I am reading the book “The Obesity Code” by Jason Fung, MD. Being someone that was raised to research and also trained by the Navy to be a researcher and troubleshooter, I know that most internet research just leads me down a rabbit hole or on a wild goose chase. But I am also someone that has been keeping a journal since I was about 6 years old and I still have all of my journals. I was a skinny kid and skinny teenager. I did not gain my weight until I left home and joined the Navy. So I have not only been reading and researching why I am heavier than I want to be and need to be, but I am looking back at why I was a skinny kid and teenager. What I am finding is that we did not eat refined carbs or for that matter any fast foods, or factory created so called foods. I am also finding that I did not eat snacks, and I had 3 meals a day, with each meal being about 5 hours a part. We also did not eat after dinner(supper), but we did have desserts with each evening meal. We also ate bread with each meal, but the bread we ate was always homemade and it was cooked fresh for each meal. Our meats were mostly smoked or salt preserved. We only ate fruits and veggies that came out of the garden. Breakfast was normally well before daylight and it was always, biscuits, eggs, and bacon or ham. My dad and grandpa would make sausage out of the hogs with butchered, and mixed that with old meat for deer, so we made the sausage only in the fall and early winter when it was hunting season.
So what was my key to being skinny? 1. I was always very active. 2. We ate 3 meals a day at the dinning room table. 3. We did not snack between meals. 4. We did not eat after dinner or at bedtime. 5. We did not eat refined or factory made so called foods. 6. We did not drink soft drinks, but I did drink sweet tea with my lunch and evening meals.
So what was the key to being skinny? 1. It was giving each meal time to be fully digested before eating again. 2. It was giving my body a chance to get over the insulin spike and also time for my body to burn off some of the extra that I had eaten before eating again. 3. And this is the important piece of the puzzle, it was never allowing my insulin levels to stay elevated. If insulin levels stay elevated then we become insulin resistant and that leads to insulin being converted to fat, and if it stays that way too long we can become diabetic.
So what am I doing to change myself. 1. I am cutting back as much refined carbs as I possibly can. 2. I am going to stop eating snacks between meals. 3. My snacks will be good fats, in other words nuts. 4. I will not be eating after the even meal, no bedtime snacks. 5. No soft drinks including diet ones. 5. I will only eat fruits that are in season, why. Fruits have sugar and they cause insulin spikes.
The key is to give your digestive system time to rest between meals. When you eat it takes up to 5 hours for your digestive system to process what you have eaten. If you do not give it time to rest then you are putting more fat on your body. So far what I am saying is just to prevent weight gain.
Now lets talk about losing fat. To lose fat we have to give our bodies time to start using up some of that stored fat, and turn it into energy to fuel the body. To do so we have to go without food long enough that we no longer have it in our digestive system and it has to pull from the reserves, which is our body fat. To do so is where longer periods between meals come into play. Yes I am talking fasting. The research shows that our bodies can go days and even weeks without food, most of it depends on the fat reserve that we care around all the time. So what is required amount of fat we should have, that depends on the gender, the age and some other factors. Most men need around 10% body fat to be safe. And from what I have read most women that are not of childbearing age needs about 20% and it is a little more for the childbearing age women. Lets be honest here I am not the expert here at all I am just pointing out what I have picked up from reading information from the research of scientist that should know and not from the BS that is mostly on the internet now. But fasting will force your body to start processing your body fat for energy and before you scream that it will cause muscle loss let me say this that is bull. From my own experience if you do your fasting correctly you will gain muscle, due to your body’s growth hormones kicking in to protect your body. I have lost a few inches around my belly and I have not lost any real amount of weight. My should measurements have even increase due to my resistance workouts and my working and lifting in the process of my move this year.
So have I lost inches in my belly as I said, and also in my hips and thighs.
Also my blood pressure is down, I am sleeping better. And to top it off I have more energy.
I do not have that much weight that I need to lose, but the research say that you will lose the weight too, but it takes longer fast than what I am doing. So far my longest time between meals is about 18 hours and most days it is about 16 hours between the evening meal and the breakfast. I do plan to try longer fast but I will wait for that for when my wife is away on her trip so she does not worry about it. She does not need to fast and she really should gain some weight. But her issue is medical seeing back in 2013 they had to take out most of her stomach due to it twisting and dying.
I will have more on my progress as I have it.
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