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

Chapter 3

The Long Haul

Due to my stroke, fasting for me became what it actually is, a health plan with the side effect of weight loss. My neuronal autophagy studies informed me that longer fasts are required to heal the brain of trauma which is what a stroke is. I was set and ready for this next phase. I was still skipping breakfast every day and lunch as well on Tuesday’s and Saturday’s eating only supper on those days. Simple and easy. Now all I had to do was learn how to lose weight on it.

Within a month or so I was down to about 210 for a total of fifty pounds lost. That is when things really started to slow down. Being an engineer in my working life I knew what the issue was. Fifty pounds lost meant that it takes less energy to move about and live life. Food equals energy. I had to make better food choices and adjust my portion sizes if I wanted to keep losing weight. I had to add some “clutter” to my simple strategy. I needed to weigh myself every morning so that I could make food choices and adjust portion sizes based on what the scale told me.

I already had a very accurate scale and had kept it calibrated so I was good there. After my stroke I began recording my blood pressure and resting heart rate. When I started to weigh myself every day, I added my weight to the record. I had read in several books that the myth of strength lost because of fasting had been debunked way back in the 1860’s, again in the 1880’s, several times in the early 1900’s and as recently as 2016, but I wanted to keep track of it myself, so I bought a hand strength dynamometer. Keeping these records proved invaluable to confirm my phenomenal improvements that will be discussed later.

To weigh myself accurately I picked first thing every morning after I had drained my bladder, but before I drank any liquids. If I did not like what the scale told me, I blamed myself and made better food selections and reduced portion sizes to ensure that tomorrow there would be no disappointment. Using this procedure, I never had a “plateau” that lasted more than a few days. The weight just kept coming 9

off. I have never counted carbs or calories and just guessed at portion sizes and obviously, over time, got rather good at it. And the weight just kept coming off. I did many extended fasts and gradually improved my health to the point where I did not know if a brief balance issue was due to the stroke or because I am an old man. Today I really do not experience fatigue that I can say is the result of the stroke or my age. I have just recovered completely and thank God often for it.

I used extended fasts of up to 7 days for healing. During these fasts I would consistently lose 10 pounds of weight but would regain 3-5 pounds at the end of the fast when I refilled my gut and maybe had some water weight gain. This is where my regular weekly protocol was used to get those 3-5 pounds back off because I refused to begin another extended fast until I got back down to my final weight of the previous extended fast. I learned that for me extended fasts for weight loss were just not sustainable. I am now 4 years into maintenance of my 100-pound weight loss and as it turns out the simple skip breakfast every day and lunch as well twice a week worked wonderfully.

Breaking my sugar addiction and food’s grip on my mind in general took a couple of 7-day fasts, but also transitioning from sweet snacks and foods to low-carb, high fat fare. It came after my stroke when it got harder to keep losing weight. We all know what bad snacks are, and it will take some creativity to replace them with items that if you do decide to shovel in some food during a weak moment, no harm done. Today my snack foods are pork rinds and homemade dip. I can’t stand pork rinds by themselves, but with dips, I love the combo! I also make meat sticks and jerky. I like hard boiled eggs with dips or fancy mustard. Several daily handfuls of mixed tree nuts are a staple for me. I keep 2-3 kinds of cheese handy. You get the idea. You can buy keto snack foods, but at this writing they are quite pricey. I love to cook so making my own salad dressings and dips is a joy and not a burden. I do not like the “chaffles”

that are popular with the keto crowd because I do not like overcooked egg. Tortilla shells have as many carbs as any other bread shape.

All that said about snacks and now the bad news. To lose the weight I stopped snacking between meals and at some point, if you want to get rid of insulin resistance you will have to add these treats to the beginning or end of a meal as well because snacking between meals is the worst possible habit for your health.

Between the stroke and reaching goal weight I had two surgeries for hernias. In July following the stroke in May I was carrying a 4 x 4 x 12’ long, treated board which is heavier than untreated wood, but much lighter than I had carried before the stroke. I felt a breach in my left inguinal area and knew immediately I had given myself a hernia. I had to wait for 12 months after the stroke before they would do surgery because of the risk of a second stroke. So, in the spring of 2019 I had surgery to fix that breach as well as an umbilical hernia I’d had for about 40 years and to do some reinforcement of a left side inguinal area hernia I had fixed when I was 14 years old.

Then I was carefully moving some late snowfall after my post-surgery lifting weight restrictions had expired and I felt the left side breach again. All was supposed to be okay for the activity. After the re-repair, the surgeon told me that she had used a piece of mesh that ‘should probably have been a little bigger”. I quipped that they sell that stuff in 4-foot x 8-foot sheets do they not? She did not laugh. I do not think she appreciated my humor before the second surgery either when I asked if I could buy the extended warranty this time. She fixed me up really well. So well, in fact, that I had to go back to the hospital the evening of the surgery because I could not pee. The surgery gave me acute urinary retention. Either too many synaptic connections were severed or too much swelling around my urethral tube not allowing muscles to relax that allow urine to flow. So, for the next week I walked around 10

hurting from surgery with a catheter shoved up my joystick. That then led to a urinary tract infection.

Earlier I referred to a lingering complication of the stroke, well that is it. I am much better today, and fasting did make it more tolerable, but I still have to pee too often and need to get up once or twice a night to do so.