Every week I receive a number of emails from people I subscribe to, who cover diets, health and wellness, but lately I have noticed a trend that I don’t really like. Trying to discredit one diet or eating plan in order to promote another without truthfully covering all the facts is wrong, and this has happened recently with the Ketogenic Diet. Eating plans aren’t always primarily about weight loss some are to help in medical conditions, but weight loss can be a secondary effect.

The Ketogenic diet was designed back in the 1920s to help combat and manage childhood epilepsy, but is now also helping type 2 diabetics control their blood sugar. Because this eating plan is very low carb and high in good fats it has been jumped on by the weight loss fraternity, and is now being classed as a fast weight loss fad diet, which it most certainly is not. This is not a short term program; people who have followed this eating plan for years are incredibly healthy. I personally don’t fully follow the ketogenic plan as I still like to have some fruit at times, and this would not be acceptable on a true keto plan. I have found that the Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diet works really well for me, in conjunction with fasting, as it has helped me lose around 70 lbs. so far, and helped to control my type 2 Diabetes without the use of medication.

When I was first looking into changing my diet and basically my lifestyle by going LCHF, if I had followed the advice of the first report I read I would still be grossly overweight, and on a multitude of medications. Change is never easy as you have to break away from what you have become comfortable with, but if you feel you are ready, and then you must do your research. You have to sieve through the BS and find the people who are speaking through experience, and then learn all you can. One of the best people I have found for LCHF and fasting is Dr Jason Fung, you won’t go far wrong following his advice. Once you have decided on the direction you want to go, document all the information you have, then take it with you when to speak to your Doctor, it helps to convince them that you have looked into it, and know what lays ahead, but NEVER try anything without getting medical advice first!!!

I have just spoken to someone who has read my last post Why Fast? And they were under the impression that you could still have a snack if you felt hungry on a Water Fast, as long as you didn’t have a meal, and they seemed surprised when I said no. I know this couple very well, and they know I am writing about them now, they just said “don’t use our names” OK Mr and Mrs Smith from London NW2 I won’t. They start there day the healthy way with a bowl of cereal, and they both have a spoonful of sugar and low fat milk, followed by 2 slices of white bread  toasted, with a margarine spread and marmalade, followed by white coffee and they both take 1 spoonful of sugar, and that is around 9am

By 11 to 11.30am they would have walked their dog, any now it’s time for their mid-morning snack and coffee. This would consist of a sandwich made with white sliced bread, margarine spread and sandwich filler from a jar, they come in a multitude of flavours. With their coffee with 1 spoonful of sugar, they would have 3 or 4 milk chocolate Hobnobs each, which are a popular biscuit here in the UK. This would set them up for their lunch, normally a pork pie with salad, shop bought low fat potato salad, and low fat coleslaw with low fat salad dressing over the rest, followed by coffee with 1 spoonful of sugar in each, and a couple of Hobnobs each.

After relaxing for about an hour, it would be out with the dog again for about an hour and back for afternoon tea. This time it would be a pot of tea for two but instead of 1 they both take 11/2 teaspoons of sugar, and they would finish off however many Hobnobs were left, and that would keep them going until their evening meal. Their evening meal is normally around 7pm, it usually consists of some sort of shop bought pie, always mashed potatoes and a couple of different vegetables with instant gravy, followed by a desert which is normally something shop bought. To finish off their day it’s normally tea and a sandwich before bed.

They consider this to be a very healthy diet, and couldn’t understand why the husband was told by his doctor he needed to make changes, as he was borderline diabetic. The recommended maxim amount of sugar an adult should consume a day is 7 teaspoons or 30 grams, and they use more than that on their cereal and in their coffee and tea, and their total daily intake would be around 25 spoons a day. For anyone on a similar diet fasting even for 24 hours would be torture, as their body would be screaming for sugar. These are people on a reasonable healthy modern diet, a large number of people who are not careful about what they eat, and drink can easily be consuming 40+ spoons of sugar a day, which would make any sort of fasting almost impossible.

Anyone can fast but to make it easier you have to be fat adapted first, meaning that you have to be able to use glucose or fat for fuel. The amounts of sugar hidden in processed food, and the amount of sugary drinks consumed, without taking into account any added sugar means most people are running on glucose all the time. To become fat adapted you need to cut sugar and processed carbs from your diet, which in turn stops the spikes in blood sugar, and reduces the amount of insulin in your bloodstream. This doesn’t happen overnight and can take several days, but once you start burning stored fat as energy, fasting becomes a lot easier, and you’re on the path to better health…

I have had a few emails asking if fasting makes you lose a lot more weight, and the quick answer is no. Obviously if you don’t eat for five days you are going to lose weight but in real terms only about 1lb of body fat per day. You could easily show a loss of about 12lbs or more over the five days but a lot of that is water weight, which you will soon gain back. So if I am not losing loads of weight fasting why am I doing it, and the easy answer is autophagy. I know some of you might not of heard about autophagy, basically it is when your body breaks down old or damaged cells and uses them for fuel, but they are replaced with new stem cells, it’s how our body repairs itself. In 2016 the Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research work into Autophagy, which translated means self-eating, and this brought a lot of attention to the little know subject. Through my type 2 Diabetes, I have suffered some nerve damage, which I am using autophagy to repair and it is helping, after being told the damage was irreversible.

Is fasting worth thinking about if you don’t have a problem that needs addressing, well yes, there are plenty of general health benefits to be gained through fasting, and they depend on how long you are prepared to fast for. I personally think that everybody would benefit from doing 24 hour water only fast once every week, and you only have to miss two meals, have your evening meal at 7pm then your next meal at 8pm the following day, and that will give you a full 24 hours without food and around 12 hours with your body in a fasting state.  If it does nothing else it will give your digestive system a rest for a few hours, which with today’s diet and the amount of food we consume it probably hasn’t had for quite some time. Even a 24 hour fast can be problematic if you are diabetic and injecting insulin or on any medication, so I can’t stress enough how important it is to get medical advice before attempting any fast or dietary change, and that goes for everybody, regardless of their medical history. When I first spoke to my doctor regarding fasting she was not in agreement and made a note on my medical record, at that time my blood sugar was high, my LDL was high so were my triglycerides and my HDL was very low, and I was suffering from non-alcoholic fatty liver, and I was grossly overweight at 362lbs. For someone who has been running a weight loss site I was a real mess.

Let’s talk about weight for a minute, I have struggled for years, at my heaviest I was around 392lbs and I was in despair, it seemed like whatever I tried I ended up heavier, and my health was really starting to suffer. I knew about yoyo dieting and have even covered it on this site, but I hadn’t realised how depressing it could become, because I had always been the glass half full type of guy not half empty, but now depression was starting to creep in, and I was becoming quite concerned. One morning I was looking for something online when I saw this article on bariatric surgery, this looked like the answer, but having spoken with my doctor he felt that with my health as it was I would probably not survive the anaesthetic, so that was that, or was it. On further reading on the subject I found that some of the people who had the surgery reversed their type two diabetes, but that was before they had really started to lose weight, and it was down to the liquid diet they were on for the first week.  I put myself on a really low calorie diet, under 1000 calories a day with plenty of fluids and I lost weight but I felt dreadful, hungry all the time with low energy but I managed to drop 30lbs, but I knew it was not sustainable in the long term.

It was at this time I saw an article about Dr Jason Fung who is based in Canada, and he was using diet and fasting to get people off medication that had type 2 Diabetes, this was the turning point for me. I watched his video’s on YouTube, where he talked about Low Carb High Fat diet (LCHF) and fasting, and the more I watched I realised that you had to change to a LCHF diet to make fasting easier. I learnt all I could about LC and also the Ketogenic diet and made some major changes. The first thing I did was to stop using vegetable oil, I cut out all grain, bread, pasta anything made with flour, white rice and potatoes, and that was a lot easier than I thought it would be, but the great thing was the weight was dropping off. I had stopped eating any processed food and just about cut all sugar from my diet, I felt good and never hungry. It was then that I started fasting; first it was just 24 hours, then 3 days, after that I did a couple of 5 days and my last one was nearly 8 days I was about five hours short, not through being hungry, but I had some food that would have wasted. So how am I doing, well since I went LCHF I have lost over 70lbs I am no longer on medication I feel great and looking forward to losing the next 100lbs by next summer. The real bonus is you lose weight and save loads of money when you fast as well, how many diets can you say that about. One last note, usually when you lose large amounts of weight you end up with flappy skin which needs to be removed with surgery, but not when you do extended fasts, this is where Autophagy comes into play and uses the surplus skin as energy…..