Wow. It’s been almost a year since I’ve successfully completed one of my DIY FMDs. If you need a refresher or are asking yourself, “what the heck is an FMD?”, please go back and read my original post about the origins of my own do-it-yourself fasting mimicking diet and the diet instructions. Very briefly, it’s a 5 day very low calorie diet designed to evade the nutrient sensors in your body and trigger autophagy, the physiologic process by which your body cleans itself up and takes out the trash. My intention has been to follow it once each quarter as part of my overall strategy for preventing, or at least delaying, cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. It’s tougher to follow when you’re not used to fasting or if you’re a sugar burner, eating a decent amount of added sugar and/or refined grains like bread, crackers, cereal, etc. Tougher to follow in that the hunger feels more dramatic. And this is essentially why I haven’t successfully done it since March 2021 — because every time I started it thereafter, I’d give up after a day or two because I just didn’t want to deal with feeling hungry.
Well, I’m done “taking a break.” It’s really important to me to take care of my body and mind, and I feel like, after the past year, I could use a good cleanse. So I will be undertaking my DIY FMD starting Tuesday morning, and because I exercise every morning which helps accelerate autophagy, I will end it after 4 days on Friday night. I’ve chosen this coming week because I’ll be busy working on service on the inpatient wards at the hospital, and being busy helps me take my mind off of eating! If you’d like a single PDF with the diet instructions to do it along with me, you can download it by scrolling to the bottom of my homepage and grabbing it there. It’s also described in detail in the blog post I linked to above, if you’d rather not download the PDF. Either way, I hope you’ll consider joining me and taking a step toward a healthier body and mind!
And in other news, my weight is up 0.8 pounds from last Saturday. I’m not worried about it. There are a slew of reasons (including but not limited to bathroom habits and feminine hormonal shifts), and I’m not making it mean that I’m failing. It’s normal to have fluctuations along the journey, and this is just one of those fluctuations. Onward!
Project 135 (resurrected) stats:
week 0 (Jan 1, 2022): 164.4 lbs
week 1: 162.2
week 2: 160.8
week 3: 159.2
week 4: 159.4
week 5: 156.4
week 6 (Feb 12, 2022): 157.2
Total weight loss: 7.2 lbs (4.4%)