A Bit More on Fasting
I have to remind myself that when I do fasts longer than 24 hours, I'll tend to shed a lot of water weight. Then when I eat again, some of that will come back. If my basal metabolic rate (BMR) is 1,600 (one of my apps says it is, based I guess on my weight, BMI, etc.), then I'm using 11,200 calories per week. If I want to reduce that by 7,000 (the equivalent of two pounds), then I would have to eat only 4,200 calories per week. That would be four days of eating 1,050 per day and three days of fasting or three days eating 1,400 and four days fasting. Or if I decided I really wanted to eat every day, I might be able to do one meal a day (OMAD) of 600 calories. That might be more realistic when I'm living in Bemidji. Or if I did two 48-hour fasts (basically a 2x OMAD, where I ate at noon and then ate again at noon two days later), then my OMAD meals could be 840 calories (4,200 calories consumed over five meals).
I have heard and read from a variety of sources that fasting gets easier when you get beyond day two. The hunger feelings supposedly recede and you start to get increases in adrenalin, cortisol, and growth hormone, which are supposed to make you feel more alert. This is also when autophagy kicks in and ketones ramp up. So maybe I should test that theory next week. This week I don't want to because I'm traveling to the Cities and will probably have a social dinner with my new colleagues at Saint Paul College. But maybe I should try a 4-day fast next week. I could start after lunch on Sunday and then eat lunch on Thursday. That would be 96 hours. There's nothing else on my calendar, really; so it might be a good time to try it.
Another element of this summer fitness journey I want to take is walking. If I walked 5 miles a day, that would be 35 miles a week. Roughly 150 miles per month. That's a good goal to shoot for, I think. It might even help raise my BMR. It would be useful if my metabolism was running at more like 2,000 calories a day than at 1,600. The best way to get to this type of result seems to be to increase my lean muscle mass. A BMR increase from 1,600 to 2,000 is 25%. Does that mean I have to increase my muscle mass by 25%? This seems a bit unrealistic, and in any case it would push my final weight above my goal. Maybe I'll shoot for a more modest improvement in muscle mass; something on the order of 5% to 10%. This would make me a little stronger than I am now, but would allow me to reach my target weight with about the right BMI percentage, I think. I guess I won't worry about what my BMR ends up looking like. By the standard calculation, it seems like it should be about 2150, so I wonder how much of the difference is age-related (although age is part of the calculation) and how much is an artifact of how my particular scale and its app does the calculation? I haven't been able to determine how that calculation is done, so I have no idea.
While I want to see these changes in the mirror and watch the numbers decrease on the scale, my biggest goals are becoming healthier and feeling better. One of the most hopeful elements of Jason Fung's books, I thought, was the idea that you don't have to feel miserable when losing weight or maintaining a lower weight. The key to this, apparently, is reducing insulin levels, which will lead to increased sensitivity and (still somewhat mysteriously, to me) to a lower "set point" for my weight. The point of the reduced BMR, it seems, is that it sort-of makes you feel kind of shitty all the time. This was the finding of Ancel Keys' Minnesota Starvation Study, which was actually a calorie reduction diet that shifted participants from 2,000 calories per day to 1,500. Their metabolisms decreased to use roughly 1,400 calories per day and they felt cold, constantly hungry, weak, foggy, and miserable. Fung's claim is that rather than eating regular meals of fewer calories, which spike insulin just as much as higher-calorie meals, skipping meals and allowing insulin to drop would have triggered fat burning at the full level of the BMR, rather than reducing it. This would mean your metabolism wouldn't have to slow down until you ran out of fat. I have about 140,000 calories stored in fat, so that would be a while!
hi, I just read that you are think to start fasting to two or more days. I only wanted to alert you to the problem of insoline. If you are not used to do it often, and you start to fasting for long periods of time, the risk of a break in insuline is high. I'm no expert of nutrition, but this is a serious problem you should take into account if you are doing it, since it can have high risk to your health and do more warm than good. Keep safe.