Keto Day

The long-term studies relative to the ketogenic diet are not very encouraging. They all point out the likelihood of heart disease. Basically, the body is not meant to consume that level of fat on a regular basis.

But that doesn’t mean that the ketogenic approach is not useful.

Let me explain. I do 19:5 intermittent fasting. I eat a big meal at 11 am and stop eating at 4 pm sharp. It is just the way I eat now. Don’t even think about it. Habit.

But I want to do 48-hour and longer fasts on a fairly regular basis for the sake of enhanced autophagy. Not that hard to do a 48-hour fast — just means not eating for one full day. But longer fasts are a real test for me, and yet they would provide even better autophagy.

So longer than a 48-hour fast is where a “keto day” comes in. I just did a 48-hour fast, but the next day afterward, I did what I call a keto day. The keto day was 2000 calories, mostly fat, a small amount of protein, but only 22 grams of carbohydrates.

The tiny amount of carbohydrates means that the deep ketosis of the longer fast will continue for another day, with all the benefits of deep ketosis.

Relative to enhanced autophagy, the small amount of protein is a more serious issue, as protein tends to halt autophagy. (A major reason for autophagy is the body is scavenging for amino acids, so if you provide protein with food that ends the need for scavenging.)

Bottom line: on that third day, one needs to keep the carbohydrates tiny for continued ketosis, but also keep the protein very low, and that — keeping the protein low — is a challenge in using a keto day for greater autophagy in a longer fast.

No Hunger

Food Order

An interesting question is whether there is any advantage in eating the macronutrients — fat, carbs, protein — in any sequence?

There is a lot of evidence that having fat in one’s meal aids the digestion of various vitamins and minerals. Without the presence of fat, these nutrients are digested, but not as well as they would have been had there been some fat available.

Fat also has no impact at all on insulin, and if you eat a meal that includes some fat, the carbs, which will spike insulin, will spike it much less severely because of the presence of fat. You do want to lower insulin spikes as much as possible.

There is also a good deal of evidence that protein is very satiating, and also slows down digestion because the protein compounds require a lot of work by digestive enzymes to break them down, which is a good thing.

So on balance, eating fat/protein at the start of a meal would appear to be the best strategy, and nothing fills that bill better than a handful of mixed nuts — high in both fat and protein. Perhaps you should start all your major meals with a source of fat/protein like nuts to improve your digestion.

Strength and Old Age

Weight Loss Tricks

Having a very low-fat diet helps because it generally translates into a lower-calorie diet.

Bumping up the amount of protein in your diet helps because the body burns much more calories in digesting protein than it does digesting carbohydrates or fats.

Eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet helps because the body requires a certain level of nutrition, and so if your diet is highly nutritious, the body will be satisfied with fewer calories.

All these are subtle strategies to facilitate losing weight.

Ageless

Best Food for Weight Loss?

The best food for weight loss has high fiber, high protein, and low fat. The fiber is good for weight loss because it passes through you undigested, but makes you feel satiated. The protein is good for weight loss because protein compounds tend to be much more complex than carbohydrate or fat compounds, and so the body has to spend more calories breaking down their more complex compounds. The low-fat aspect is the obvious one — fat has 9 calories per gram versus only 4 calories per gram for carbohydrates or protein, so foods that are low in fat tend also to be lower in calories.

Given these 3 characteristics of the best food for weight loss, what is the very best food for losing weight: BEANS. Beans are high fiber, high protein, and low fat. They are also the one food common to all 5 of the so-called Blue Zones.

Liquid Meals

Weight Control

Not weight loss but weight control — what can you do to stabilize your weight, not to lose weight per se, but instead to help ensure that it doesn’t creep back up?

One thing that I do is once a week, on a designated day that I know I’m obligated to use for that purpose, I have a low-calorie day. I shoot for 550+ calories lower than what I usually eat (Cronometer helps a lot with this). Tuesday is my low-calorie day, and I usually eat the same assortment of foods, which tend to be very low in fat calories. But there are little nuances on that particular day that help me get to minus 550 calories. For instance, instead of my usual 3 prunes I only have 2, instead of 2 figs, just the 1. Instead of my usual mouthful of walnuts, I’ll skip nuts entirely, and have an extra slice of lean turkey. With enough of these nuances, it is surprisingly easy to have such a low-calorie day — and you don’t feel deprived.

Having such a lean day one day a week means that on those other days when you inevitably go “over budget,” sort of speak, it all gets compensated for in the end — and the weight stays amazingly stable, no longer so erratic.

Omega 3 Fat Hurdles

Weight Loss

Weight loss from 198 to 155 in one year. Nutritarian diet (Joel Fuhrman) with intermittent fasting.

I’ve recently found that baked potatoes are also a useful tool, as they are filling and very low in fat. Having days with a very low number of grams in fat really accelerates weight loss. It may not be true that “fat makes you fat,” but it is clearly true that low fat will make you skinny because low-fat days tend also to make for low-calorie days.

What Don’t You Know?

Losing Weight

How many times have I read the exact same post in Facebook but with slightly different words: I’m doing everything right but am not losing any weight — why? The body has its own timetable for weight loss. For one thing, the metabolism tends to counter everything a person does. So if you eat significantly fewer calories, for instance, the metabolism will slow down to counter that. However, no matter what tricks the metabolism plays, if you have a sustained program for weight loss, the weight will come off at some point. But if you give up in frustration, it won’t.

My Story