I used to be someone who struggled with a healthy body fat percentage for a long time.
During my worst, I was at 210 pounds with mostly fat with almost no muscle.
During my “first” weight loss journey between 2014–2015, I’ve managed to drop down to 170 pounds, only to regain it back to 200 in about a year.
Then I went on to my “second” weight loss journey between 2018–2019. I’ve managed to drop down to 150 pounds in a period of three months, only to once again regain it back to 190 in about a year.
Now, for the third time, I’ve drop down to 150 pounds in about two months during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine. I’ve also managed to maintain this weight and it has since stabilized.
What was my strategy each time? A combination of factors, but the dominate strategy was intermittent fasting. For me, this strategy was a gradual conditioning of my body to depend on food less and less. The culture of standard eating is three meals a day. After my weight-loss journey, I believe eating so much everyday is a societal construct designed to encourage us to spend more money and to help us deal with economic issues that occurred some generations ago. Now that food and production is plentiful, I believe that our daily standard of 3 meals a day may not be necessarily for some people. I for one, have depended on mostly 1 with the occasional 2 meals a day for about two years now. Besides some unintentional health benefits (yes, you read that right, benefits), my finances have become much easier to handle.
I first started learning about intermittent fasting back in October 2018. Initially, it was only about finding a way to reduce my expenses while I was job searching. I was hoping to tap into my body’s fat reserves as to relieve some financial strain on myself. My main source of information was from Dr.Eric Berg, an internet celebrity who taught me a lot about Intermittent Fasting, The Ketogenic Diet, and various Fat-Loss drinks. My fat lost journey employed these three aspects.
Step 1a : Reducing Eating Window to 8 hours stabilizing between 12pm–8pm
Day 0–8am to 12am
Day 1–9:30am to 11:30pm
Day 2–10am to 11pm
Day 3–10:30am to 10:30pm
Day 4–11:00am to 10:00pm
Day 5–11:30am to 9:30pm
Day 6–12:00pm to 9:00pm
Day 7–12:00pm to 8:00pm
Rest of the days — 11am-7pm, 12pm-8pm, 1pm-9pm, 2pm-10pm
The average notion of 3 meal a day encouraged a daily eating window anywhere from 8am to 12am for me. This was an eating window of 16 hours that I gradually reduced into 8 hours. At first, I did not reduce the total calories I ate per day, but rather merely shifted when those total calories would be eaten.
However, as my body was slowly being trained to depend on food in certain hours of the day, it burned small traces of fat during those fasting hours. This initial fat loss had an effect on my leptin (hunger hormone) and the slow transition into 8 hours inadvertently reduced my daily appetite. By the time I reached 8 hours, I was depending on 2 meals a day rather than 3 meals with a significantly reduced in daily caloric requirement.
For about a month or so, I then alternated in my eating start and end time. However the eating window was consistently within 8 hours with only two meals a day. Of course there was definitely “cheat” days where I broke the habit of an 8 hour window. However, I would still go back to the 8 hour window immediately the next day.
Step 1b : Gradual Reduction of Carb Intake
Day 0–200g carbs a day
Day 1–150g carbs a day
Day 2–100g carbs a day
Day 3–80g carbs a day
Day 4–70g carbs a day
Day 5–60g carbs a day
Day 6–50g carbs a day
Rest of the days : anywhere between 20–50g a day.
As a Chinese person, rice is a staple food in my community. Not eating rice or training my body to not depend on it was a major hurdle. I’ve done ketogenic dieting before and failed miserably. My initial attempts caused a major lack in energy, numerous headaches and intense thirsts. Why? I tried to enter into it right away.
I tried something else. I started off with reserving carbs for only one meal out of the 3 (later 2) meals I consume everyday. I slowly then reduced and nearly removed sugar-based foods/drinks (I never liked these much anyway), and savory (my weakness is salty food) bit by bit. I still allowed myself junk food from time to time but the frequency and the portion size was drastically reduced as I entered deeper into my fat-loss period.
Once I got 20g grams (from berries/vegetables), my body became fat-burning adapted.
Step 1c : Drinking Plenty of Fat-Loss Drinks
The hardest part of my fat loss journey were each day’s fasting periods. While reducing carbs and restricting eating window was a straightforward task, the hours of the day where I was not eating posed the greatest difficulty. Those hours had moments of hunger, thirst, fainting, low blood sugar, poor vision and general discomfort.
At least that’s what happened at first.
To ease away the discomfort, I relied on drinking vast amount of water to trick my stomach there’s . I’d say during my fat-loss journey, I drank at least 4 litres of water per day. Water itself greatly reduced the difficulty of the discomfort I had. The potency of water in during the fasting period was greatly magnified once I added Lemon juice (no sugar), Vinegar, Cinnamon Bark.
The combination of these three resulted in three amazing benefits
— Cleansed digestive organs so they would work more efficiently in burning fat
— Reduced my blood sugar to accelerate fat loss
— Nearly killed any hunger-associated pains immediately
Conclusion
It was from these three strategies that helped me drop from 190 to 150 pounds during October 2018-January 2019. I lost 40 pounds in a period of three months. My body felt very cleansed and purified after the fast.
However, a year later, I eventually regain it to 190 during a bulking phase. I had foolishly believed that because I was weightlifting every day, that I could eat as much junk as I wanted.
Using these three strategies and new ones, I was able to easily lost all of it once again.
