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…..