My 5 day fat fast

I started on Monday after lunch and then continued from Tuesday 28th July to Sat 1st August

Background.

I have yoyo dieted for very many years.  No diet ever worked for me long term until I started following LCHF.  As at Monday last week I had lost 2 stones 11 pounds since April 1st 2014.  I had also lost 7 pounds before this date but this took me around 2 years to achieve.   My metabolism has suffered greatly by so much dieting and cutting down of calories, so much so that I have very gradually increased the amount I eat to at least 1200-1300 calories a day, sometimes up to about 1800 calories, but never less than 1200.   I need to keep my metabolism boosted.  I will no longer starve myself to lose weight.  

Reasons for undertaking a 5 day fat fast.

There were two reasons I did this.  

1. Hopefully to lose a few pounds
2. To give my metabolism a boost by consuming more calories

I googled ‘fat fast’.  The recommendations generally seemed to be to have around 1200 calories, mostly fat.  I didn’t like the sound of this, that’s the calorie level I usually have anyway.  So how would this improve things for me longer term?  I decided to tailor the advice to suit me.  

For all my years of yoyo dieting I believed the statement that to lose weight you had to cut calories, that ‘calories in had to be less than calories out’ for someone to lose weight.  This was true for me for my first few diets, but then as I tried harder and harder to lose weight my metabolism slowed down.   So much so that in 1997 (? ) I dieted for a month.  I consumed 1000 calories a day or less and walked 2 miles every day.   I didn’t normally do any exercise at that time so was expecting to lose at least a little weight.  I stayed the same.   Following the calories in/calories out advice over the years I had slowed my metabolism down so much that I was burning very few calories.   Increasing the amount of exercise did nothing to help.

In 2007 my son and I had flu.  After 11 days of eating very little, I only lost ½ pound.   I realised that reducing my food intake was never going to help me to lose weight.  So after a few more bad ideas, I started with my own version of LCHF (I had never heard the name until I joined DCUK in 2013) that’s how I lost the 7 pounds in 2 years.  Then I worked harder at LCHF to lose the rest when I started my thread over there last year.

Since around late November last year my weight has stayed around the same, going up and down 3 pounds or so, but I wasn’t managing to lose any more.  

My fat fast.

I started on Monday afternoon, on a whim really.  I had been to the chiropractor and she had told me to rest for 2 days and not do a great deal of exercise for a few more days.  

I wanted to have foods I love and to keep it as simple as possible, whilst consuming as much fat as I wanted and very few carbs and protein.   Nowadays I ignore the calories in/calories out bit as it simply doesn’t work for me.   The statement I choose to believe now is: – the metabolism is like a fire, you need to give it plenty of fuel to keep it burning.  Eating fat has to be a great way of getting the fire to burn better.  I have had less than normal exercise since Monday; I have done the bare minimum that I needed to do.  

The 5 day fast was by no means a healthy balanced diet and the advice is not to carry on with a fat fast for more than 5 days.  I took vitamin supplements.   My diet consisted of things mostly beginning with C(not planned just  a coincidence)!  Cream (double), corned beef, cheese, cucumber, coffee, chocolate (99%) plus milk in tea and butter, and lots of water.   I don’t like the fat on meat, so if I had a lot of meat it would be mostly protein, not fat, so I stuck to dairy produce for my fat intake.   I didn’t try to restrict calories at all.  I just ate until I didn’t want anymore.   I used my fitness pal to record my carb/fat/protein/calorie intake.  

My average daily intake over the 5 full days of the fat fast was:-

Calories    2312
Carbs      15.8g    
Fat          238g                                     
Protein    26.4g

Allowing for 4 calories per gram of carbs and protein and 9 calories per gram of fat, the calorie percentage works out as follows.  
                  Carbs        Fat            Protein
                  2.74%       92.69%     4.57%

My fasting BGs were:-
Tues       Weds     Thurs       Fri     Sat     Sun
5.7          6.1 *         6.3        5.3      5.4     4.8

*Tuesday night I thought I would have to abandon this experiment as I woke with a sore throat.  I had a teaspoonful of manuka honey for medicinal purposes and thankfully did not succumb to the same virus that my husband had at the time.  I included it in my food diary.

My weight loss for the 6 days since I last weighed on Monday morning is 6 pounds.   I am now the lightest I have been for 10 years.

Before I started LCHF and back when very little was known about the Newcastle diet, I did another diet for 7 weeks.  I ate 600 calories daily, nearly all carbs, because all I ate was veggies.  Yes I lost weight, but nothing comparable to this experiment.   I lost around a stone and a quarter in those 7 weeks, on a starvation diet.  This recent experiment was calorie laden and I still lost weight without slowing down my metabolism by starving myself.  

I have heard some people say it is madness to add fat to your diet in order to lose weight as fat contains more calories than carbs or protein.   It isn’t madness it works!  Not all calories are equal.  

I plan to continue with LCHF and maybe do another fat fast in 3 months or so.

Well done-Good results there!

Just goes to show you that not all calories are equal! (Sorry about that Sid...)

A great post Zand and very well done on the weight loss. I have read countless papers on 'are all calories equal'. The way the boffins test for calorific values is in a contraption called a bomb calorimeter. Basically they burn the food and measure the heat coming off, OK that's a very crude description but you get the idea. Trouble is that does not equate for how a human being works, not by a very long way. Let's say for argument all calories are equal when consumed by a young fit adult, and the numbers stack up compared to another young fit adult. That may work out, I don't honestly know. The thing is us diabetics are not young fit adults, we have a severely broken metabolism. For me that means all bets are off.

That being the case, and everyone knows this on this forum, the source of calories to us makes a massive difference on our weight, blood glucose numbers, lipids and a thousand and one other manifestations.

Starvation methods for weight loss can never be maintained in the medium to long term, starvation will always win. Also those sort of diets are highly dangerous both physically and mentally. Once again well done on the weight loss and perhaps more importantly very well done on the BG numbers. Many thanks for your continued support and all the effort you have made on this and other forums.

Excellent news zand you must be so pleased it's working for you, I agree not all calories are created equal my own experience proves it to me.

Thanks all of you. Yes I am very pleased that it's working. I'd also like to say that drinking double cream for a meal each day was no hardship at all.

You must be so thrilled, @zand - well done!

Have you ever watched any of Christine Cronau's videos? She more or less echoes what you say - she eats tons of fat, never counts calories and has maintained her low weight for years eating that way. I think her book is called The Fat Revolution.

There is nothing worse than being hungry and depriving yourself - that's why I think being fat adapted is so crucial - your body has access to all those stored calories any time it needs them.

Indy51 wrote:You must be so thrilled, @zand - well done!

Have you ever watched any of Christine Cronau's videos? She more or less echoes what you say - she eats tons of fat, never counts calories and has maintained her low weight for years eating that way. I think her book is called The Fat Revolution.

There is nothing worse than being hungry and depriving yourself - that's why I think being fat adapted is so crucial - your body has access to all those stored calories any time it needs them.

Yes I am thrilled Indy. I am working at how to drop a few grams of carbs from my normal LCHF diet to make way for a meal replacement drink on a regular basis. Not a low calorie meal replacement drink though - a very high calorie one - double cream, yummy. Maybe all I have to do is to drink my tea black instead of adding milk. I'll see how it goes.

No I haven't watched any of her videos, I'll look out for them now though.

LCHF is awesome.

zand wrote:I started on Monday after lunch and then continued from Tuesday 28th July to Sat 1st August

Background.

I have yoyo dieted for very many years.  No diet ever worked for me long term until I started following LCHF.  As at Monday last week I had lost 2 stones 11 pounds since April 1st 2014.  I had also lost 7 pounds before this date but this took me around 2 years to achieve.   My metabolism has suffered greatly by so much dieting and cutting down of calories, so much so that I have very gradually increased the amount I eat to at least 1200-1300 calories a day, sometimes up to about 1800 calories, but never less than 1200.   I need to keep my metabolism boosted.  I will no longer starve myself to lose weight.  

Reasons for undertaking a 5 day fat fast.

There were two reasons I did this.  

1. Hopefully to lose a few pounds
2. To give my metabolism a boost by consuming more calories

I googled ‘fat fast’.  The recommendations generally seemed to be to have around 1200 calories, mostly fat.  I didn’t like the sound of this, that’s the calorie level I usually have anyway.  So how would this improve things for me longer term?  I decided to tailor the advice to suit me.  

For all my years of yoyo dieting I believed the statement that to lose weight you had to cut calories, that ‘calories in had to be less than calories out’ for someone to lose weight.  This was true for me for my first few diets, but then as I tried harder and harder to lose weight my metabolism slowed down.   So much so that in 1997 (? ) I dieted for a month.  I consumed 1000 calories a day or less and walked 2 miles every day.   I didn’t normally do any exercise at that time so was expecting to lose at least a little weight.  I stayed the same.   Following the calories in/calories out advice over the years I had slowed my metabolism down so much that I was burning very few calories.   Increasing the amount of exercise did nothing to help.

In 2007 my son and I had flu.  After 11 days of eating very little, I only lost ½ pound.   I realised that reducing my food intake was never going to help me to lose weight.  So after a few more bad ideas, I started with my own version of LCHF (I had never heard the name until I joined DCUK in 2013) that’s how I lost the 7 pounds in 2 years.  Then I worked harder at LCHF to lose the rest when I started my thread over there last year.

Since around late November last year my weight has stayed around the same, going up and down 3 pounds or so, but I wasn’t managing to lose any more.  

My fat fast.

I started on Monday afternoon, on a whim really.  I had been to the chiropractor and she had told me to rest for 2 days and not do a great deal of exercise for a few more days.  

I wanted to have foods I love and to keep it as simple as possible, whilst consuming as much fat as I wanted and very few carbs and protein.   Nowadays I ignore the calories in/calories out bit as it simply doesn’t work for me.   The statement I choose to believe now is: – the metabolism is like a fire, you need to give it plenty of fuel to keep it burning.  Eating fat has to be a great way of getting the fire to burn better.  I have had less than normal exercise since Monday; I have done the bare minimum that I needed to do.  

The 5 day fast was by no means a healthy balanced diet and the advice is not to carry on with a fat fast for more than 5 days.  I took vitamin supplements.   My diet consisted of things mostly beginning with C(not planned just  a coincidence)!  Cream (double), corned beef, cheese, cucumber, coffee, chocolate (99%) plus milk in tea and butter, and lots of water.   I don’t like the fat on meat, so if I had a lot of meat it would be mostly protein, not fat, so I stuck to dairy produce for my fat intake.   I didn’t try to restrict calories at all.  I just ate until I didn’t want anymore.   I used my fitness pal to record my carb/fat/protein/calorie intake.  

My average daily intake over the 5 full days of the fat fast was:-

Calories    2312
Carbs      15.8g    
Fat          238g                                     
Protein    26.4g

Allowing for 4 calories per gram of carbs and protein and 9 calories per gram of fat, the calorie percentage works out as follows.  
                  Carbs        Fat            Protein
                  2.74%       92.69%     4.57%

My fasting BGs were:-
Tues       Weds     Thurs       Fri     Sat     Sun
5.7          6.1 *         6.3        5.3      5.4     4.8

*Tuesday night I thought I would have to abandon this experiment as I woke with a sore throat.  I had a teaspoonful of manuka honey for medicinal purposes and thankfully did not succumb to the same virus that my husband had at the time.  I included it in my food diary.

My weight loss for the 6 days since I last weighed on Monday morning is 6 pounds.   I am now the lightest I have been for 10 years.

Before I started LCHF and back when very little was known about the Newcastle diet, I did another diet for 7 weeks.  I ate 600 calories daily, nearly all carbs, because all I ate was veggies.  Yes I lost weight, but nothing comparable to this experiment.   I lost around a stone and a quarter in those 7 weeks, on a starvation diet.  This recent experiment was calorie laden and I still lost weight without slowing down my metabolism by starving myself.  

I have heard some people say it is madness to add fat to your diet in order to lose weight as fat contains more calories than carbs or protein.   It isn’t madness it works!  Not all calories are equal.  

I plan to continue with LCHF and maybe do another fat fast in 3 months or so.

What a lovely post to read Zand - well done, you must be so pleased.      
I'm sure your post will help other readers too.  

All the best Jan

Yes @Jan1 I was really pleased. I am even more pleased this morning as my weight has stayed the same even though I am eating my normal LCHF diet now. That's what's most important to me - that I lose weight, but don't yo-yo diet anymore.

Interesting stuff.

zand wrote:Thanks all of you.  Yes I am very pleased that it's working.  I'd also like to say that drinking double cream for a meal each day was no hardship at all.  

Please put that in very small print next time, I mean the stuff the stuff about the double cream.

Pasha wrote:

zand wrote:Thanks all of you.  Yes I am very pleased that it's working.  I'd also like to say that drinking double cream for a meal each day was no hardship at all.  

Please put that in very small print next time, I mean the stuff the stuff about the double cream.

I'll try to remember that for next time lol. That stuff does make a great meal replacement drink though. I never had that much success with the low calorie meal replacements that are on the market. I think this ties in with the "Is God Stupid" thread I was reading just now.

Think about this. The one area the medics do not ever argue about is breast milk is the best start for a baby. I know for good reasons this is not always possible. Jan worked as a volunteer for the National Child Birth Trust for a long time. Check out the fat content of breast milk.

I have asked medics when does a high fat diet become a killer, one year of age, five years of age, 50 years of age, no one seems to have an answer.

Often when Jan was out, a Mother would ring up and go straight into a long speech about breast pumps etc. and I would say hang on a minute, you need to talk to my Wife, can you call back later please.

Some time ago the boffins came up with a low fat milk formula substitute, it was a disaster and quickly dumped. Get my drift?

lol Eddie having had a premature baby I could tell you a thing or two about breast pumps...but I won't

I'm disappointed the Co-Op seems to have dropped the Cornish Clotted Cream which was my all time favourite. I wonder how long before Double Cream is made illegal? I couldn't decide between strawberries or blueberries today, so I bought both to have with my cream. The carb content all but vanishes.