Category: Stoic

“I need food, food to be strong for when the wolves come.” – Conan the Barbarian

Communist humor is like food:  not everyone gets it.

Normally I’d end a post like this with a warning, but this week I’ll put the warning straight up front.  I’m a freedom blogger with a side order of humor.  I’m not a doctor, except in my role as John Wilder – Civil War Surgeon to His Children®, Remover of Splinters and Super-Gluer® of Grievous Wounds.  The following advice has worked flawlessly for me and for thousands of others.  There may be some medical reason that it might not work for you.  As always, I suggest you go see a doctor, even though I’m pretty willful and just skipped that step entirely.  I’m not on any medications, so it’s hard to screw up medications that aren’t there.

I think, in all seriousness, this is one of the more important personal health posts I’ve written for anyone who wants to lose weight, which from the statistics is most of the United States.  As far as I can see, the biggest weight loss issues people normally face (besides your mother) are:

• The diet isn’t working.
• Okay, it’s working. But it’s working slooooooowly.
• Wait, it didn’t work this week at all.
• I’m not sure why, but this week I gained
• Is it just me, or can everyone gain weight on a box of McDonalds® fries?
• Wine or Beer or Chocolate Shakes or Twinkies® don’t have that many calories, right?
• I just walked half a mile! I need to reward myself with a Double Whopper©.  Yes, with cheese.

I’m going to make a pretty bold statement:  I can fix every one of the issues above with one simple trick that doesn’t involve Marx, Lenin, or Castro.

Just stop eating.  Fast.  Not fast as in “quickly” but fast as in fasting:  not eating.

That’s it.

• No books.
• No seminars.
• No cash payments to TV promoters.
• No special food to buy.
• No 1-800 phone numbers.
• No special Internet offers.
• No counting calories.
• No communist dictators.

Thus, there’s very little profit opportunity in a business like this.  A cynical person might point out that the diet industry in the United States is worth about $70 billion every year, and the cost of being overweight rings in a tab of (my guess, based on decade-old numbers) of nearly half a trillion dollars in health care costs.  That cynical person might also note that it’s certainly not in the interests of people who are making hundreds of billions of dollars because a problem exists to actually fix that problem.

But imagine:  Just not eating . . . would save the United States $70 billion, and that’s just for starters.  It would also save a lot of money on food.  But more on that later.

When people say “listen to your body” I wonder if they’re schizophrenic or puppeteers, since those are the only people I know who talk to a body part.

Let’s talk about something more interesting:  me.  I wanted to wait to write this post until I had some pretty significant results – I wrote once before about fasting, and it was going well then.  How about now?

• I’ve lost more than 20% of my body weight since January 1, 2019.
• I feel great.
• The average weight loss is about 1.5% a week.
• The weight loss is consistent.
• The weight loss is maintained.
• I have to shorten my belt every week or two.
• The ghost of Stalin is wondering how I did it.

Again, I’d say that fasting costs nothing, but that wouldn’t be true.  Fasting has saved me lots and lots of money, which will become apparent when I describe how I’m doing it below.

One other thing – I gave up drinking alcohol (beer, wine, etc.) as my weight loss progresses with the exception of two major milestones.  I figured that, besides motivation, giving up alcohol during my weight loss would be good because alcohol is the source of at least two things:  empty calories and bad decisions.  Besides, you can’t sit around on the back deck with a Budweiser® and claim you’re fasting.  Well, you can, but you’d be using Senate-level honesty.

So what exactly did I do?  I stop eating Saturday night most weeks.  Then I eat again from Friday at lunch until Saturday night.  In any given week, my window to eat is about 36 hours long.

Does it require willpower?  Yeah.  But it’s not a frightening level of willpower where I have to face the gom-jabbar or anything.  I think the biggest change for me has been breaking the conditioning of “you have to eat” that’s pretty prevalent.  I’ll listen to people saying “you have to eat” when I’m wearing size 32 jeans.  Until then?  Nope.

I know that the two of you who got this laughed.

Did I drink anything?  Sure.  Water.  Tea.  Coffee.  Club soda.  No diet soda – I’ve read that it stimulates and insulin response, and that’s the exact opposite of what we wanted.  Besides, I think diet soda tastes like I imagine antifreeze tastes.  Your mileage may vary.

So no eating anything?  Okay, I’ll come clean.  The first few weeks I had breath mints, but then I read the label and did the math and now I don’t have them at all unless I have a business meeting and don’t want to have bad breath that can melt a conference table.  Sugar free doesn’t mean calorie free.  I also brush my teeth twice as often.

I also cheat with dill pickles.  At 10 to 20 calories per day, it wasn’t much, and the pickles replaced salt I sweated out while exercising.  Yes, every day that I could get to the gym at lunch I would exercise.  It did two things – it burned a few extra calories, but after a workout I’m never hungry, so the afternoons are hunger free.

What is a typical week like?

Sunday is always great.  Generally no hunger at all.  Generally no food at all, either.  Not even the pickles I cheat with.

And cleanup is a breeze!

Monday is normally pretty good.  I might have five calories of pickles.  Or ten.

Tuesday is the toughest day.  I believe what’s happening here is that my liver is all out of glycogen, a sugar that is stored in the liver for emergency use.  Any food in my digestive system is long gone.  That means that on Tuesday the body has to switch over to using fat.  By Tuesday night I’m feeling pretty good.  My energy levels are actually higher on Tuesday night than Tuesday morning.  Tuesday is the only day I feel really hungry.  The rest of the time, when I think I’m hungry, I’m really just . . . conditioned to be eating.  When I really sit back and examine if I’m hungry, the answer is almost always “no.”  Except on Tuesday.

You guessed it – if I get horribly hungry I have a few small dill pickles.

Wednesday and Thursday look pretty much the same as each other – my energy levels are up even though I’ve gone 72+ hours without any food.  There’s a strong focus and mental acuity that seems to emerge about this point.  It’s entirely likely that this account’s for Shakespeare’s quote from Julius Caesar, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”  I have no idea if Cassius ate pickles.

Thursday about midnight (when I’m writing this blog) I often go upstairs and cook some broth and/or have some cheese.  Total calories are about 40 (about the same as eight mints) but it seems to make sense to have this as a gentle kick-start for the digestive system.  The of all food I’ve consumed during the fast would probably be less than 100 calories, and certainly less than 200 calories, and almost never any sugar.  It’s like I’m a fashion model, but without the cocaine!

Mmmmm, water.

Friday is FOOD DAY!  I’ll eat at lunch – say 11:30 or so, though one particular Friday I was feeling so good that I skipped going to lunch right away and pushed it off entirely until nearly 2pm.  My longest fast is about five and a half days.  I might go longer, just for grins, but five and a half days a week is worth a weekly weight loss of more than 1.5% of my body weight every week.

The weight loss is wonderful, but the other payoff is significant:  on Friday, the food is amazing.  The taste of crisp lettuce and tomato on a burger . . . gives me shivers.  The Chick-Fil-A® nuggets become a banquet.  One Friday I had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon.  No king ever had such wondrous flavors hit his palate.  One of the reasons I’ve grown to love fasting is that food tastes so much better.  I guarantee you that after going 100 hours without food, you will enjoy and savor food more than you ever have in your life.

Did you notice the big lunch buffet behind the lunch?

Food (mainly) tastes better, more flavorful, richer.  That is, food that is closest to being “natural” – processed junk is not appealing on day five of a fast.  One Friday I had a concession stand pretzel with concession stand cheese for lunch.  I threw half of it away – the pretzel tasted like paste and the cheese like a chemical byproduct meant to poison some of the horrible fist-sized spiders that only live in Australia.  I never would have imagined throwing food away after not eating for five days, but then again, I never would have pictured not eating for 134 hours.

The other effect I notice at the end of a fast is that my stomach is small.  I simply cannot eat as much as I used to eat.  I’m often full before I can finish a “normal” portion size at the local restaurant.  And if I try to eat three “normal” meals?  I get uncomfortably full.

So what do I eat during the 36 hours?  Anything I want to.  No limits on portions or content, with the previously mentioned exception of the wine and beer.  Why no wine and beer?  As I mentioned, there are a lot of bad decisions in those bottles, but also because I love a good glass of wine with a steak or a beer while I’m at the barbeque grill.  These are motivation for success.  It’s that simple.

It’s also breakfast, the most important meme of the day.

I know that this diet might sound extreme, but I’ll counter that our current culture is probably a LOT more extreme than this diet.  Where in history has mankind had such a surplus of food?  There is no point in history that we’ve been as heavy as we are today, and that’s more extreme than fasting.  But let’s rewind:

A mammoth hunter back in 20,000 B.C. couldn’t jump into his Fred Flintstone® car and go down to the 7-11© to pick up a Slurpee™ when he was hungry.  Instead he’d carve into the mammoth that he and Ug got the previous week.  Oops, they ate it all.  Now they couldn’t exactly go down to Mammoth-Mart© and pick up some steaks, they had to go find one.  That might mean days of hunting, and it might mean that Fred and Ug might have to focus on the hunt.

One thing that’s for sure, the body would want to provide them with energy but not eat into the muscle needed for hunting.  Thus it would pull high-quality energy from the source created just for that purpose – fat.  Fat serves a very useful purpose in animals – future energy storage for times when it’s needed.

Metabolic slowdown has been observed to be much more of an issue with reduced calorie diets – your body understands that there’s food, but just not as much as it would like.  It reacts by lowering temperature and going into a semi-hibernation.  But when the body has no food?  Energy is actually required, so it provides it as needed.  It’s often that my best and most energetic workout of the week is on Thursday after fasting for over 100 hours.

Gym fees were waived if the mammoth stomped on you.

Do I have to workout while fasting?  No, many people don’t.  But every calorie burned in a workout while I’m in a fasted state is a calorie of fat.  So if you do a 500 calorie workout five days in a fasted state, that’s 2500 calories.  Of fat.  A pound of fat is 3600 calories, so you’ve burned about 0.7 pound (500,000 kilograms) of fat for a fairly short workout.  Add that up?  In ten weeks that’s 7 pounds (3.2 grams).  Not bad – there are entire diets that don’t provide that kind of predictable success that I’ve experienced with just one aspect of my new lifestyle.

Yes, lifestyle.  When I started, my goal was to get to a weight that I had not too long after college.  Now?  My new final goal is to get back to my college weight.  I can see that fasting some duration each week (One day?  Three days?  I’m not sure.) will be a part of maintaining that goal weight – and it won’t be a burden, I actually like fasting after having done it.  It’s obvious to me that the things I tried before didn’t work because they weren’t simple.

This is simple.

Okay, Dr. Evil may not be a real doctor.

Fasting is also something that Dr. Fung (LINK) has said he’s used to cure (yes, cure) type II diabetic patients.  As a kidney doctor, he got to see patients that had progressed pretty far toward death.  Dr. Fung noted that he was pretty frustrated being told that the only thing that he could do was make these patients comfortable until they died.  There was no cure.

Fung didn’t accept that.  Type II diabetes is a disease that’s related to lifestyle.  It’s really part of a bigger condition known as metabolic syndrome.  He began treating his patients with fasting.  The farther gone they were, the longer the fasts – in some cases 14 days.  He noted (and many subsequent studies have confirmed this) that fasting made them better.  It increased insulin sensitivity, and that was huge.

Insulin plays many roles in the human body – I believe I recall doctors had found at least 40 regulatory influences from insulin, but I can’t find that article right now, but did find a full dozen important things it does.  But (if you have a functioning pancreas) two important features are that it allows your body to admit sugar to cells for use.  That’s important.  But in type II diabetes a resistance is formed and more and more insulin has to be released to transport the sugar into the cell.

Uh-oh.

Insulin also signals your body to build and store fat.  So you’re using sugar poorly, but also being signaled to store more fat.  Thus?  Your metabolism is screwed up and your body wants to make more fat out of the sugar in your system.  So Dr. Fung came up with the idea to just stop type II diabetics from eating.  And it worked like a charm.

People are alive today because Dr. Fung had this idea.  Let that sink in.

Am I saying that it can cure you?  Dr. Fung thinks so.  But he also cautions that certain diabetic medications can be dangerous and need close monitoring so you don’t die, or something.  Blah blah blah.

I hear they’re going to start vaping Cheetos® soon.

But I’m not on any medications, so this seemed like a slam dunk.  I even spent $30 for a cheap-o blood sugar monitor to see if there was anything that would show up.  Nah.  Boring, which just means that my liver and pancreas are doing the things they’re supposed to do.

But the other meters in the house, the scale and my belt have certainly been heading in the right direction.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve saved a lot of money.  When you only have two lunches and two dinners a week, you don’t spend as much on groceries and hardly anything on restaurants.  Also, the fam doesn’t tend to go out to dinner when I’m fasting.  I’m certainly okay with going out, but I think they feel guilty.  So there’s that money saved, too.  Oh, and the wine and beer.  Not buying any of that saves money.  And we all know that mixing Amazon® and beer lead to purchases of solar string lights and ceramic garden gnomes because “those might look good on the deck.”  The worst part is trying to explain to The Mrs. exactly what I was thinking . . .

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have saved thousands of dollars by fasting.

This will likely be the last post on fasting until I’ve reached my primary goal and learned what I have to do to stay there, forever.  And I’ll only post that if it’s interesting.

In addition to the Doctor Fung reference, the sub-Reddit on fasting is a wealth of information – mainly good information, but you should do your own research:

Here’s a link to the Reddit on fasting: /Fasting

Here’s a link to a Reddit thread showing my results aren’t unique:  Reddit /Fasting Dude

Here’s a link to about a guy who fasted for over a year:  Scottish Fasting Dude