EAT Stop EAT:
Intermittent Fasting for Health and Weight Loss
Disclaimer:
I am not a medical doctor. Everything I share here are things I have learned from others and from personal experimentation. I am simply sharing what has helped me. Hopefully, there are a few nuggets that help you on your personal journey to become healthy and serve the Lord with all your might. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, check with a doctor (a functional medicine doctor if possible).
I am not a medical doctor. Everything I share here are things I have learned from others and from personal experimentation. I am simply sharing what has helped me. Hopefully, there are a few nuggets that help you on your personal journey to become healthy and serve the Lord with all your might. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, check with a doctor (a functional medicine doctor if possible).
Eat Stop Eat was the first book on Intermittent Fasting that I read and it has been very helpful.
This is hands down the easiest method I have found for both losing and maintaining weight.
If you struggle with hypoglycemia or other health problems, talk to your doctor first.
Here is a short illustration of how intermittent fasting works:
Food is fuel for our body. Let’s compare our body to a vehicle that needs fuel to go. When you are young, you probably drive your vehicle faster, so you need more fuel. Every day you put in 10 liters of fuel and every day you burn it off. As we get older, we don’t drive as fast, so we don’t burn off as much fuel. However, we keep putting in 10 liters of fuel. Pretty soon, our fuel tank is full. So what do we do? We start putting the extra fuel in bottles and filling our back seat and trunk (boot) with them. After some time of this, we finally realize (hopefully), that we need less fuel each day and so we just put in what we use and we stop continuing to gain weight.
The problem is, how do we get rid of all the extra bottles of fuel (fat) in the back seat and trunk (boot)?
The first way to burn the extra fuel is a road trip (exercise). Burn off the calories you eat and the extra ones stored as fat. In exercise, we try to burn off all the extra calories that we eat as well as the extra fat that we have stored up. The problems with this method are that: it takes way more exercise than we think to burn off food and fat; and when we exercise a lot, we often eat more than we burn off. This short video shows the difference between using fasting and exercise to try to burn fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQbuzsY_34Q
You can’t out-train a bad diet.
The second way to burn the extra fuel is to put in less fuel each day than you use (diet). Eventually, you will use up some of the extra fat. In a diet, we try to eat less food than we actually burn off so that we will use some food and some fat for fuel. However, because we are actually consuming less than we need, we are CONSTANTLY hungry. Eventually, we give up because it is miserable.
The third way to burn the extra fuel is to not put fuel in the tank once or twice a week (intermittent fasting). When you do this, your body will use JUST the stored fat as fuel. To lose weight, quit eating after dinner one night and wait till dinner the next day to eat twice a week. If you can’t last that long, slowly work into it by waiting till lunch to eat. When you do eat, you can’t eat the amount of food you “missed”. Just eat the meal like normal. Even though this sounds hard, your body is designed to burn fat as fuel. It just needs to learn how to do it again. If you are truly hypoglycemia or have other medical conditions, have a doctor monitor you. For most people, you will do just fine.
How this works with the math:
A pound of fat is equal to about 3,500 calories. If your average daily intake of food is 2,000 calories, then fasting for one day a week could help you lose about ½ pound of fat a week. Fast twice a week and that is 1 pound a week. Over a year that adds up to 26 pounds (once a week) or 52 pounds (twice a week).
Self-Experimentation
Weight loss/maintaining weight:
This is hands down the easiest method I have found for both losing and maintaining weight. If I need to lose weight I will fast once a week for a longer amount of time and/or I will skip breakfasts and begin eating mid-afternoon. If my waistline is increasing, it means I am eating more calories than I am burning and I need to have a few extra fasts.
Furlough & eating out:
When we are on furlough where we eat out more regularly while traveling or want to eat out at a restaurant that we know will have more calories than we need, Intermittent Fasting is a huge help. Simply skip breakfast (and lunch also if it is going to be a big meal). Your body doesn’t care if your calories come in all at once in one meal or spread out over the day. Evaluate your calories from a day/week perspective instead of a meal to meal perspective. This allows me to enjoy eating out when I am with friends and not battle the bulge.
Travel:
I used to eat every 2 hours. By doing so, I had essentially trained my body to only use glucose as fuel, this meant I was not fat adapted and able to burn my fat as fuel very well. If I didn’t eat, I would get a headache. This was my body not wanting to switch over from burning glucose to burning fat. This book recommended trying to extend the times of fasting and drinking a glass of water every time you thought you were hungry. Many of the times we eat, it is out of habit, not hunger. Sure enough, I didn’t die. This is how it helped with travel: if there is not good food to eat while traveling, I know I am not going to die of starvation in 8 hours. I can simply wait until I get somewhere with healthy food to eat and not ingest all the preservatives on the airplane.
Healing:
Intermittent Fasting also has a huge benefit of giving our digestive system a much-needed break. If we eat soon after we wake up, depending on how long we slept, that doesn’t give our digestive tract much time to rest. Also, our Parasympathetic system and a Sympathetic system don’t function well at the same time. The Parasympathetic system is used in digestion. The Sympathetic system is used in repairing cells and recovery. If we don’t give our body time to heal we could set ourselves up for disease later in life.
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