Fortunately, dark chocolate is also low carb.

But I wouldn't suggest anyone eat that way unless the food appeals to them. The diet works because it is high fat with enough protein, not high protein. The fat has a satiating effect so you actually don't end up eating all that much food if you are doing it correctly.

I see it mainly as being useful for people with blood sugar issues. @wildmissus said she had a family history of diabetes, and though she hasn't been diagnosed with anything, the tests they use don't pick up blood sugar problems until literally years after they have already wreaked havoc on our bodies. And one of the first things mildly abnormal blood sugars do is damage our appetite control and make us physiologically hungry all the time.

[Tracieknits]

Having had some experience with this (I had gestational diabetes), I think that the blood sugar thing/mindful eating isn't necessarily a bad combination. It completely depends on what you eat. If I ate nuts or cheese, I didn't have that response. If I ate fruit or carbs as the biggest part of my meal, I quickly learned that was a huge problem. But I could eat a properly balanced (for me at the time) meal with *some* small amount of healthy, whole grain nutritious carbs together with protein and fat and yes, this mindful eating would work just fine. I was, at the time, following the advice of my dietician to eat small, well balanced meals frequently. Since I didn't want to gain any more weight than I had to, I got quite a bit of practice of figuring out "am I eating enough or too much?" Doing this, I was able to bring my blood sugar under control quickly (combined with increasing my walking) and once it was under control, I only had a couple of bad blood sugar readings for the rest of my pregnancy.

Obviously, one person's results are not a scientific study. But I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand for someone who has never actually had bad blood sugar readings or a diagnosis of anything. Perhaps the way of eating SallyO and I recommended could work perfectly with the regimen you're suggesting

I have found this thread very interesting but don't have anything to add. I associate with so many of the difficulties mentioned. Just wanted to say, Wildmissus, that I totally sympathise and hope that you find a solution, of the many offered, that works for you.
Good luck!

@peebles and @ssure and @sallyo
Thank you for your detailed, lengthy responses. Very enlightening and you have me thinking seriously about what my weight goal SHOULD be and hunger responses.

Reading up to there I kept on thinking about Amanda Sainsbury-Salis's Don't Go Hungry Diet.

@Sallyo, The one issue that arises with the kind of mindful eating that you describe is that people who have something wrong with their blood sugar will be physiologically ravenous shortly after eating, because that is what swiftly moving blood sugars will do to us. So asking, "Am I hungry" gives the answer, "Yes!" And eating just makes it worse.

So I think the issue here is that there are different reasons why people become overweight, and if the problem is comfort eating, emotional eating, this strategy is very helpful. If the problem a metabolic one, it wont' help, and the person often will blame themselves for gluttony because they are getting that continual hunger symptom. There is one last issue which is that some people are heavy because they are abuse survivors and the fat which makes them unattractive keeps them safe. Those people need a whole nother kind of help to be able to diet successfully.

I don't want to 'jack @wildmissus ' thread but I strongly agree with @peebles on this. There are people for whom mindful eating is revelatory and transformative. There are people for whom this hyperawareness of food and their emotional state would send their chimp into over-drive and the constant logging and checking-in might well drive rebound episodes of over-eating or trigger what Gillian Riley calls the addictive desire to over-eat.

Maybe it would be helpful to have a mindful eating thread where people can discuss their experiences with it? It does sound very helpful for some people.

ETA: 5-2-diet-chat-f6/mindful-eating-what-are-your-experiences-t13679.html

I'm going to post this in several useful spots - Yoni Freedhoff of weightymatters has just posted a 7 year chart of the weight record of one of his clients:
This Is What 7 Years of Real-Life Weight Management Looks Like
http://www.weightymatters.ca/2015/01/this-is-what-7-years-of-real-life.html

Go look, it's real world, real life, intriguing, has plateaus, and shows progress over time despite the far from straight line.

The fact that her loss is anything but a straight line is pretty damn normal because truly nothing in life is a straight line.

What's not normal, or at least what isn't common, is that year and a half segment from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2010 where her weight pretty much stayed the same. Not that people's weights can't or don't stabilize, but rather that most folks who are trying to manage their weights tend to give up if the scale doesn't keep going down.

Of course had she given up back then she probably wouldn't have gone on to lose 50 more pounds and may well have regained the 35 or so she had lost before her weight first stabilized.

Weight loss is about embracing your own personal best.

My favourite takeaway:

All this to say, and I've said it before, success is about consistency, embracing imperfection, and being proud of your best, where your best is the healthiest life that you can enjoy living, not the healthiest life that you can tolerate.

Her best, and yours, are great, and scales can't help you to determine what your best is.

Can only offer the same advice as @azureblue, log everything you eat on non fast days. It really helps you know where and what you are overeating. I went a couple of kgs overweight and was able to lose them easily by doing this, eating mindfully and thinking of food as a "fuel" rather than pleasure.
Good luck!

@Tracieknits,

The blood sugars diagnosed as diabetic in gestational diabetes are much lower than those it takes to achieve a regular diabetes diagnosis. I've had both, and never had the problem with obsessive hunger while pregnant that I did when I became fully diabetic a decade later after being given a drug that pushed my blood sugar up a good 70 mg/dl. When my sugars were going up to 250 mg/dl and then dropping down to 90, I became so ravenous I felt like I'd die if I didn't have something to eat. And then, while I was eating, I'd get hungrier.

Truly awful! I had never had a problem with compulsive eating before or with regulating my weight, so it was very obvious to me that something was really badly wrong with my body. But if a person who already had a weight problem experienced these symptoms, they probably would have just taken it personally and assumed it was a personal failing.

More to the point, as soon as I ditched the carbs, the ravenous hunger dissappeared.

To give you an idea of how extreme blood sugar-related hunger can be, years ago I read a post someone made on a Type 1 Diabetes forum where she told how she had woke up in the middle of having a severe hypo, where her blood sugar had dropped down below 30, and in the confusion that that state brought on attempted to eat her alarm clock.

This points out not only how bad that hunger can be, but also that it is when it DROPS not when it's high, that we get hungry. People with Type 2 whose blood sugar may stay very high for many hours often don't experience any extraordinary hunger at all. It is people in the earlier stages of the process of blood sugar deterioration, where their blood sugar goes very high and then drops pretty quickly (over 2 hours) get the hungriest.

And this takes in the huge number of people whose doctors don't diagnose them with anything because their blood sugar is back in the normal or low pre-diabetic range 2 hours after eating.

[Tracieknits]

Just because that happens with some people, doesn't mean it will happen with everyone. I'm in the car, and can't type properly. But I do think it's worth a shot, for most people. After all, 52 isn't for everyone either

Do you guys watch Elementary? This is another take on Sherlock Holmes, with Johnny Lee Miller playing Sherlock, and to make it different from all the other takes on Sherlock Holmes, Watson is a female, played by Lucy Liu (whom I normally hate, but is quite good in this). She is Sherlock's "sober companion", hired by his father to help him maintain sobriety after getting out of rehab. (actually, I should say was, because now she is just his partner in crime fighting, as consultants to the NYPD). Anyway… this week's episode showed Sherlock trying to find excuses to miss his NA (I think that' s right: Narcotics anonymous??) meetings. Joan confronts him about it and he gives quite the monologue about the tedium of sobriety. I'll try to find a transcript, because I felt it was particularly apt with respect to diet fatigue and maintenance in general.

In the meantime, quoting a write-up about the episode at gottawatchit.com:

Sherlock is coming to a very real and very difficult part of staying clean: the life-long grind of abstinence. The day-to-day living in which the meagre reward for not indulging in your joyous addiction is . . . vigilance. It’s a full-time job that has no breaks, no vacations, and the only benefits are your continued success as a functional human being, the same as billions of others, but carrying the baggage of guilt and shame and self-loathing all the time. Sobriety is constantly accepting your being weak, everyday.

Obviously our weight issues aren't as extreme as heroin addiction, but it still really spoke to me…

I have just gone back to eating to my TDEE and logging it on MFP every day. Most days I manage well and then at the last minute I eat all sorts of crazy things and that is what was happening on my fast days. I am going to spend a week or so concentrating on getting control of eating to TDEE and then I'm going to put one fast day back in and then possibly another if needed. I do also think there is something in the weight + age thing. In my twenties I maintained at just under 112 lbs, then thirties, with three prenancies, it was 122lbs. In my forties combined with lots of running I kept to 115lbs now my default setting seems to be 125lbs which isn't too bad. So if I have to settle for that I will but I do want to get back to fasting at least once a week properly, not necessarily for weight loss but for all the other reasons. Thank you for all the fascinating comments on this thread

Me too @Loulou51, so far I've done one proper full on 23/24 hour fast per week this year, eaten 240 cals only on the 2nd fast then fasted a further 16 hours. This on top of my general 16:8 through the week. It may not be enough to reduce the 2kgs I'd like to go, I'll review in February, but we're still in cold winter so common sense says I may need some fat until spring.
Must. keep. walking!
:0)