Week 5 of this weight loss journey was taken up mostly by my DIY Fasting Rejuvenating Diet, which I did Tuesday through Saturday morning. It had been more than 3 months since I did it, and my goal is to try to get one in at least quarterly in an effort to improve my chances of delaying the onset of cognitive impairment. I chose this past week because I am on service at the hospital (I’m about to go to work right now!), and it’s always easier for me to tolerate hunger when my mind is otherwise occupied with work. Sitting at home near the kitchen with more time on my hands is tougher!
If you follow me on Facebook, you saw my daily posts with my morning weight, blood ketone levels, and blood glucose levels. It went relatively smoothly this time; I won’t lie, there have been times in the past when I just gave up on day one or two. I think it was easier this time for a few reasons: I was posting publicly about it, which dramatically improved my accountability, and I had been off flour and sugar for almost 6 weeks, so I am fat adapted (meaning there was no extra withdrawal on top of the physical hunger). I’ve found a dramatic improvement in my hunger levels and the tolerability of physical hunger when I’m fat adapted, when my body is off sugar and able to “flip the metabolic switch” and access my body fat for energy more easily. When I’ve been eating sugar, I feel hungry every few hours and the hunger feels less tolerable.
Anyway, a quick non-scale victory: I realized on a Friday that I’d been seeing a big bag of mini sized candy bars sitting in my team’s work room all week, and vaguely registered it but never actually felt an urge or desire to eat them. This is HUGE! Before getting myself off sugar on April 30, when I was in the throes of my addiction (and gaining weight by the day), I would’ve been acutely aware of them sitting 5 feet away from me and would’ve spent a lot of mental energy resisting the desire to eat them (actually, I probably would’ve eaten them as much as resisted eating them). That desire was at a fever pitch 6 weeks ago. Giving my brain a break from all the sugar-induced dopamine and intentionally failing to feed the fire of desire has allowed me to reset a little — allowed my dopamine receptors to normalize somewhat. No joke, yesterday I ate a couple of Brazil nuts when breaking my fast, and they tasted oddly sweet. Same thing for some almonds a bit later. My palate has adjusted dramatically. Only in a world of no-added-sugar-or-sweeteners do nuts taste sweet. I really like living in this world! ????
And now for this morning’s weigh-in:
Project 135 stats:
Starting weight: 159.6
Week 1: 157.2
Week 2: 155.6
Week 3: 155.4
Week 4: 153.8
Week 5: 151.0
Total weight loss: 8.6 pounds (5.4%)
As expected, my fasting mimicking diet led to more weight loss than my usual average (2.8 pounds this week!) and has gotten me caught up to my overall goal for these 6 months, which was to lose 6 pounds in the first 4 weeks and another 5 pounds by the end of 8 weeks (total 11 pounds in the first 8 weeks)… with the end goal being, as you know, to reach my dream weight of 135 pounds. My hope is that next week’s weight loss isn’t a big fat nothingburger in response to the process my body went through this past week. Stay tuned to find out!