The FastDay Forum

I'm losing tummy fat on 5:2 with a moderate carb intake after years of NOT being able to shift it on a moire stringent low carb regimen. No idea why.

But I am very wary of any advice that relies on supplements to lose tummy fay, because there are NO supplements that have ever been proven to improve insulin resistance or lower cortisol levels. This is a territory filled with scammers.

Vitamin D is only safe if you have your levels tested periodically and avoid going much over the lower bound of the normal range. A well meaning doctor told me to supplement when my levels were already normal and after 2 years my blood calcium levels rose to where they were abnormally high, which results in the calcium being deposited in the arteries and causing heart disease. My blood pressure rose and became much harder to control Turns out I was not the only patient this happened to.

What you regain when you eat carbs is glycogen which is stored in liver and muscles. Glycogen binds a lot of water but here's the important thing to understand about it. If you eat a very low carb diet, and then regain glycogen, you will feel bloated. But if you maintain eating more than say, 70 g of carbs a day, and are patient, most of that bloat will go away.

Bloat occurs when you cross the ketogenic boundary. This is the level at which your body burns off its glycogen and then starts burning ketones (at first) and then, in a few weeks, free fatty acids. As soon as you cross the ketogenic boundary going up, you will start to store glycogen again.

Going up and down over that boundary is miserable because you will bloat, then you will pee it all away, for hours, when you drop your carbs again.

The answer for many of us is to keep carbs always a tiny bit over that boundary.

Where the boundary is depends on your body weight and composition to some extent. For me it is at 70 grams a day. For someone who weighs 280 lbs (twice my weight) it might be at 100. So when I am watching carbs I try to keep them closer to 100 g a day. This is low enough, if I spread them through the day, to keep from making my blood sugar go too high, but high enough to avoid that rotten bloat/pee cycle.

@peebles does this mean that it is preferable to do 7 days of, say 75 gr per day of Carbs than 25 gr on fast days and 100 gr on feast days? Just asking.

Well, if you want to avoid gaining and losing that glycogen-associated water weight, keeping under 75 g at all times would do it. But that means committing to a ketogenic diet, which isn't something all of us want to do.

I do best eating about 110 g a day of carbs. But I rop to about 40 g on fast days, which does get me peeing my brains out at night, which I'm not all that happy about as I end up with poor sleep.

But it's a matter of math. If you raise your carbs to 75 grams you end up with 300 calories from those carbs , and that doesn't leave enough calories for the necessary protein and fat. Your body does NOT store protein, so you really do need to eat a minimum of 50 g or more depending on your weight, which is another 200 calories and for me, more calories than I should eat on a fast day given my low TDEE. And at that intake level you don't have any room left for fat, which makes you likely to end up very hungry.

Worse, If you eat only one meal on the fast day, 75 grams of carbs eaten all at once is likely to jack up your blood sugar and leave you with rebound hunger. That's a whole glucose tolerance test's worth!

So I pretty much just live with the fact that I am going to see some water weight fluctuation each time I fast and that the weight will go up and down by that 2 or 3 lbs each week due to my regaining glycogen.

I maintain my weight loss eating about 110 g of carbs a day, which is where my body feels best, so I realize that my fully fed weight is my "real" weight, and the after fast weight, with that water squeezed out is not.

When I reach goal (or wherever I decide to stop losing) I will test out doing 2 fasts of 800 calories a day, which will let me eat more carbs on fast days, rather than one 450 calorie fast. The 800 calorie fast day would give me more room for carbs.