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- Words: 7,082
- Pages: 38
- Publisher: Lulu.com
- Released Date: 2021-01-19
- Author: Haydon Johnson
52 lbs.
Strategic Weight Loss
By Haydon Johnson
52 lbs. Strategic Weight Loss
1st Edition Copyright © 2021 Haydon Johnson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9-781716-213809
Table of Contents Warning:
Why other diets fail. The old cliché.
52 lbs.
This is the program:
An example of a weight loss plan on this program:
What are the health benefits of fasting?
Why dry fast?
What will you be eating on your eating days?
Why not lose weight faster?
Breaking the food addiction: what to do when you are craving food.
Exercise!
Wrapping up
Warning: Warning! I am not a doctor nor any kind of medical or nutritional certified professional. I’m not even remotely close to qualified for giving you medical advice. By reading this, you’re assuming responsibility for your own actions. This writing is strictly an observation of my weight loss experience and is not intended to be prescribed as advice to anyone else. Take this information for what it is and you assume your own responsibility and risks.
Why other diets fail. The old cliché.
Cutting calories doesn’t work. Modifying your diet and removing a food group from your diet will only work temporarily (until you find a substitute for the removed food group). As much as we wish they would, diets don’t work at long term weight loss because our bodies have evolved to adjust to whatever caloric input we are at.
What about marathon runners and professional athletes? They look fit, surely exercise works, right? If you want to lose weight, it would be a great idea to become an Olympic Athlete. However, getting hours and hours of exercise is really only an option to those who have a lot of time on their hands and/or don’t have small children to take care of. The large majority of people in our busy modern world simply do not have the option for high-intensity exercise for hours every day without giving up significant career progression and time with their families.
Other than a small minority of outliers, most people will gain weight while maintaining a moderate exercise program and watching their calories.
Why doesn’t diet and exercise work for long term weight loss? Because our bodies have evolved to adjust our metabolism to what is available in our environment! The first skeletons of modern Homo Sapiens were found nearly 200,000 years ago. Throughout these 200,000 years our ancestors had to survive long periods without food. The early humans that stored the most fat and keep it on the longest were the ones who survived droughts and famines and were able to on their genes to the next generation. The ones who didn’t put on large amounts of fat during times of abundance were the first to die during periods of famine. That is why most of us have evolved to be obese. It’s by design.
The amazing human body – built to constantly prepare for extreme famines! This fantastic ability to survive famines is the very reason why losing weight is so very difficult, it is the reason why a person can diet and exercise every day of their lives and remain obese or even morbidly obese.
Diets fail because our bodies have evolved very effectively to maximize the fuel stored (storing as much fat as possible), minimize the fuel used (amount of exercise), and adjust to whatever caloric intake you currently are on. So, if you are craving food all the time, if it’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up and the last on your mind when you go to bed, if no matter how much you diet and exercise you can’t lose weight, what you actually are is human! We have evolved to do exactly that! We have evolved to desire to gorge ourselves every time we find tasty food. And, when food is short, we have evolved to efficiently keep as much of that fat stored as we can for as long as we can.
In other words, if you reduce your caloric intake to even as low as 1,200 calories per day, you will lose weight for a while, but eventually your body will adjust to that level of calories and you will stop losing weight, or even gain weight, even on as little as 1,200 calories per day. The body reducing its metabolism to that point is a body that is working exactly as it’s evolved to work, it’s working perfectly! The body’s ability to adjust the metabolism to the amount of calories taken in is actually what has allowed the human race to be able to survive long and unpredictable periods of famine. Take the case of Angus Barbieri, an obese man who stopped eating for 382 days. He didn’t eat anything for over a year! He simply stopped eating until he reached his goal weight (he had regular medical appointments). While that’s not advisable and many people wouldn’t have made it, it is actually the perfect example of what humans have evolved to be able to do – to pack on the pounds during periods of abundance, so if need be, they can survive without food for many months, even until the next harvest.
Angus Barbieri was able to go from grossly obese to ideal weight in a little over
a year. In addition to Angus Barbieri, there have been many others who stopped eating until they reached their ideal weight, sometimes fasting for weeks or even many months. So, why don’t doctors prescribe this more often? Death. Simply stopping eating for extended periods of time has lead to a few deaths. Stopping eating for months or a year isn’t advisable, it isn’t safe, and sometimes leads to death and other long term health problems. However, to realize that people have been able to stop eating for weeks, months, and even over a year brings us back to the reality that fasting for only one day is a relatively short period of time.
So, it’s not safe to simply stop eating until the end goal weight is achieved if it’s more than five pounds from your current weight. And, I’ve explained calorie reduction and moderate exercise isn’t the answer, either. The human body will reduce the daily calories burned to match the intake. However, contrary to calorie reduction, when fasting our metabolism actually increases! Why is this? Well, if our body figures out that we will be eating 1,200 calories per day then the body knows that to survive it will need to burn only 1,200 calories per day or it will die. However, if the body has no food at all, it knows that it will not survive at all unless it finds food. When the food has completely run out (no food vs low food supply, such as calorie reduction), the human body has evolved to become energized to find food. In other words, fasting increases metabolism whereas dieting decreases metabolism. Evolution has taught your genes that either we starve to death very quickly, or we burn the last of the energy we have to find food.
In summary, the body will burn less if we simple reduce our intake. Conversely, the body will burn more if we stop eating completely. That is why reducing your calories will only work temporarily but fasting will reduce pounds quickly.
In addition to not losing weight, when our bodies have adjusted to a low level of caloric intake, we will be exhausted and depressed. When we are depressed, we don’t feel like doing anything. We feel like staying in bed, curling up, and sleeping the day away (in other words, conserving energy until the environment improves). Depression evolved to ensure survival during famines, to conserve
energy until rain came or other conditions improved. Even depression is a natural part of our evolution! Depression is the body’s natural mechanism to stop all activity until more food becomes available. That is why calorie cutting can lead to fatigue and depression – it’s a natural result of evolution.
That is why people who eat healthy and get moderate exercise can still be obese, and on top of that, depressed. If we obey our instincts to eat at all, we will put on weight. Even only a pound a week, ten years later, will accumulate to an extra 520 pounds! However, the human body naturally wants to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible, so if we eat what we feel like eating and do as much exercise as we feel like doing, then we can easily put on many pounds per day.
So, what can be done about this? If lots of exercise is not practical for busy people and especially parents, and diet only helps temporarily, what can be done? Is there any way to lose weight?
Most likely, if you are overweight, you’ve been overweight for a long time and have tried just about every diet out there. You may have even spent your whole life on one diet or another and still struggled with your weight.
What if there was a simpler solution? Simpler, yet more effective?
52 lbs.
In this program, we are limiting the amount of weight lost in a year to 52 pounds so that the body doesn’t simply react by burning less and less fuel, thus causing you to put the weight back on.
Well, is 52 pounds of weight enough? A year is 52 weeks long. One year from now will come and go regardless of what we do. The question is, a year from now do you want to be 52 pounds lighter, or do you want to try the other diets out there that do not work and be right where you are or possibly heavier?
The idea behind the 52 lb. diet is that we are going to limit the amount of weight lost to one pound per week. As the weeks and months go by, healthier eating habits will be established and a strategic plan to keep the weight off for the rest of your life will become a habit.
Sounds backward, however, by limiting the speed at which weight is lost, the body doesn’t respond by lowering the metabolism to match the lower caloric intake.
Are there exceptions to 52 pounds?
Yes. For every 100 pounds overweight you are, you could consider adding a pound of week to the weight loss goal. In other words:
If you are zero to 100 pounds overweight, limit weight loss to one pound per week, the standard plan. If you are between 100-200 pounds overweight, then consider losing 2 pounds per week until you are less than 100 pounds overweight, at which point consider switching to 1 pounds per week. If you are over 200 pounds overweight, ask your doctor how many pounds you should lose per week.
Why these exceptions? Because if you are 100 pounds or more overweight, you are dangerously unhealthy. The more overweight you are, the more dangerous it is (that is why “morbidly” obese is called “morbidly” – it is deadly!). Therefore, if you are more than 100 pounds overweight, in the name of your health, you will need to lose weight faster or you will die from obesity. As you gradually get out of the dangerously obese zones, then you can reduce the speed at which you lose weight.
As with any other weight loss program, before starting you should schedule a check-up with your doctor and let them know what you are planning to do, and schedule regular appointments as advised by your doctor to make sure you are getting adequate nutrition and to address any other underlying issues.
While it is possible to lose weight faster, such as in the case of Angus Barbieri, who didn’t eat for 388 days and lost 276 pounds during that year, this was only possible because he didn’t work during that time and was being closely monitored by his doctor. It was also dangerous to go that long without food. It is better to take your time and lose the weight pound by pound, week by week, and thereby establish a healthy eating pattern to keep the weight off for the rest of your life.
What about the theory that fasting only leads to temporary weight loss? To that I say, why get our hair cut when it’s only going to grow back? When the hair grows back, get your haircut again.
In the same way, when the weight comes back, fast again. It really is that simple.
With simply diet and exercise, as I’ve explained, you will gain weight. That is what we’ve evolved to do. While diet and exercise works for a small percentage of people (that frankly, those very same people would be the first to perish in a famine), for most of us, simply diet and exercise alone will have us gaining weight, or at the very least, only lose weight until our body adjusts to the new caloric input/output. So, the only way to actually lose weight in the long term is to fast, and when the weight comes back on, to fast again. In this way, we can not only lose the excess fat, but we can keep it off for the rest of our lives.
One of the biggest lessons we learn through fasting is this:
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
This is the program:
First: set an appointment with your doctor and let him/her know you will be fasting for about 30 hours at a time a couple times a week, and of those 30 hours, 20 of them will be dry fasting. Make sure your doctor confirms that you don’t have any underlying conditions that might make this program dangerous for you (for example, diabetes). Don’t start this program until after you have had your doctor visit and received confirmation that it will be safe for you.
Women who are pregnant, nursing, planning to get pregnant, or people of either age younger than 25 years of age, should not fast.
Next: get a glucose monitor for watching your blood sugar and a digital scale for weighing yourself. On your fasting days, at least the first few times, you will be monitoring your blood sugar on an hourly basis to make sure that it remains in the safe zone as defined by your doctor.
When I started fasting, my blood sugars were not in a healthy range. I wasn’t able to fast for a full 24 hours for several months due to my pre-diabetic condition. At first, I could only “fast” for a half an hour after I woke up (delaying my breakfast). I kept monitoring my blood sugar, and was able to extend the amount I could fast bit by bit, week by week. After several months, I was finally able to fast for 24 hours and then finally to over 30 hours.
With this diet, the strategy is to set a goal of one pound lost for every week.
Every morning, when you wake up, the first thing you do, even before you go to the bathroom, weigh yourself on your digital scale. If you are not at your goal weight or lower, then you don’t eat anything until the next weigh in the next morning. That’s it! The program is really as simple as that, but there are some additional strategies to make this work.
There are a few reasons why this program requires a daily morning weigh-in:
It gives us the ability to see clearly the consequences of our daily habits. If we weigh ourselves more often, there won’t be a clear timeline of events. If we weight ourselves less often, we won’t clearly see the effects of one day’s habits.
Every Monday (or day of the week of your choosing), you will go down by one pound for that week, and only one pound. The day of fasting will be for about 36 hours, give or take (from the last meal on Monday until breakfast on Wednesday), and the next day you can eat, but if you overeat and go back up to above your goal weight, you will need to fast again.
You will not eat until the next weigh-in, but you may have some calorie free liquids. You may drink black coffee or plain tea (no sugar, milk, or sugar substitute) until 10:00 am, and as much water as you feel thirsty for. Then, you won’t eat or drink from 10:00 am that morning until the next morning’s weighin. You will likely need to fast every other day or every few days, and watch your calories on your “eating days”.
For example, let’s say your goal weight this week is 230 pounds On Monday when you wake up, the first thing you will do is weigh yourself. If the scale says
230.0 lbs or less, then you get to eat. On the other hand, if the scale says 230.1 or higher, then you won’t eat until Tuesday morning’s weigh in, and you won’t weigh yourself either. You also won’t drink fluids from 10:00 am Monday until Tuesday morning weigh in (unless you get thirsty). On the days that you fast, track your fasting on a free app such as Fasting Tracker.
Then, Tuesday morning, you will wake up and the first thing you will do is weigh yourself. If you weigh 230.0 lbs or less, you get to eat! If you weigh 230.1 or more, then you again won’t eat until Wednesday morning’s weigh in. However, on Tuesday, even if you’re not eating, you can drink coffee, tea, and/or water (but no milk, sugar, or sugar substitute) until 10 am.
On the days that you get to eat (by meeting your weight goal), you will track your calories. Tracking your calories will be necessary so that you know what your body burns in a day so that you don’t put back on the weight you just fasted to lose.
You will likely lose more than one pound during your day of fasting. That’s what you hope for. However, due to the nature of the body’s evolved need to burn as little as possible and store as much as possible, your body will put as much back on as possible on your eating days.
On the days that you eat, track your calories through a free app such as MyPlate and set a goal of eating between 1,200 and 1,500 calories. When you weigh yourself the next morning, compare that to the number of calories that you have eaten the day prior and adjust your daily caloric intake until you are at maintenance on your eating days. If you continue to lose weight on your eating days due to too few calories, that means it will cause your metabolism to crash, so increase or decrease your caloric intake until you maintain your weight or slightly above. If you go up one pound, that’s about right. It will just mean you need to fast again, but you don’t want to gain more than one pound in a day because then you might need to fast for more than one consecutive day to take it
off.
Another benefit of fasting is that it breaks the addiction to food. As any alcoholic knows, it is nearly impossible to simply limit what you drink. It is better to go cold turkey. It is the same with food. If you are addicted to food, which humans naturally are, eating smaller portions doesn’t break the addiction, in fact, it more likely makes it worse. To break the food addiction, you need to go without food entirely and find other ways to deal with your emotions than running to food.
Keep track of your weight in a goal book. In this book, you will have three columns:
Date Goal Weight Actual Weight
Every morning when you weigh yourself, you will write in your goal book what you weigh in the “Actual Weight” column.
In theory, for a person that lowering calories and exercise works, there may be no fasting days. Sometimes, especially for those who are very overweight, diet and exercise alone will cause a person to lose a pound a week. If so, then you can continue without any fasting. If this is true for you, then just keep your daily log of your weigh-ins and continue on the pound per week or adjusted schedule. Most likely, though, if you lose weight through diet and exercise alone, this is temporary, and at some point your metabolism will crash so that you will stop losing weight or will start to put it back on (for the reasons outlined in chapter 1). As long as you are recording every day, then you will know exactly when
that happens and can begin the fasting portion of this program.
The body will naturally try to put back on any weight you lose. However, your fasting days will allow you to lose at least a couple of pounds, so even if a little weight is gained back, as long as you keep fasting on the days you exceed your goal weight, your average weight will gradually decrease.
And, :
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
An example of a weight loss plan on this program:
Woman 40 years old 5’5’’ Medium Frame
Current weight: 180 lb.
Goal weight: 130 lb.
Date
Goal Weight (in pounds) Actual Weight (in pounds)
January 1, 20x1
180.0
180.0
January 2, 20x1
180.0
181.2 (fast)
January 3, 20x1
180.0
176.3
January 4, 20x1
180.0
177.2
January 4, 20x1
180.0
178.4
January 5, 20x1
180.0
179.3
January 6, 20x1
180.0
181.0 (fast)
January 7, 20x1
180.0
176.3
January 8, 20x1
179.0
177.5
January 9, 20x1
179.0
178.3
January 10, 20x1
179.0
180.7 (fast)
January 11, 20x1
179.0
175.9
January 12, 20x1
179.0
176.3
January 13, 20x1
179.0
177.5
January 14, 20x1
179.0
177.8
January 15, 20x1
178.0
178.0
January 16, 20x1
178.0
178.5 (fast)
January 17, 20x1
178.0
174.4
January 18, 20x1
178.0
175.6
January 19, 20x1
178.0
176.3
January 20, 20x1
178.0
177.5
January 21, 20x1
178.0
178.0
January 22, 20x1
177.0
179.1 (fast)
January 23, 20x1
177.0
175.4
While it may seem to go slow at one pound per week, at the end of one year, she will be at her goal weight of 130 pounds.
After the weight is lost, maintain the goal weight indefinitely with the same method, by weighing yourself every morning and eating or not eating that day based on whether you are at or below your goal weight.
As the year progresses, you may even find yourself looking forward to your fasting days, as they provide extra time for spending with your family and friends, and also, will increase your energy level. If you find your energy dipping, talk to your doctor about whether or not you should be taking SaltSticks.
And ,
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
What are the health benefits of fasting?
The number one benefit of fasting is increased life span.
Fasting can be dangerous for people with underlying conditions, such as diabetes. There are other conditions as well, so that is why it is important to visit your doctor before embarking on any weight loss program, including this one. There is some research to that fasting can treat and/or cure type 2 diabetes, but again, that’s something to speak with your doctor about first.
That being said, there are many well-documented health benefits of fasting. In mammals in laboratory settings, by fasting every other day in a lab, many animals gain about 15-20% life span. We don’t know if this directly translates to humans, but recent research on the health benefits of fasting on humans s that assumption. That means, if the average human lives to about 75 years old, in theory, if everyone fasted every other day, the average human life span could be 90 years old, even if no other changes were made. The other benefit is, that the years gained are not just added years, but added healthy, energetic, and happy years. The additional years have less cancer, more energy, more hair, fewer wrinkles, less depression, greater mental sharpness, and more physical mobility. In other words, the gains aren’t just a number of years, the gains are in youth, vitality, and enjoyment of life.
So, then if eating only every other day is so beneficial, then why not just do this diet with eating every other day? Well, in theory, you could. You could just eat every other day. However, this book is about losing weight, which is actually a different goal. If you eat every other day without the weight loss goal, it is easy to overeat on the eating days, which will result in no overall weight loss or even weight gain. Conversely, by fasting only when the goal weight has been
exceeded, you are actually rewarding yourself for eating more healthily. The night before you weigh yourself, as your experience with this lifestyle increases, you will find yourself thinking about the next day’s weigh-in, and reducing what you eat. It is about reward and punishment, carrot and stick. Motivating yourself by what you will look like a month from now isn’t nearly as motivating as the effect of choosing whether to eat a bedtime snack determining whether or not you will have breakfast the next morning. It is changing the mentality and relationship you have with food, and countering some of the effects of 200,000 years of evolution that drives us to gorge ourselves at every opportunity. In order to change that mentality, we need to somehow rewire the reward sensors in the brain. As you move along in this program, you will find yourself celebrating every time you maintain your weight at or below the goal weight. Similarly, when you exceed the goal weight, you will be able to reflect back on the day prior and see where you might have overeaten. You will find out that the human body actually doesn’t need to much food to maintain the current weight. It’s just evolution that we desire more food than we need for that day.
So, even though in theory you could just switch to eating every other day, that doesn’t reliably cause weight loss nor does it create the reward/punishment effects. My point in bringing up the research on the health benefits of fasting is that not eating for a day is not only do-able, but is very good for most people.
And, again, please :
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
Why dry fast?
Dry fasting is optional on this diet. I bring it up because many people find dry fasting to be much easier than water fasting. The reason is that drinking water on an empty stomach makes many people very, very hungry. Also, drinking water without replenishing the electrolytes can cause some serious weakness and dizziness. However, if you feel thirsty, drink water. Dry fasting shouldn’t make you thirsty, actually. If you have drunk plenty of fluids in the morning before 10 am, and then are only dry fasting until the next morning’s weigh-in, that is about 20 hours. If you become thirsty, drink some water or salt water. It isn’t good to get too thirsty, severe dehydration can cause strokes and other health problems. Dry fasting should only be done for comfort. It just helps with the hunger.
This is again, something to make sure your doctor agrees you can do safely. And, absolutely never ever go over 20 hours of dry fasting. Some people dry fast for many days, but there are also cases of death, stroke and other serious ramifications of that behavior so don’t do it! Even on dry fasting days, drink water, coffee or tea as much as you want until 10 am. The day after dry fasting, be prepared to drink lots of water and carry a water bottle with you everywhere you go so that you can drink until you feel you have replenished yourself.
The health benefits of dry fasting have been said to be three times as beneficial as water fasting. In other words, some people believe that one day of dry fasting has as many cleansing benefits as 3 days of water fasting, though I haven’t seen any scientific studies to back up that claim. However, it is possible that dry fasting may help with the hunger as well as speed up weight loss and autophagy.
What will you be eating on your eating days?
On the days that you eat, track your calories with an app such as MyPlate. The fasting days are the only days that you are trying to lose weight. If you simply reduce calories every day, your body will reduce the metabolism. That is why on the eating days we are not watching calories to lose weight. Your goal on your eating days is to maintain the weight loss, not to lose additional weight.
The food to eat on the eating days are:
Whole foods (raw vegetables, whole grains, etc). No processed foods or foods that have been manufactured in any way Absolutely no junk food. No Sugar-based desserts At least 2 cups of cabbage, lettuce or other leafy greens per day Limit or eliminate a bedtime snack No high calorie drinks Snack on very low-calorie foods such as celery and cucumbers. Eliminate fruit Lots of vegetables Legumes and tofu or other protein
The human body doesn’t need much food to maintain the weight. So, that means every calorie needs to be worth it and full of nutrition! The good news is that healthy food is much cheaper than junk food. Don’t believe me? Compare a bag of potato chips to a bag of potatoes! A bag of chips and a bag of potatoes cost roughly the same amount, but in a bag of chips you actually only have a few potatoes worth of food, whereas a bag of potatoes at the same price will be about a dozen of potatoes and many meals worth of potatoes!
Fruit is a bit of another story: fruit can be expensive, more expensive than junk food and even more expensive than vegetables. On top of that, it’s also high in calories and not as healthy as some would presume. You can get plenty of vitamin C and other vitamins from the vegetables you eat for far fewer calories. Consider replacing the fruit in your diet with vegetables.
The core of your diet should be low or no calorie foods, such as cabbage, leafy greens, cucumbers, and other vegetables. It’s important to eat a balanced diet, but the majority of your diet should be those very low or no calorie foods so that you can feel full and satisfied on a low calorie diet.
The amount of leafy greens per day should be modified to suit your digestive system. For those who can tolerate it, here is a recipe:
Cabbage Salad Recipe:
Chop and add to a bowl in this order:
Half a cabbage, chopped into shreds Half an onion, chopped into half rings Half a jalapeno pepper, sliced Half a cucumber, sliced 1 carrot, julienned 1 tsp red pepper flakes 1 lemon, squeezed over top
After adding a portion to a serving bowl, add a couple teaspoons balsamic vinaigrette or Italian dressing.
The following recipes should also be part of your diet, along with a balanced diet of other veggies and sources of protein.
Simple Tofu:
1 block of Extra Firm Tofu, cut into 16 pieces
Put some Louisiana Fish breading into a dish and dip each piece of tofu into the breading until it is covered
Cover the bottom of a cookie sheet with a very thin layer of oil or spray with a nonstick spray.
Put the breaded tofu pieces onto the oiled cookie sheet in a single layer.
Put into toaster oven and bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then turn each piece over and cook for another 15 minutes.
If you’d like extra firm, “meaty” tofu, turn off the oven at 15 minutes and leave in the oven as it cools until it is the texture you prefer: another 15 minutes or an hour, depending on your preference.
There are many no and low calorie soup recipes available online with a simple google search. When you eat these types of soups, not only are they very healthy as they are filled with vegetables, but you can also eat fairly large quantities of diet soup with very few calories. Here are a few of my favorites:
Low Calorie Soup
6 cups veggie stock 1 diced yellow onion 3 cups frozen mixed veggies 1 cup diced celery 1 bunch of kale 2 teaspoons garlic 1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper 1 tub Tofu or cooked chicken 1 can diced tomatoes
Add all ingredients to a large pot and heat to simmer for 15 minutes or until cooked until it is of your liking.
Spicy Veggie Soup
1/4 cup soy sauce 3 tablespoons fish sauce 1 tsp curry powder 3 T lemon juice 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste 3 teaspoons Sriracha sauce 2 teaspoons chili garlic paste (Asian) 2 cloves garlic (Minced) 6 cups cooked chicken or vegetable broth 2 cups cauliflower 1 whole large carrot cut into thin slices 2 cups kale leaves
3 cups napa or American cabbage 1 pound shrimp or 1 tub tofu
Add all to a pot on stove and simmer for 15 minutes or until vegetables are cooked to your liking.
As the weeks progress on this diet, you will learn how many calories your body burns in a day, and you can add or remove various foods until you achieve that equilibrium on your eating days. After a few months of this program, you can start looking at your favorite foods and seeing how often and at what portion sizes they can be added back to your diet by monitoring how it affects your weight the next morning.
If you put weight back on quickly on the eating days, here are a few things you can try:
OMAD: eat only once per day, for an hour per day. Don’t eat a bed time snack
Why not lose weight faster?
There are many reasons why it is beneficial to fast only on days that the goal weight was not met, and to only lose a pound a week.
For one, it allows skin the time to go back into shape. Losing 52 pounds per year gives the skin time to get back into shape. By dry fasting, this will also help with tightening the skin.
Another reason to lose weight slowly is because it’s a new way of living, this is a new habit to not just lose weight, but to maintain that weight for the rest of your life. It will get easier over time, and at some point, it will become your new norm.
Yet another reason to lose weight at this modified pace is because it will lessen the shock on the system. Instead of fasting for 3, 7, or 20 days as some recommend, fasting only one day at a time will be much easier and will have many health benefits.
Also, going this slow allows you to learn about your body, and what exactly it takes just to maintain the weight (and not increase the weight). The human body actually needs very little food, not nearly the portion sizes that are provided at many restaurants.
Losing a pound of week may seem slow, however each pound lost becomes a
solid pound lost: not water. Just as a comparison, butter is mostly fat. That means, for every pound of fat you lose, you are losing about equal to a pound of butter! That’s a lot! One pound of weight lost is a big deal and certainly something to celebrate! So, trust the system and take the time to lose the weight right.
Breaking the food addiction: what to do when you are craving food.
We have evolved to be able to eat only one meal every couple of days and still put on weight! We have evolved to desire to gorge ourselves. There is certainly nothing special about being a person who loves food, who loves to gorge on food, who wants to eat all day long, and to think about your next item of food right after you’ve finished something delicious.
This is what we’ve evolved to do! To be constantly looking for food and gorging on the most calorie rich food at every opportunity is how we’ve evolved to be and is absolutely necessary in an environment that is constantly short on food. However, the environment we’ve evolved to be able to survive is no longer the environment that we live in. If we live based on our instincts, we will be gorging every few hours enough calories to be able to last a few days of intense exercise!
To be able to even just not gain weight when we are surrounded by food goes completely against our evolution, and certainly to lose weight when we have an abundance of food is going against our own nature. In order to not become morbidly obese, we have to go against our basic instincts, yet we need to do this for our health.
So, what do we do when we are craving food but we are on a fasting day? Here are some options:
Take a nap. Taking a nap can curb some cravings.
Take a walk. Start a hobby Clean and organize your home Tap your forehead while thinking of your craving (this helps some people) Brush your teeth.
If it’s possible, you could take a nap. Being sleepy can make hunger worse.
What you will find on the days you are fasting is that you have a LOT more time. In that way, you might even find yourself looking forward to fasting days because you can get so much done and will have more energy.
You will save money because on the days that you fast you won’t be eating at all. If you fast every other day and don’t increase your intake on the days that you eat, you effectively cut your grocery bill in half! You will also be saving the time that you took to buy, prepare, and eat the food. So, what to do with all this time?
Exercise!
Try to get at least 30 minutes of intense exercise per day on the days you are eating. On the days that you are fasting, do not engage in high intensity exercise. Instead, do low intensity exercise, such as walks in the neighborhood. However, for many people, we don’t even have 30 minutes to exercise.
One of the reasons many people don’t even try to get exercise is because what many people consider exercise – at a track or gym – is simply not available to a large portion of the population. We might have kids and work long hours, or another of the millions of valid reasons why we cannot go to the gym or track. Even if we could realistically begin an exercise regimen, doing so may take precious time away from our families. BUT! We can still get exercise while we are taking care of our children, and in the process, teaching our kids a healthy lifestyle.
The way to measure if you have time to exercise is to look at your Monday to Friday schedule. Do you have time to watch tv or browse Facebook, other media or other entertainment? If so, you have time to exercise. In those cases, it would be trading your Facebook, tv, or other entertainment time for exercise time. We cannot make time. The only thing we can do is find an activity to trade the time with. If you have a different work schedule than Monday through Friday, just trade the days. The point is, if you have time to watch tv after work, you absolutely have time to exercise. Just trade your tv time with exercise time, or exercise while you’re watching tv.
If you don’t have time for any entertainment because you are only working your job and then coming home to clean the house and take care of the kids, then you can consider that those hours that you are cleaning the house and taking the kids
to the park as exercise, but you will need to spend at least twice as much time doing something at low intensity as you would focused high-intensity exercise. So, if you only have time to clean the house but not exercise, then make a point to clean the house with as much energy as you possibly can for at least an hour a day.
The weekends are about changing habits. If you have free time, then it is a family affair. The whole family will need to adopt new habits. Instead of bingewatching shows, go on a long walk with the family. The idea is to turn off the tv, stop watching Netflix and other media, and get exercise instead. The idea would also be to limit any tv, video games, or other media to less than 3 hours per week, and trade the time that you used to do those activities with activities that involve physical movement and exercise. This will mean that you make new habits, and those habits you do with your kids will have positive effects for generations.
The more exercise you get, the more calories you burn. This is again working against our instinct to conserve energy. We have to work against our desires to do as little as possible to prepare for the next famine. We live in modern society, we don’t need to store fat for the famine. Instead, we need to get up and keep moving as much as possible.
Wrapping up
That’s the whole program, actually very simple, and a new way to live your life. A system to set your ideal weight, achieve your ideal weight, and keep it off for the rest of your life!
Strategic Weight Loss
By Haydon Johnson
52 lbs. Strategic Weight Loss
1st Edition Copyright © 2021 Haydon Johnson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9-781716-213809
Table of Contents Warning:
Why other diets fail. The old cliché.
52 lbs.
This is the program:
An example of a weight loss plan on this program:
What are the health benefits of fasting?
Why dry fast?
What will you be eating on your eating days?
Why not lose weight faster?
Breaking the food addiction: what to do when you are craving food.
Exercise!
Wrapping up
Warning: Warning! I am not a doctor nor any kind of medical or nutritional certified professional. I’m not even remotely close to qualified for giving you medical advice. By reading this, you’re assuming responsibility for your own actions. This writing is strictly an observation of my weight loss experience and is not intended to be prescribed as advice to anyone else. Take this information for what it is and you assume your own responsibility and risks.
Why other diets fail. The old cliché.
Cutting calories doesn’t work. Modifying your diet and removing a food group from your diet will only work temporarily (until you find a substitute for the removed food group). As much as we wish they would, diets don’t work at long term weight loss because our bodies have evolved to adjust to whatever caloric input we are at.
What about marathon runners and professional athletes? They look fit, surely exercise works, right? If you want to lose weight, it would be a great idea to become an Olympic Athlete. However, getting hours and hours of exercise is really only an option to those who have a lot of time on their hands and/or don’t have small children to take care of. The large majority of people in our busy modern world simply do not have the option for high-intensity exercise for hours every day without giving up significant career progression and time with their families.
Other than a small minority of outliers, most people will gain weight while maintaining a moderate exercise program and watching their calories.
Why doesn’t diet and exercise work for long term weight loss? Because our bodies have evolved to adjust our metabolism to what is available in our environment! The first skeletons of modern Homo Sapiens were found nearly 200,000 years ago. Throughout these 200,000 years our ancestors had to survive long periods without food. The early humans that stored the most fat and keep it on the longest were the ones who survived droughts and famines and were able to on their genes to the next generation. The ones who didn’t put on large amounts of fat during times of abundance were the first to die during periods of famine. That is why most of us have evolved to be obese. It’s by design.
The amazing human body – built to constantly prepare for extreme famines! This fantastic ability to survive famines is the very reason why losing weight is so very difficult, it is the reason why a person can diet and exercise every day of their lives and remain obese or even morbidly obese.
Diets fail because our bodies have evolved very effectively to maximize the fuel stored (storing as much fat as possible), minimize the fuel used (amount of exercise), and adjust to whatever caloric intake you currently are on. So, if you are craving food all the time, if it’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up and the last on your mind when you go to bed, if no matter how much you diet and exercise you can’t lose weight, what you actually are is human! We have evolved to do exactly that! We have evolved to desire to gorge ourselves every time we find tasty food. And, when food is short, we have evolved to efficiently keep as much of that fat stored as we can for as long as we can.
In other words, if you reduce your caloric intake to even as low as 1,200 calories per day, you will lose weight for a while, but eventually your body will adjust to that level of calories and you will stop losing weight, or even gain weight, even on as little as 1,200 calories per day. The body reducing its metabolism to that point is a body that is working exactly as it’s evolved to work, it’s working perfectly! The body’s ability to adjust the metabolism to the amount of calories taken in is actually what has allowed the human race to be able to survive long and unpredictable periods of famine. Take the case of Angus Barbieri, an obese man who stopped eating for 382 days. He didn’t eat anything for over a year! He simply stopped eating until he reached his goal weight (he had regular medical appointments). While that’s not advisable and many people wouldn’t have made it, it is actually the perfect example of what humans have evolved to be able to do – to pack on the pounds during periods of abundance, so if need be, they can survive without food for many months, even until the next harvest.
Angus Barbieri was able to go from grossly obese to ideal weight in a little over
a year. In addition to Angus Barbieri, there have been many others who stopped eating until they reached their ideal weight, sometimes fasting for weeks or even many months. So, why don’t doctors prescribe this more often? Death. Simply stopping eating for extended periods of time has lead to a few deaths. Stopping eating for months or a year isn’t advisable, it isn’t safe, and sometimes leads to death and other long term health problems. However, to realize that people have been able to stop eating for weeks, months, and even over a year brings us back to the reality that fasting for only one day is a relatively short period of time.
So, it’s not safe to simply stop eating until the end goal weight is achieved if it’s more than five pounds from your current weight. And, I’ve explained calorie reduction and moderate exercise isn’t the answer, either. The human body will reduce the daily calories burned to match the intake. However, contrary to calorie reduction, when fasting our metabolism actually increases! Why is this? Well, if our body figures out that we will be eating 1,200 calories per day then the body knows that to survive it will need to burn only 1,200 calories per day or it will die. However, if the body has no food at all, it knows that it will not survive at all unless it finds food. When the food has completely run out (no food vs low food supply, such as calorie reduction), the human body has evolved to become energized to find food. In other words, fasting increases metabolism whereas dieting decreases metabolism. Evolution has taught your genes that either we starve to death very quickly, or we burn the last of the energy we have to find food.
In summary, the body will burn less if we simple reduce our intake. Conversely, the body will burn more if we stop eating completely. That is why reducing your calories will only work temporarily but fasting will reduce pounds quickly.
In addition to not losing weight, when our bodies have adjusted to a low level of caloric intake, we will be exhausted and depressed. When we are depressed, we don’t feel like doing anything. We feel like staying in bed, curling up, and sleeping the day away (in other words, conserving energy until the environment improves). Depression evolved to ensure survival during famines, to conserve
energy until rain came or other conditions improved. Even depression is a natural part of our evolution! Depression is the body’s natural mechanism to stop all activity until more food becomes available. That is why calorie cutting can lead to fatigue and depression – it’s a natural result of evolution.
That is why people who eat healthy and get moderate exercise can still be obese, and on top of that, depressed. If we obey our instincts to eat at all, we will put on weight. Even only a pound a week, ten years later, will accumulate to an extra 520 pounds! However, the human body naturally wants to put on as much weight as possible as quickly as possible, so if we eat what we feel like eating and do as much exercise as we feel like doing, then we can easily put on many pounds per day.
So, what can be done about this? If lots of exercise is not practical for busy people and especially parents, and diet only helps temporarily, what can be done? Is there any way to lose weight?
Most likely, if you are overweight, you’ve been overweight for a long time and have tried just about every diet out there. You may have even spent your whole life on one diet or another and still struggled with your weight.
What if there was a simpler solution? Simpler, yet more effective?
52 lbs.
In this program, we are limiting the amount of weight lost in a year to 52 pounds so that the body doesn’t simply react by burning less and less fuel, thus causing you to put the weight back on.
Well, is 52 pounds of weight enough? A year is 52 weeks long. One year from now will come and go regardless of what we do. The question is, a year from now do you want to be 52 pounds lighter, or do you want to try the other diets out there that do not work and be right where you are or possibly heavier?
The idea behind the 52 lb. diet is that we are going to limit the amount of weight lost to one pound per week. As the weeks and months go by, healthier eating habits will be established and a strategic plan to keep the weight off for the rest of your life will become a habit.
Sounds backward, however, by limiting the speed at which weight is lost, the body doesn’t respond by lowering the metabolism to match the lower caloric intake.
Are there exceptions to 52 pounds?
Yes. For every 100 pounds overweight you are, you could consider adding a pound of week to the weight loss goal. In other words:
If you are zero to 100 pounds overweight, limit weight loss to one pound per week, the standard plan. If you are between 100-200 pounds overweight, then consider losing 2 pounds per week until you are less than 100 pounds overweight, at which point consider switching to 1 pounds per week. If you are over 200 pounds overweight, ask your doctor how many pounds you should lose per week.
Why these exceptions? Because if you are 100 pounds or more overweight, you are dangerously unhealthy. The more overweight you are, the more dangerous it is (that is why “morbidly” obese is called “morbidly” – it is deadly!). Therefore, if you are more than 100 pounds overweight, in the name of your health, you will need to lose weight faster or you will die from obesity. As you gradually get out of the dangerously obese zones, then you can reduce the speed at which you lose weight.
As with any other weight loss program, before starting you should schedule a check-up with your doctor and let them know what you are planning to do, and schedule regular appointments as advised by your doctor to make sure you are getting adequate nutrition and to address any other underlying issues.
While it is possible to lose weight faster, such as in the case of Angus Barbieri, who didn’t eat for 388 days and lost 276 pounds during that year, this was only possible because he didn’t work during that time and was being closely monitored by his doctor. It was also dangerous to go that long without food. It is better to take your time and lose the weight pound by pound, week by week, and thereby establish a healthy eating pattern to keep the weight off for the rest of your life.
What about the theory that fasting only leads to temporary weight loss? To that I say, why get our hair cut when it’s only going to grow back? When the hair grows back, get your haircut again.
In the same way, when the weight comes back, fast again. It really is that simple.
With simply diet and exercise, as I’ve explained, you will gain weight. That is what we’ve evolved to do. While diet and exercise works for a small percentage of people (that frankly, those very same people would be the first to perish in a famine), for most of us, simply diet and exercise alone will have us gaining weight, or at the very least, only lose weight until our body adjusts to the new caloric input/output. So, the only way to actually lose weight in the long term is to fast, and when the weight comes back on, to fast again. In this way, we can not only lose the excess fat, but we can keep it off for the rest of our lives.
One of the biggest lessons we learn through fasting is this:
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
This is the program:
First: set an appointment with your doctor and let him/her know you will be fasting for about 30 hours at a time a couple times a week, and of those 30 hours, 20 of them will be dry fasting. Make sure your doctor confirms that you don’t have any underlying conditions that might make this program dangerous for you (for example, diabetes). Don’t start this program until after you have had your doctor visit and received confirmation that it will be safe for you.
Women who are pregnant, nursing, planning to get pregnant, or people of either age younger than 25 years of age, should not fast.
Next: get a glucose monitor for watching your blood sugar and a digital scale for weighing yourself. On your fasting days, at least the first few times, you will be monitoring your blood sugar on an hourly basis to make sure that it remains in the safe zone as defined by your doctor.
When I started fasting, my blood sugars were not in a healthy range. I wasn’t able to fast for a full 24 hours for several months due to my pre-diabetic condition. At first, I could only “fast” for a half an hour after I woke up (delaying my breakfast). I kept monitoring my blood sugar, and was able to extend the amount I could fast bit by bit, week by week. After several months, I was finally able to fast for 24 hours and then finally to over 30 hours.
With this diet, the strategy is to set a goal of one pound lost for every week.
Every morning, when you wake up, the first thing you do, even before you go to the bathroom, weigh yourself on your digital scale. If you are not at your goal weight or lower, then you don’t eat anything until the next weigh in the next morning. That’s it! The program is really as simple as that, but there are some additional strategies to make this work.
There are a few reasons why this program requires a daily morning weigh-in:
It gives us the ability to see clearly the consequences of our daily habits. If we weigh ourselves more often, there won’t be a clear timeline of events. If we weight ourselves less often, we won’t clearly see the effects of one day’s habits.
Every Monday (or day of the week of your choosing), you will go down by one pound for that week, and only one pound. The day of fasting will be for about 36 hours, give or take (from the last meal on Monday until breakfast on Wednesday), and the next day you can eat, but if you overeat and go back up to above your goal weight, you will need to fast again.
You will not eat until the next weigh-in, but you may have some calorie free liquids. You may drink black coffee or plain tea (no sugar, milk, or sugar substitute) until 10:00 am, and as much water as you feel thirsty for. Then, you won’t eat or drink from 10:00 am that morning until the next morning’s weighin. You will likely need to fast every other day or every few days, and watch your calories on your “eating days”.
For example, let’s say your goal weight this week is 230 pounds On Monday when you wake up, the first thing you will do is weigh yourself. If the scale says
230.0 lbs or less, then you get to eat. On the other hand, if the scale says 230.1 or higher, then you won’t eat until Tuesday morning’s weigh in, and you won’t weigh yourself either. You also won’t drink fluids from 10:00 am Monday until Tuesday morning weigh in (unless you get thirsty). On the days that you fast, track your fasting on a free app such as Fasting Tracker.
Then, Tuesday morning, you will wake up and the first thing you will do is weigh yourself. If you weigh 230.0 lbs or less, you get to eat! If you weigh 230.1 or more, then you again won’t eat until Wednesday morning’s weigh in. However, on Tuesday, even if you’re not eating, you can drink coffee, tea, and/or water (but no milk, sugar, or sugar substitute) until 10 am.
On the days that you get to eat (by meeting your weight goal), you will track your calories. Tracking your calories will be necessary so that you know what your body burns in a day so that you don’t put back on the weight you just fasted to lose.
You will likely lose more than one pound during your day of fasting. That’s what you hope for. However, due to the nature of the body’s evolved need to burn as little as possible and store as much as possible, your body will put as much back on as possible on your eating days.
On the days that you eat, track your calories through a free app such as MyPlate and set a goal of eating between 1,200 and 1,500 calories. When you weigh yourself the next morning, compare that to the number of calories that you have eaten the day prior and adjust your daily caloric intake until you are at maintenance on your eating days. If you continue to lose weight on your eating days due to too few calories, that means it will cause your metabolism to crash, so increase or decrease your caloric intake until you maintain your weight or slightly above. If you go up one pound, that’s about right. It will just mean you need to fast again, but you don’t want to gain more than one pound in a day because then you might need to fast for more than one consecutive day to take it
off.
Another benefit of fasting is that it breaks the addiction to food. As any alcoholic knows, it is nearly impossible to simply limit what you drink. It is better to go cold turkey. It is the same with food. If you are addicted to food, which humans naturally are, eating smaller portions doesn’t break the addiction, in fact, it more likely makes it worse. To break the food addiction, you need to go without food entirely and find other ways to deal with your emotions than running to food.
Keep track of your weight in a goal book. In this book, you will have three columns:
Date Goal Weight Actual Weight
Every morning when you weigh yourself, you will write in your goal book what you weigh in the “Actual Weight” column.
In theory, for a person that lowering calories and exercise works, there may be no fasting days. Sometimes, especially for those who are very overweight, diet and exercise alone will cause a person to lose a pound a week. If so, then you can continue without any fasting. If this is true for you, then just keep your daily log of your weigh-ins and continue on the pound per week or adjusted schedule. Most likely, though, if you lose weight through diet and exercise alone, this is temporary, and at some point your metabolism will crash so that you will stop losing weight or will start to put it back on (for the reasons outlined in chapter 1). As long as you are recording every day, then you will know exactly when
that happens and can begin the fasting portion of this program.
The body will naturally try to put back on any weight you lose. However, your fasting days will allow you to lose at least a couple of pounds, so even if a little weight is gained back, as long as you keep fasting on the days you exceed your goal weight, your average weight will gradually decrease.
And, :
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
An example of a weight loss plan on this program:
Woman 40 years old 5’5’’ Medium Frame
Current weight: 180 lb.
Goal weight: 130 lb.
Date
Goal Weight (in pounds) Actual Weight (in pounds)
January 1, 20x1
180.0
180.0
January 2, 20x1
180.0
181.2 (fast)
January 3, 20x1
180.0
176.3
January 4, 20x1
180.0
177.2
January 4, 20x1
180.0
178.4
January 5, 20x1
180.0
179.3
January 6, 20x1
180.0
181.0 (fast)
January 7, 20x1
180.0
176.3
January 8, 20x1
179.0
177.5
January 9, 20x1
179.0
178.3
January 10, 20x1
179.0
180.7 (fast)
January 11, 20x1
179.0
175.9
January 12, 20x1
179.0
176.3
January 13, 20x1
179.0
177.5
January 14, 20x1
179.0
177.8
January 15, 20x1
178.0
178.0
January 16, 20x1
178.0
178.5 (fast)
January 17, 20x1
178.0
174.4
January 18, 20x1
178.0
175.6
January 19, 20x1
178.0
176.3
January 20, 20x1
178.0
177.5
January 21, 20x1
178.0
178.0
January 22, 20x1
177.0
179.1 (fast)
January 23, 20x1
177.0
175.4
While it may seem to go slow at one pound per week, at the end of one year, she will be at her goal weight of 130 pounds.
After the weight is lost, maintain the goal weight indefinitely with the same method, by weighing yourself every morning and eating or not eating that day based on whether you are at or below your goal weight.
As the year progresses, you may even find yourself looking forward to your fasting days, as they provide extra time for spending with your family and friends, and also, will increase your energy level. If you find your energy dipping, talk to your doctor about whether or not you should be taking SaltSticks.
And ,
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
What are the health benefits of fasting?
The number one benefit of fasting is increased life span.
Fasting can be dangerous for people with underlying conditions, such as diabetes. There are other conditions as well, so that is why it is important to visit your doctor before embarking on any weight loss program, including this one. There is some research to that fasting can treat and/or cure type 2 diabetes, but again, that’s something to speak with your doctor about first.
That being said, there are many well-documented health benefits of fasting. In mammals in laboratory settings, by fasting every other day in a lab, many animals gain about 15-20% life span. We don’t know if this directly translates to humans, but recent research on the health benefits of fasting on humans s that assumption. That means, if the average human lives to about 75 years old, in theory, if everyone fasted every other day, the average human life span could be 90 years old, even if no other changes were made. The other benefit is, that the years gained are not just added years, but added healthy, energetic, and happy years. The additional years have less cancer, more energy, more hair, fewer wrinkles, less depression, greater mental sharpness, and more physical mobility. In other words, the gains aren’t just a number of years, the gains are in youth, vitality, and enjoyment of life.
So, then if eating only every other day is so beneficial, then why not just do this diet with eating every other day? Well, in theory, you could. You could just eat every other day. However, this book is about losing weight, which is actually a different goal. If you eat every other day without the weight loss goal, it is easy to overeat on the eating days, which will result in no overall weight loss or even weight gain. Conversely, by fasting only when the goal weight has been
exceeded, you are actually rewarding yourself for eating more healthily. The night before you weigh yourself, as your experience with this lifestyle increases, you will find yourself thinking about the next day’s weigh-in, and reducing what you eat. It is about reward and punishment, carrot and stick. Motivating yourself by what you will look like a month from now isn’t nearly as motivating as the effect of choosing whether to eat a bedtime snack determining whether or not you will have breakfast the next morning. It is changing the mentality and relationship you have with food, and countering some of the effects of 200,000 years of evolution that drives us to gorge ourselves at every opportunity. In order to change that mentality, we need to somehow rewire the reward sensors in the brain. As you move along in this program, you will find yourself celebrating every time you maintain your weight at or below the goal weight. Similarly, when you exceed the goal weight, you will be able to reflect back on the day prior and see where you might have overeaten. You will find out that the human body actually doesn’t need to much food to maintain the current weight. It’s just evolution that we desire more food than we need for that day.
So, even though in theory you could just switch to eating every other day, that doesn’t reliably cause weight loss nor does it create the reward/punishment effects. My point in bringing up the research on the health benefits of fasting is that not eating for a day is not only do-able, but is very good for most people.
And, again, please :
Hunger is just a feeling. We can live with it and we don’t need to do anything about it.
Why dry fast?
Dry fasting is optional on this diet. I bring it up because many people find dry fasting to be much easier than water fasting. The reason is that drinking water on an empty stomach makes many people very, very hungry. Also, drinking water without replenishing the electrolytes can cause some serious weakness and dizziness. However, if you feel thirsty, drink water. Dry fasting shouldn’t make you thirsty, actually. If you have drunk plenty of fluids in the morning before 10 am, and then are only dry fasting until the next morning’s weigh-in, that is about 20 hours. If you become thirsty, drink some water or salt water. It isn’t good to get too thirsty, severe dehydration can cause strokes and other health problems. Dry fasting should only be done for comfort. It just helps with the hunger.
This is again, something to make sure your doctor agrees you can do safely. And, absolutely never ever go over 20 hours of dry fasting. Some people dry fast for many days, but there are also cases of death, stroke and other serious ramifications of that behavior so don’t do it! Even on dry fasting days, drink water, coffee or tea as much as you want until 10 am. The day after dry fasting, be prepared to drink lots of water and carry a water bottle with you everywhere you go so that you can drink until you feel you have replenished yourself.
The health benefits of dry fasting have been said to be three times as beneficial as water fasting. In other words, some people believe that one day of dry fasting has as many cleansing benefits as 3 days of water fasting, though I haven’t seen any scientific studies to back up that claim. However, it is possible that dry fasting may help with the hunger as well as speed up weight loss and autophagy.
What will you be eating on your eating days?
On the days that you eat, track your calories with an app such as MyPlate. The fasting days are the only days that you are trying to lose weight. If you simply reduce calories every day, your body will reduce the metabolism. That is why on the eating days we are not watching calories to lose weight. Your goal on your eating days is to maintain the weight loss, not to lose additional weight.
The food to eat on the eating days are:
Whole foods (raw vegetables, whole grains, etc). No processed foods or foods that have been manufactured in any way Absolutely no junk food. No Sugar-based desserts At least 2 cups of cabbage, lettuce or other leafy greens per day Limit or eliminate a bedtime snack No high calorie drinks Snack on very low-calorie foods such as celery and cucumbers. Eliminate fruit Lots of vegetables Legumes and tofu or other protein
The human body doesn’t need much food to maintain the weight. So, that means every calorie needs to be worth it and full of nutrition! The good news is that healthy food is much cheaper than junk food. Don’t believe me? Compare a bag of potato chips to a bag of potatoes! A bag of chips and a bag of potatoes cost roughly the same amount, but in a bag of chips you actually only have a few potatoes worth of food, whereas a bag of potatoes at the same price will be about a dozen of potatoes and many meals worth of potatoes!
Fruit is a bit of another story: fruit can be expensive, more expensive than junk food and even more expensive than vegetables. On top of that, it’s also high in calories and not as healthy as some would presume. You can get plenty of vitamin C and other vitamins from the vegetables you eat for far fewer calories. Consider replacing the fruit in your diet with vegetables.
The core of your diet should be low or no calorie foods, such as cabbage, leafy greens, cucumbers, and other vegetables. It’s important to eat a balanced diet, but the majority of your diet should be those very low or no calorie foods so that you can feel full and satisfied on a low calorie diet.
The amount of leafy greens per day should be modified to suit your digestive system. For those who can tolerate it, here is a recipe:
Cabbage Salad Recipe:
Chop and add to a bowl in this order:
Half a cabbage, chopped into shreds Half an onion, chopped into half rings Half a jalapeno pepper, sliced Half a cucumber, sliced 1 carrot, julienned 1 tsp red pepper flakes 1 lemon, squeezed over top
After adding a portion to a serving bowl, add a couple teaspoons balsamic vinaigrette or Italian dressing.
The following recipes should also be part of your diet, along with a balanced diet of other veggies and sources of protein.
Simple Tofu:
1 block of Extra Firm Tofu, cut into 16 pieces
Put some Louisiana Fish breading into a dish and dip each piece of tofu into the breading until it is covered
Cover the bottom of a cookie sheet with a very thin layer of oil or spray with a nonstick spray.
Put the breaded tofu pieces onto the oiled cookie sheet in a single layer.
Put into toaster oven and bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then turn each piece over and cook for another 15 minutes.
If you’d like extra firm, “meaty” tofu, turn off the oven at 15 minutes and leave in the oven as it cools until it is the texture you prefer: another 15 minutes or an hour, depending on your preference.
There are many no and low calorie soup recipes available online with a simple google search. When you eat these types of soups, not only are they very healthy as they are filled with vegetables, but you can also eat fairly large quantities of diet soup with very few calories. Here are a few of my favorites:
Low Calorie Soup
6 cups veggie stock 1 diced yellow onion 3 cups frozen mixed veggies 1 cup diced celery 1 bunch of kale 2 teaspoons garlic 1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper 1 tub Tofu or cooked chicken 1 can diced tomatoes
Add all ingredients to a large pot and heat to simmer for 15 minutes or until cooked until it is of your liking.
Spicy Veggie Soup
1/4 cup soy sauce 3 tablespoons fish sauce 1 tsp curry powder 3 T lemon juice 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste 3 teaspoons Sriracha sauce 2 teaspoons chili garlic paste (Asian) 2 cloves garlic (Minced) 6 cups cooked chicken or vegetable broth 2 cups cauliflower 1 whole large carrot cut into thin slices 2 cups kale leaves
3 cups napa or American cabbage 1 pound shrimp or 1 tub tofu
Add all to a pot on stove and simmer for 15 minutes or until vegetables are cooked to your liking.
As the weeks progress on this diet, you will learn how many calories your body burns in a day, and you can add or remove various foods until you achieve that equilibrium on your eating days. After a few months of this program, you can start looking at your favorite foods and seeing how often and at what portion sizes they can be added back to your diet by monitoring how it affects your weight the next morning.
If you put weight back on quickly on the eating days, here are a few things you can try:
OMAD: eat only once per day, for an hour per day. Don’t eat a bed time snack
Why not lose weight faster?
There are many reasons why it is beneficial to fast only on days that the goal weight was not met, and to only lose a pound a week.
For one, it allows skin the time to go back into shape. Losing 52 pounds per year gives the skin time to get back into shape. By dry fasting, this will also help with tightening the skin.
Another reason to lose weight slowly is because it’s a new way of living, this is a new habit to not just lose weight, but to maintain that weight for the rest of your life. It will get easier over time, and at some point, it will become your new norm.
Yet another reason to lose weight at this modified pace is because it will lessen the shock on the system. Instead of fasting for 3, 7, or 20 days as some recommend, fasting only one day at a time will be much easier and will have many health benefits.
Also, going this slow allows you to learn about your body, and what exactly it takes just to maintain the weight (and not increase the weight). The human body actually needs very little food, not nearly the portion sizes that are provided at many restaurants.
Losing a pound of week may seem slow, however each pound lost becomes a
solid pound lost: not water. Just as a comparison, butter is mostly fat. That means, for every pound of fat you lose, you are losing about equal to a pound of butter! That’s a lot! One pound of weight lost is a big deal and certainly something to celebrate! So, trust the system and take the time to lose the weight right.
Breaking the food addiction: what to do when you are craving food.
We have evolved to be able to eat only one meal every couple of days and still put on weight! We have evolved to desire to gorge ourselves. There is certainly nothing special about being a person who loves food, who loves to gorge on food, who wants to eat all day long, and to think about your next item of food right after you’ve finished something delicious.
This is what we’ve evolved to do! To be constantly looking for food and gorging on the most calorie rich food at every opportunity is how we’ve evolved to be and is absolutely necessary in an environment that is constantly short on food. However, the environment we’ve evolved to be able to survive is no longer the environment that we live in. If we live based on our instincts, we will be gorging every few hours enough calories to be able to last a few days of intense exercise!
To be able to even just not gain weight when we are surrounded by food goes completely against our evolution, and certainly to lose weight when we have an abundance of food is going against our own nature. In order to not become morbidly obese, we have to go against our basic instincts, yet we need to do this for our health.
So, what do we do when we are craving food but we are on a fasting day? Here are some options:
Take a nap. Taking a nap can curb some cravings.
Take a walk. Start a hobby Clean and organize your home Tap your forehead while thinking of your craving (this helps some people) Brush your teeth.
If it’s possible, you could take a nap. Being sleepy can make hunger worse.
What you will find on the days you are fasting is that you have a LOT more time. In that way, you might even find yourself looking forward to fasting days because you can get so much done and will have more energy.
You will save money because on the days that you fast you won’t be eating at all. If you fast every other day and don’t increase your intake on the days that you eat, you effectively cut your grocery bill in half! You will also be saving the time that you took to buy, prepare, and eat the food. So, what to do with all this time?
Exercise!
Try to get at least 30 minutes of intense exercise per day on the days you are eating. On the days that you are fasting, do not engage in high intensity exercise. Instead, do low intensity exercise, such as walks in the neighborhood. However, for many people, we don’t even have 30 minutes to exercise.
One of the reasons many people don’t even try to get exercise is because what many people consider exercise – at a track or gym – is simply not available to a large portion of the population. We might have kids and work long hours, or another of the millions of valid reasons why we cannot go to the gym or track. Even if we could realistically begin an exercise regimen, doing so may take precious time away from our families. BUT! We can still get exercise while we are taking care of our children, and in the process, teaching our kids a healthy lifestyle.
The way to measure if you have time to exercise is to look at your Monday to Friday schedule. Do you have time to watch tv or browse Facebook, other media or other entertainment? If so, you have time to exercise. In those cases, it would be trading your Facebook, tv, or other entertainment time for exercise time. We cannot make time. The only thing we can do is find an activity to trade the time with. If you have a different work schedule than Monday through Friday, just trade the days. The point is, if you have time to watch tv after work, you absolutely have time to exercise. Just trade your tv time with exercise time, or exercise while you’re watching tv.
If you don’t have time for any entertainment because you are only working your job and then coming home to clean the house and take care of the kids, then you can consider that those hours that you are cleaning the house and taking the kids
to the park as exercise, but you will need to spend at least twice as much time doing something at low intensity as you would focused high-intensity exercise. So, if you only have time to clean the house but not exercise, then make a point to clean the house with as much energy as you possibly can for at least an hour a day.
The weekends are about changing habits. If you have free time, then it is a family affair. The whole family will need to adopt new habits. Instead of bingewatching shows, go on a long walk with the family. The idea is to turn off the tv, stop watching Netflix and other media, and get exercise instead. The idea would also be to limit any tv, video games, or other media to less than 3 hours per week, and trade the time that you used to do those activities with activities that involve physical movement and exercise. This will mean that you make new habits, and those habits you do with your kids will have positive effects for generations.
The more exercise you get, the more calories you burn. This is again working against our instinct to conserve energy. We have to work against our desires to do as little as possible to prepare for the next famine. We live in modern society, we don’t need to store fat for the famine. Instead, we need to get up and keep moving as much as possible.
Wrapping up
That’s the whole program, actually very simple, and a new way to live your life. A system to set your ideal weight, achieve your ideal weight, and keep it off for the rest of your life!
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