I combined these days as there are a lot of similarities and it just doesn’t make sense to keep making short posts that are pretty much the same. From here on, I’m going to start doing weekly posts and just go over the changes I made.
Yesterday, I increased my distance to 1 mile per day. I just doubled my walking distance, as a half mile just didn’t seem to be enough of a challenge for me any more. I still have to rest every so often to catch my breath and I sit on a bench every lap to recover some. I didn’t walk on Sunday of this week as I decided to do yard work instead. I still got a pretty good workout, but I’m not sure how I feel about skipping a day even though I know my body does need a rest day.
I started to think maybe I could start having creamer in my coffee and increase my fasting to just one meal per day. I will have to try the creamer first to see if it will effect my blood glucose, even though it is sugar free. My fasting blood glucose has been in the low to mid 130’s this week.
As I said before, supposedly the magic starts after 16 hours of fasting. The progression of this is to increase your fasting time to 18 or even 20 hours per day. This is when fat loss will accelerate. I’m not sure how I will tolerate this.
There’s also an option of having only one meal a day (OMAD). With this, you fast for 23 hours and eat for 1 hour per day. My son tried this and lost 40 lbs over a 3 month period. He only stopped because he got ill and started eating regular meals again once he recovered.
Another variation is to fast 2 days per week, like Tuesday and Friday. The rest of the days you eat like normal and on your fasting days you only have coffee, tea or water. No creamer or sugar. There is some discussion if you can have sugar free beverages. Some say yes, some say no, they will still elicit an insulin response. It is recommended you have a starting time during the day, like 2 pm one day to 2 pm the next. In this way you never have one whole day where you are not eating at some point.
Both of these seem a little extreme to me. I did do OMAD back when I was in the Air Force. I was leaving Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois back in 1977 and I needed to lose some weight fast. Whenever you change duty stations you have to be within your weight range when you leave one base and check into the next. I lost 10 lbs in 1 week using that strategy, but I was a lot younger and highly motivated at the time.