Category: Intermittent fasting

Extending Ketosis

I don’t think the Keto diet is healthy. It doesn’t provide enough fiber for healthy gut bacteria. It doesn’t provide a wealth of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that you get from eating lots of complex-carb vegetables and fruits. Also, people who practice it make light of the hazards associated with saturated fat and heart disease, which I consider a serious issue. Having said all that, I do think there can be a subtle role for using Keto in order to extend the ketosis one experiences with intermittent fasting.

Let me explain. I do a 19:5 regimen with intermittent fasting. To my mind, this means that ketosis starts to build around the 12th hour from my last meal. So, with 19:5, I should be getting an escalating ketosis that lasts about 7 hours — from the 12th to the 19th hour of my fasting period.

Question is, is there a viable way to maximize ketosis past the next meal for another 19 hours? This is where Keto may come in handy. If at the next meal, one eats an extremely low — as in insignificant — amount of carbohydrates, but an excessive amount of fat, then the body doesn’t spike insulin, and is left with only fat as an energy source.

Doing this strategy — an extremely high-fat but extremely low-carb OMAD meal — it is very possible to radically reduce your calorie count for that day, as all that fat induces satiety on far fewer calories than what you eat normally. This means that over the following 19-hour fasting period, burning body fat will happen much sooner (perhaps starting at the 6th hour instead of the 12th) because the body will burn through the fewer-than-normal calories from the food sooner, and so instead of 7 hours of ketosis, I might be experiencing up to 13 hours of escalating ketosis in this subsequent fasting period — a win win.

So I think a judicious and selective use of Keto with intermittent fasting could have significant benefits relative to burning body fat, even though I think Keto as your basic diet is unhealthy, even dangerous.

48-Hour Fast

48-Hour Fast

I want to do one 48-hour fast per month to get the benefit of increased autophagy, but I’ve had difficulty doing this. I stay busy with exercise (swimming) the full day that I can’t eat anything, but end up caving and eating just a few hours before going to bed, which would otherwise mean success if I didn’t cave. So I almost get there. Frustrating.

I got this idea from listening to a Youtuber about how to extend a fast a little longer. The idea was to use very high-fat and low-carb foods that won’t spike one’s insulin levels, so they won’t bring down the active ketosis. So I thought I might try this the next time I reach that impasse at a few hours from bedtime.

I’ve chosen two foods to eat: pecans (20 half shells) and one whole avocado. I put these two foods into cronometer, and they do provide an enormous amount of fact and very little carbohydrates. The issue is whether that much fat will satisfy my food craving and get me to bedtime without an insulin spike. We’ll see how this goes.

Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent Fasting

I’ve been doing 19:5 for a very long time. Eat just one large meal around noon and stop eating around 4 pm. Snack in those last 4 hours. Lately have been doing something like 21:3 3 times a week because I can swim on those days in an indoor pool and so it is easier to push back the big meal from 11 am. to 1 pm.

Goal is to increase the time I’m in ketosis in order to burn more body fat. I’ve gotten pretty close to my ideal weight, but am still interested in reducing body fat as much as possible. I think that when one plateaus and isn’t losing any weight, one can still be reducing body fat.

I call myself an “almost vegan,” as I follow Joel Fuhrman’s GBOMBS diet but eat a small amount of turkey every day, but no dairy. Very focused on both ketosis and autophagy. For autophagy, I’m trying to do one 48-hour fast each month — the first Monday of each month. I find that if I can be very busy with things during that Monday, it is easier to go without food that whole day. But if I’m idle, then it is a problem.

With IF, I’ve dropped from 195 to 146 — I’m 5’7″. I think my ideal weight is 140. But a very lean 140. I think the 3 days doing 21:3 will get me there.

Odyssey

Losing Weight

Have lost 30 lbs. in about 12 months with 19:5 intermittent fasting and the GBOMBS diet.  The weight loss also has targeted fat, that is, ketones, so my waistline has gone down noticeably.

Cronometer has been a valuable tool because it helps me not go over a calorie limit each day, and I can manage each day’s intake so that I come in a little under the number of calories it says I should be eating for my age and activity level — I never before knew what that number was.  Cronometer also has given me a much better sense of how caloric each food actually is.

Don’t even think about 19:5 intermittent fasting anymore because it is just the way I eat.  Losing the weight slowly over that 1 year period has been easy to do.  I haven’t felt like I’ve been missing out on food at all, but the focus has been on nutritionally dense food.   No processed food at all, 98% plant based, a very small amount of meat (white meat/turkey, which is very lean meat and low in saturated fat) each day.  Lots of leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, and beans.

One thing that has become very obvious to me with Cronometer is that everyone should be taking a general vitamin pill, as it is so common to be deficiency in many of the micronutrients when one doesn’t take such a pill.  So it’s just a kind of insurance policy to avoid those several likely deficiencies, which you won’t even know you have without using such a tool.

Vitamin Pills and Fat