Moving forward with intermittent fasting

Making progress...so let's make more, shall we?

For me, making progress doesn't necessarily amount to weight loss. We all know my history. And weight loss hasn't been necessarily forthcoming. If I were someone else who was all centered in on weight, I'd be sorely disappointed.

I went to Nashville in July and enjoyed plenty of good food. When I returned and decided to begin IF in earnest on July 26, I was sitting at 288.2 pounds of prime beef. Since that time, I've slowly decreased, and as of today, I'm at 281.5 pounds. This does not include a low-carb diet...nor, really, any diet at all. That has been just over a month with 6.7 pounds melted away. Not terribly fast. But again, that's not been my goal.

I've noticed some other pretty cool stuff happening. Rashes have been leaving. Scaly skin on my face has been going away. My lips are barely chapped anymore; they're quite smooth, actually. So that's been encouraging.

What do I want? Autophagy. The body recycling bad materials back into good. So how do I do this? Well, from what I see all over the internet, autophagy begins around 18 hours without food. I've yet to break that. I've done 18 hours so far, which is okay. Yesterday I had lunch around 1:30, and polished off my smoothie around 7:30, then began eating today around 1:30 again. That made 18 hours. So I juuust made it. Barely beginning autophagy. For me to do this, I'll have to go beyond that. I'm thinking some 24-hour fasts should be good to do that. So...a dinner-to-dinner fast. Or breakfast-to-breakfast. You get the idea.

Something else obvious I want: decreased fatty liver. I'm not sure how glycogen—the liver's store of glucose—fits into the picture, but glycogen stores are depleted after 18-24 hours (more likely 24). Once that happens, the body then must revert to using fat as an energy source, creating ketones, or ketone bodies. Probably it would take a fast of 36 hours to accomplish. So that would involve something like eating dinner one night, sleeping, fasting all day the next day, then sleeping and beginning to eat again on the following day. I think this could be worth trying.

This is my body, and I can do with it as I want. That lesson came down hard about 11 years ago, when I decided I wanted to pack on weight and get bigger. Now I sense some subtle but firm signals that my body would like to enjoy some fasting from time to time. I've been doing 16 hours at a stretch easily. Going to 18 hasn't been particularly difficult either. I think I could accomplish 24, perhaps starting tonight. That would bring on the autophagy in a nice way!

Now...to do this, I would have coffee in the mornings, probably make some tea for the afternoon, then also have water with electrolytes and salt in it in case I have any issues with electrolyte loss, then eat dinner again tomorrow. I'm thinking perhaps a yummy Hawaiian meal tomorrow: rice, macaroni salad, and either kalua pork or chicken katsu. If I had some haupia, that would be a perfect way to end dinner.

In the meantime, here's a cool website.