100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Chapter Eleven: In Conclusion

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Chapter One

In the Beginning

Fear plays a part in making us afraid of fasting that most of us won’t admit to. I read several books on fasting that should have brought relief to my fears, but until I started fasting, they were of little help.

Even learning about the epic, supervised, zero-calorie fast of Angus Barbieri in 1965 for 382 days left me apprehensive. In 2013 I read The 5:2 Diet by Michael Mosley. It was a good book, very informative, but it advised weighing food and counting calories and carbs, eating at certain times and not others, and I just do not do all that. If I was going to do anything it had to be simple. I was going to adhere to a few rules, if you will, but that was it. It had to be on my terms, or I was going to just be fat the rest of my life and that was that.

From my past dieting experiences, I knew that a low-carb, high fat diet was to my liking. Eating low-carb since I read The New Diet Revolution by Dr. Robert Atkins in 1996 was certainly keeping me alive because saturated fat actually protects the cardiovascular system from the damage done to it by high carb foods, even though my indulgences into everything sweet were pretty much unabated. I knew I would have to do something about that at some point. I gave up on the 5:2 diet thing very quickly. I had stopped eating breakfast for a time for an eating window of about 18:6 (18 hours fasting, with two meals in 6 hours and no snacking between them). I really missed my breakfast which was fried eggs atop a slice of homemade sourdough bread with a slice of American cheese between them. I have eaten this breakfast since I was a kid. I have never been a cereal person which is partly responsible for me obtaining my three score and 13 years on the planet’s surface so far. And I have always cooked my own breakfast. Frying my eggs each day was the first thing I learned how to cook.

After giving up on the 5:2 as too complex, I meandered through life carrying an extra person under my skin until January of 2017. That is when I’d had enough and started the eviction process of getting rid of my 100-pound burden. I weighed 260 pounds and set my goal to get to a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 25 or 160 pounds. However, if and when I reached the goal, I was going to allow myself to go back up to 170

pounds. I found a website that used actual bone dimensions to determine what a person’s weight should really be. After I input my information, it said that my weight range for my frame size should be 152-170. With that I was off and running.

The first thing I did was begin skipping breakfast to give autophagy the longest time possible to heal my body from my self-loathing gluttonous past. This I learned later was restricted window eating. I made 11:30 AM my lunch time and my last mouthful for the day would be before 6 PM. This would be 17.5:6.5

in restricted time eating lingo.

I needed to do some research. I wanted to do this right, and I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. I knew that all diets could bring permanent weight loss if they were sustained. I had tried several of the 111 diets rolled out on the global population since 1970 and the more cluttered with rules and tasks they were the less likely they will be sustainable. Especially for me! Fasting, more than any other reason, appealed to me because I realized that at its core, fasting is to do nothing. There is nothing easier to do than NOTHING! Fasting is an overlay for any diet you choose. For me there are no special foods, no counting calories or carbs, no weighing my food, no weird instructions to a restaurant server, I can eat anything on the menu, it is nothing like manmade diets. You can add all the clutter you want, but it was not for me. Using manmade diets, of the people who reach goal weight, only 1.7% manage to maintain it. That means 98.3% fail to keep lost weight lost.

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So, I started skipping breakfast every day and started reading about therapeutic fasting. I read books that were published in the 1800’s, 1900’s and as recently as 2016. They all start by addressing fear. They help a person considering a fasting lifestyle to get comfortable with the idea of intentionally refusing to eat. They all talked about how all other mammalian lifeforms on earth fast when sick or injured except man. “You need to eat to keep up your strength” does not come from a place of wisdom. They all talked about the history of fasting including its prehistoric beginnings and how we were either designed or evolved to go prolonged periods of time without food. Another thing I observed was that fasting has been a healing dietary intervention for thousands of years and there is nothing new. Nothing. They just have modern physiological tools now to prove what fasting practitioners have been saying about fasting going back to the earliest medical writings in ancient times.

I started reading the free stuff first. The first book was The No Breakfast Plan – Fasting Cure by Dr.

Edward Dewey published in 1904. I found Upton Sinclair’s The Fasting Cure, published in 1911, to be very well written. The best of everything I have ever read on therapeutic fasting was by Dr. Herbert Shelton titled Fasting and Sunbathing, published in 1934. I read that one several times. Then I broke down and purchased a few books and the best of those was The Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung.

A few weeks after I started skipping breakfast every day, I found out that the phrase “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” first appears in American literature in the publication Good Health magazine in 1917. The article was written by the magazines founder, but the more important fact about it was the editor. Dr. John Kellogg whose brother Wilber founded the Kellogg’s Cereal Co. They were competitors in the cereal business. So, I would have to say that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is the most successful advertising slogan in the history of advertising. Then, once I learned about autophagy and how it works, I realized that breakfast was the most foolish meal I could possibly eat and haven’t had it since. I love American breakfast foods like eggs and sausage, so I just have it for lunch.

A few weeks after starting to skip breakfast I began to skip lunch as well two non-consecutive days a week, Saturday, and Tuesday. That is when the weight really started to fall off. At that time, I was still eating sugar added foods every night for dessert. The first 50 pounds seemed to fall off in chunks, but the last 50 took flexibility in making better food selections and reducing portion sizes.

A couple of months in I did my first overnight fast. I ate my last bite of food at 6 PM, did not eat all day the next day, and then waited until lunch the next day to eat again. I was relieved when I woke up on the third day realizing I’d survived. Sometime after that I did 2 days waiting until noon on the third day to eat lunch. Then I did three days and again did not die. I was 8 months into the lifestyle, I had read 8

books on fasting before I did my first 5 day zero-calorie fast. My sustenance was water, sparkling water, and coffee. No calories and nothing with artificial sweeteners. The fourth day of this fast was something very special. I’d read about it, it was in nearly every book I’d read, that on the fourth day of a zero-calorie fast many people experience a euphoric feeling that makes you feel like you could go on forever.

Hunger pain leaves you on the fourth day with a feeling in your stomach that you are not hungry, but not full either. My mind was clearer than at any time I can ever remember. It also became obvious to me why fasting and religion have walked hand-in-hand since the beginning. No extended fast that I have ever done has brought an experience close to that feeling again. Maybe it is because they no longer have that first time excitement factor.

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In the afternoon of that 5 day at 2 PM I was turning a screwdriver for some home repair and experienced severe cramping in both hands, even the one not turning in the screws. I immediately went to the refrigerator and broke the fast with some grapes. A month or two later I was in another fast, it was the afternoon of the fifth day again and had the same side effect. Cramping in my hands. So, I started researching this phenomenon and it led me to electrolytes. After I started including salt, magnesium, and potassium in my drinking water I never had the issue again.

If you decide to embrace this lifestyle change you are going to read about all manner of rules that people apply to fasting. When confused it is not a bad idea to think back to prehistoric times where fasting was common and necessary for survival. There were no rules. If you could not kill anything or find anything you fasted until you did. Fasting really is that simple, but you can add whatever claptrap to it that makes you happy.