5-Day Fast #2: Rediscovering dieting through caloric restriction

The results this week are really exciting!!

TL;DR

After dropping about 5 lbs during my first 5-day fast, I dropped another 9 lbs in the second week!!!  I'm feeling great and super excited about reclaiming weights I haven't been since college!  The access to this success I think is as simple as calorie restriction, leading to fat burning.

How Much Did I Stick to my Plan

Check on my post a week back for details about my first 5 day fast.

Measuring My Weight

The electronic scale in the house was broken, and given how long it had sat unused, I decided not to replace it.  So I do not have daily weight data.  However, I have 3 legitimate data points now... The Friday before this second fast, I weighed myself in the gym and weighed in at 161 lbs.  This was while still fasting and was on the morning of the fifth day.  One week later, on the fifth day of Fast #2, on the same scale, with the same amount of clothes on, I weighed 152 lbs!!!

I was actually so looking forward to weighing myself that I weighed myself on the way back from the shower with only a robe on: stepped on the scale, set the 150 lbs big weight and then went to adjust the smaller weight on top (as I always do) and realized that the scale hadn't moved!!!  Without my normal clothes and shoes and full pockets, I was under 150 lbs!!!  I was so surprised, I thought momentarily that I forgot how to use a scale.  I rechecked it numerous times.  I then got dressed and re-measured and got the results mentioned above.

The last really valuable data point is... how much did I weigh after going back to eating and after eating carbs, ie. how much did I weight once I regained any water weight and had food in my digestive system?  I stepped on a friend's electronic scale and weighed 156 lbs!!!  I haven't weighted that little on a full stomach in so many years I can't even remember.

Needless to say, these are very encouraging results.  After two back to back, weekday 5 day fasts, I'm down what I estimate to be about 10 lbs.  Especially the way I did the second week, I'm super excited about now knowing how to drop so much weight in such a short period of time.

What I Did During this Fast

I'll have to stop calling them fasts because as I'm about to explain, this is really just becoming a very, very calorically restrictive diet.  But the caloric restriction is so extreme, it helps me to think about it as a form of fasting.

Generally, this fast was like the first 5-day fast: I generally at my morning near-zero-calorie smoothie and then drank water, coffee, tea, and low-sugar kombucha the rest of the day.  The main difference, which I planned for this fast, was simply eating a small amount of keto-appropriate food when the hunger became nagging.  That happened between 1 and 3 times in a day.  I had visited a polish deli the prior weekend, so I had head cheese and smoked sausage in the fridge.  So my "snacks" were a tiny square of head cheese or an inch-long piece of sausage.  This tiny amount of food a few times a day was plenty to kill off the worst of any hunger I had.  It also had the benefit of making the food taste amazing because of how infrequently I was eating.  I have never savored a single bit of food more, that I remember, in my life.

Example size of my head cheese snack

Example of my sausage snack

How I Deviated from my Plan

I wanted to take in enough fiber to keep my digestive system passing food.  From what I've read, leaving food in your intestines for extended periods of time isn't great for you.  So I said I would take 2 - 3 servings of psyllium husk per day.  I stopped this mid-way through Day 2 because it didn't seem to be keeping things moving.  Fiber like psyllium husk is a binder; it forms gel when mixed with water.  I guessed that this was only one piece of the puzzle.  I assume honest to goodness roughage was another piece... actual large pieces of whole vegetables.

The lowest calorie source of roughage I could think of was cabbage, which I conveniently had in the fridge.  So I got out the food processor and processed half a head of cabbage into pretty small pieces, only adding a little apple cider vinegar (maybe 4 or 5 Tbl for the entire half a head of cabbage).  This was surprisingly not terrible to eat and was a lot of volume for very little calories.  Unfortunately it turns out that my digestive system apparently needs a lot more than just psyllium and cabbage to get the job done.  I'm thinking that in the future, I'll preload the fast with quinoa and oatmeal the day before I fast, which I'm hoping will help to move things along early on before the fast stops everything.  Similarly, on the first day I eat, I'll likely eat nothing other than quinoa and super-low calorie, high roughage veggies: braised greens, brussel sprouts, broccoli, etc. just to get enough volume to make up for not eating for days.  I think doing this in a more planned, methodical way and not rushing things, I will also avoid the discomfort I had Saturday, which I think was largely attributable to stuffing myself with as much roughage/volume as I could.  It may just take however long it takes to get things moving again.

What's Next

Given the results I continue to be getting, I'm going to continue to severely restrict calories the next few days.  Thanksgiving is coming, and I'll likely eat a full meal at Thanksgiving dinner, but outside of that, I'll be eating tiny amounts of protein/fat as the hunger sets in.  I will also get back to reading the rest of Fung's book, given I resorted to experimenting before I was done with chapter 4 and have plenty more to read in the book.  My sister has also mentioned some of the details of intermittent fasting.  So I will tend toward eating in a shorter time window, for instance, eating only between 5pm and 10pm should be super easy, and if I can close that window a little more, I'll consider that.  At the moment, I'm mainly focused on being fat-burning and calorie restricted.  When I can land myself below 150 lbs with food in me, I'll be done with the weight loss phase of this experiment and start to get much more interested in what fasting might look like as a life style.

My dinner Friday night...

As always, leave your comments and success stories in the comments below if you're so inclined.  I'd love to hear other people's experience.