2.2 More on Losing Weight/Fasting Technique, Hands on Experience

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2.2:  Eating to Lose or Keep Healthy Weight. Update 03 November 2021 - Column of topics, use search & find or scroll down in order.

 The Method

Fasting for Rapid Weight Loss,

Eating to Lose Excess and Maintain Low Body Weight

Speed of Eating:
Reduce Quantity of Eats: 
Quality of your Eats – Caloric Density 
Use Economy Motive to Maintain Low Weight:  
Restaurant Eating: 
Timing of Eating, Snacking, Conditioned Response, Vending Machine  
Eats in a day & type:  
Use of Night Lie-Down to Avoid Eating 

 Exercise 

Monitor Good Eating

Water
 Metal Toxicity

The Edge Against Overeating

  Food Additive

 Monitor of Under-nutrition

  Preferred Food  

 I favor animal-rights

 Beverage 

  Our Bad Eating

  Self-Experimental Approach to Eating

Pills or  Surgery for Weight Loss

                              Uncontrolled  Crazy Appetite                                    

The Method: Set a healthy (<25) BMI goal. If above it, eat less and add useful physical activity. And use your weigh-in BBT to monitor body weight. When you reach best body weight  for BMI, consider the range on either side you are comfortable with. Then get down to lower border of that range and eat healthily.

Fasting for Rapid Weight Loss: Fasting is the fastest way to weight loss. It can start you on Healthy Longevity. For motivation, convince self of the importance of healthy, long life and your need to achieve it. Then realize a BMI below 25 will make long life most probable and with least sickness. This is a continuous must to reinforce daily. At the start it may not seem to work well but keep at it day, week and month, and watch your morning weigh-in to see it work,

   Fasting involves continuing decisions to go against basic human drive. It takes practice. Every fast should be begun as experiment. Never let it be looked on as contest between asceticism and Miss Piggy. I define a fast as starting from 8 hrs after last calorie in mouth; before then it is intention to fast. Even a fast you stop before planned completion should be success if it cuts down food intake and loses weight and gets you closer to your BMI goal; and however you can achieve the goal – by fast or not, by use of drug or not – so long as you can see movement toward the goal, be happy. Emphasis is not on the fahyg

 

st, it’s on the BMI goal.

   From my experience with fasting, it is best considered as tool to reverse overeating to start you on way to best BMI. Serious students of weight loss will find there will be periods during a life when fasting can be done with good effect.

   Fasting should occupy the opening phase of “get down to best BMI.” Psychologically it is useful to get an opening push by fasting. Once you succeed at fasting, the discipline and self-knowledge gained from it will help eating behavior in future.

   Almost all fasts are ended by 24 hours and I do not advise longer because going past 24 hours recruits anorexia nervosa (Weight-losing disorder of teenage female signaled by BMI 16 or lower and inability to stop weight-losing behavior; and carrying a 6x normal mortality; needs treatment by psychotherapeutic team). The most practical is alternating 24-hr fasts. Here, you cycle the eating, starting each 24-hr at your convenience, and completing the 24 hrs, cycling back and forth between eating and fasting as long as you wish until BMI goal is reached.

   Ideally, a fast ought to be planned to arrange the fasting environment to minimize the stimuli to eat. For some wannabee fasters, Weekender or vacation period is good because of the flexibility the free time gives.

   Entering a fast and its successful completion require powerful and separate motivations that are difficult to turn on and off. At times you may find yourself motivated to start a fast at a non-ideal time. Most often this will be in reaction to an eating mistake (“pigging out”) that has caused disappointment in your self-image. Sometimes it is sudden discovery of being badly overweight. If motivation strikes, even if you have not prepared for or anticipated fasting, grab the opportunity and start fasting. At worst you’ll stop before 24 hours. At best, it might turn out the one fast you succeed in because of powerful motivation.

   The most stressful time in a fast is at mealtimes. It is best to plan physical chore or non-caloric enjoyment for then. Sometimes starting off with a sleep works well to get fasting going after the first 8 hours.

   Many who fast do it as pollutant-free, drug-free, natural organic food kick to “clean system.” I advocate fasting for one purpose: To get below bad BMI !  So anything that safely helps you to not eat, like sleep pill or strong caffeine black coffee is OK.

   Social activity, especially involving others eating and drinking is a No-No during a fast.

   Sleep is useful against stress of fast. Easiest way to fast is to stay in bed, even with help of mild sleep pill.  But be sure you are not taking medicine that stimulates eating – like antihistamines, or some sleep pills like Ambien (zolpidem) or serotonin re-uptake inhibitor anti-depression medications like Prozac.

    I find it best not to drink water during a fast because the mildly dehydrated state of the blood during a non water 24-hour fast depresses appetite compared to a more diluted blood which ups appetite by neural stimulus.

   

Fasting to achieve best BMI can cure or improve disease or conditions like diabetes, gout, and hypertension. Healthy BMI below 25 lowers cancer, arthritis and heart disease. Also, 24-hour fast is useful after an over-eating or a bad meal to “get back to healthy square one”. Also good for mental depression. I use it to keep healthy.

   OK. You have the info. Now, convince self you’re over the top in BMI and go at it and keep at it every day despite initial failures! Starting fasting is easy since you don’t have to count calorie and the instructions are very simple - No food at all - and your goal is right there to be seen on your weigh-in balance.

Eating to Lose Excess and Maintain Low Body Weight: Eating for health is a way of life you carry on for life. At end of rainbow see happy, healthy, long-lived you, enjoying health to hilt and living longevity lovingly. And however you have lived up to the moment – if it has made you fat, you ought to be dissatisfied. Fat is not beautiful, it is ugly and so will you be as long as you are it !  To succeed in getting and keeping healthy weight, be patient, be persistent, be wily. You may not always follow the new, healthy eating pattern; when you do not, you ought to feel you are going to dog; not putting it on! Never be satisfied or content until you are at healthy BMI. What follows is attack on overeating that – instead of counting calorie – counts coup against overeating. 

Speed of Eating: Cultivate delayed, slow eating. Slower you eat, less calories you absorb in unit time, and easier to lose fat and maintain healthy weight. Start first, by delaying eating. If you feel hungry to eat, arbitrarily set your cell phone alarm for 1 hour ahead before putting anything into your mouth. (Of course, compromise for social nicety) Then, at start, if you dine with other(s), be the last at table to take your 1st bite, which may be assisted by taking extra time to cut food into pieces on plate. Then, while other(s) shovel food into mouths, take time chewing small spoonful, savor your chewed food, and swallow slowly. Take extra time by interspersing your forkful with calorie-free fluid. (But do not do this to obvious excess like anorexia nervosa patient)

   More on delaying eating: Delay by becoming a finicky, picky-picky eater! Choose not to sit to eat unless everything about your eating place and food is to your liking. (A clean place, best service – if restaurant, your choice food menu) Never wait on line to eat; never eat standing up or in uncomfortable seating. Always have in your eating repertoire, the alternative of just saying No thanks if everything is not to your liking. Breakfast, lunch, and supper, ought to have lowest priority. It means eating only after you take care of all timely chores and affairs. And a snack ought to be the reward for delaying your dinner. 

Reduce Quantity of Eats: Food-preparation at home should start in “rule of half or quarter”. It means halving or quartering easily fractioned or fractured portion. If you normally have 4 pancakes, go to 2 or 1; if you slice whole banana into your 2 cups of cornflakes and douse it with 2 cups milk, make one half banana and douse only 1 cup. In restaurant if offered choice of size of serving, choose smaller all other things being equal. (The Quarter Pounder rather the larger Big Mac) At home or in restaurant prefer the set meal with individual serving rather than Viking or buffet. Use scissors to cut portion. Count the spaghetti cylinders (my portion normally 50) into the boiling water; measure everything you eat. Also, a mental set attitude to be altered is the normal tendency to "eat it all", i.e., empty your plate or eat up the serving that you planned for your dinner.  Instead of that, interrupt it (in your mind just before sitting down to eat) with the thought I don't have to eat it all up. And for those who have been taught by parents to empty a plate in order to avoid throwing the food away while the poverty-stricken starve, remember! You can always stop while your plate is half empty, and then eat the rest at your next appropriately timed meal (or doggy bag if you are in restaurant).

Quality of your Eats – Caloric Density means weight-gaining power per kilogram of food. Fat and oil (lipid) has more than twice compared to protein or carbohydrate. Protein has additional advantage of reducing appetite more quickly than carbohydrate and lipid. Alcohol is a No-No because it has higher caloric density than carbohydrate or protein, reduces inhibition and stimulates appetite.

   Turning to beverage, your juice or soda or soup is loaded with salt, and, if in cans, with toxic metal. So give up canned and other container beverage; and instead drink pure water.

   A maneuver to reduce weight-gain food is to start off with coffee, tea or water and then fresh fruit and veg salad. In this way you fill stomach with no- or low-calorie food, leaving little room and no desire. 

Use Economy Motive to Maintain Low Weight: Restaurant and take-out food which is fattening is more expensive than less fattening homemade. So prefer low-calorie homemade. Save money and live long to enjoy your money more by eating homemade. Prefer money in pocket to food in fridge. If you live alone and don’t have to worry about other appetites or tastes, play the game of eating up every scrap of food at home before going to market to buy more. It’s a good game on a slimming spree !  Eat up, first, from all those partly used boxes of dry cereal before buying. The best policy is to buy only that much that you can eat up right away or in less than a day. And as part of economy, follow my rule of fractions: cut standard portion in half or quarters and you will halve or quarter your costs of eating the portion plus reducing its calories.

Restaurant Eating: We go to restaurant to satisfy animal restlessness, monkey-see, monkey-do. And we are constantly propagandized in favor of a “joy” of restaurant eating. But always before me I have vision of dying badly and prematurely in a restaurant from the unhealthful junk that goes into me there. I resist going to restaurant. If I must dine in restaurant and pay, then my selection principle is low price, low calorie, no side order, no paid for juice, soup, coffee or tea or alcohol. My ideal is “communist portion.” It means sharing serving, eating “for each according to his or her need”. But it is a rare fellow diner who is intelligent or flexible enough to see benefit in sharing, since most have been programmed for big individual portion.(Click 13.16 Bronx Cafeteria to experience the communist portion)

   Eating in street or in public non-dining place is No-No; it promotes overeating and junk-eating. I include in this proscription: No drinking or carrying coffee on street or soda, water and other canned, boxed/bottled beverage. Why? Because the major control gateway of food and drink is to limit intake to sitting at table. Once you open gate to eating and drinking – on street, on couch watching TV or DVD, and in movie house – the Deluge that Louis XIV (Apres Moi Le Deluge) warned would follow him will overwhelm you in slow, lingering old-age premature death.

Timing of Eating, Snacking, Conditioned Response, Vending Machine : Most of us eat as if feeding time at zoo; when clock strikes 8, 12, 6, the person puts on a metaphoric feeding bag and becomes munch, munch, munch munchkin. And food is eaten while TV blares: “Buy this !”, “Buy that !”, “Eat this !”, “Drink that !” And these messages, associated with overeating, are inserted into our behavior. So we snack between meals mindlessly. To break this conditioning that is putting you into a lockstep with premature illness and death, become self-consciously analytic before putting anything into mouth, before putting money into vending machine and before sitting to eat. Eat for good health and long life. Also, be “in touch with your body.” (Be always mentally flexible to change immediate plan of doing !) Before eating, ask self “Do I really need to eat now?”, check body feeling and analyze your urge to gorge. And especially when, with a dinner just set on table before you, if you have overeaten or badly eaten at restaurant not long ago previously, wait till you are truly convinced of your need to before eating next food. And use your clock to be sure of a minimum of 6 hours from last meal before deciding on eating next one.

   Avoid vending machine, which is a worst conditioner of bad eating. For snack, eat small fresh fruit or small chocolate with tea or coffee as way of delaying dinner.

Eats in a day & type:  A day's eating is of practical import in controlling weight. My day is broken up into 3 or 4 main read/study/relax/eat & drink sessions. A session consists of, first, hot water flavored with vitamin C powder or of tea or coffee, followed by my main writing chore; then a small snack, then a fresh fruit and then the main snack which may be as small as 198 Kcal Light Cup Noodle or 50 pieces of boiled spaghetti with herb, or a cup of boiled rice with fruit or other small snack. (I vary this formula) And I read as I eat. On that, I maintain a 55 to 60 kg  range body weight for a 17-18 BMI.

Fresh Vegetable and Fruit ought to be eaten every day. Get out of habit of putting salty or sweet flavoring on food. (But salty food need not be avoided if your heart condition and blood pressure do not contraindicate it) Vegetable and fruit serve a number of good purposes: they contain sitosterol, which is equivalent of taking an anti-cholesterol pill because it blocks absorption of cholesterol. Also fruit and vegetable will load you with fiber – protecting against constipation and cancer – and its lo-calorie, hi-water content in high volume will fill stomach at start. (Note in older age, as I do now at age 88 now, one may be taking anti-cholesterol pill, vitamins B complex, C and D and calcium, and the amount of pill should be based on one's eating - i.e. & e.g., an extra anti-cholesterol pill with a meaty dinner)

Use of Night Lie-Down to Avoid Eating:  If you are having trouble achieving or holding a good weight, look for the blame to your night snacking. If you have nothing to do at night from 9 PM, it is better to lie down rather than to stay up for the extra eating that too often goes with staying up at night. There will be times in life you need to stay up to do useful work or get good knowledge or enjoyment. But a lie-down repose (light sleep/awake but light-thinking, fugue-like state) or just sleep is better than overeating. (But beware of sleep pills like Ambien that stimulate nighttime munching)

Exercise: In the long run, to hold weight loss without starving self, you must up your energy output, which means upping your muscle activity. But artificial exercise wastes time; joining clubs wastes money. Instead, do functional exercise, anything necessary to your life. No electrical and other labor saving device, no helper(s) you presently employ; these are No-Go’s for losing weight. Replace: electric pencil sharpener by mechanical one, housemaid by yourself, unneeded car by your feet and public transport; and instead of elevator, walk down stairs.

Monitor Good Eating: Use your body weight stimulus by weekly weigh-in. Once you get to healthy BMI, any other signs of bad eating like high blood pressure and high cholesterol should improve and that should reinforce your good health program.

Water: I can’t emphasize enough how important it is. I drink as much water as I can during my typical day. Water intake flushes the system; prevents build up of cholesterol and calcium in artery, and the formation of stone and clot internally; helps heart and kidneys function maximally; fills stomach with no-calorie fluid and alleviates hunger, reduces caloric intake and stops drinking from cans that give the metal toxicity and accelerates Alzheimer’s. So do it! In the road ! At home ! Wherever ! Whatever ! Drink Water ! Drink Water ! And then drink more water !  

Metal Toxicity: As your life goes on, your body cells fill up with metal ions (Iron, Copper, Aluminum, ...) because of high level of these metals in diet due to cans or other metal contact with fluids you drink. Once blood level rises above a critical point, the metals begin to plate out in vital organs, sometimes with horrid effects: Iron in liver causing cancer; and in pancreas (digestive anti-diabetes organ in mid abdomen), causing diabetes; and in brain, causing Parkinson disease; Aluminum in brain, Alzheimer’s; Lead (Pb) in bone marrow, anemia; and in peripheral nerves, neuropathy, and in child it causes brain retardation and low IQ; and Calcium solidifying in blood vessel worsens hardening of artery and stroke, senility and premature organ aging. Metal toxicity is a cause of degenerative disease of aging. When you see an 80 y/o looking age 50, you can bet she rarely drank out of a metal can and you will win.

Slow, cumulative toxicity will signal its initial bad effect by slightly high test level. This high test is a time bomb set to go off after age 65. Worst offenders are iron (eating from iron cookware) or taking unnecessary iron as part of vitamin or blood tonic; aluminum (from cookware, stomach antacid use, and aluminum can, and from kidney dialysis fluid that uses aluminum-rich fluid); also toxic Pb lead (from breathing fume of internal combustion engine, eating from ceramics glazed with lead, using old plumbing for tap water, and in inner city kid eating wall paint in old flat); Hg mercury (industrially tainted fish, e.g., Minamata disease); and the metal bismuth (too much stomach medicine Pepto Bismol, as single dose no problem but as habit, No-No).

Prevention: As much as possible, eat, drink, and cook out of glass container. (Glass eating ware because it is see-thru is also more efficient to wash) Use Pyrex glass cookware for boiling food or fluid. Drink purified water (Office-machine purified or by using activated charcoal at home) Take no excessive vitamin and mineral supplement; and give up owning a car because inside a private car is greatest source of direct air-polluting, toxic metal as well as of deadly carbon monoxide. And if you are a painter, then monitor your toxic metal levels by blood test. I stand witness that such prevention is possible without decreasing the joy of living and it works for Happy Healthy Longevity.

The Edge Against Overeating: It means being a bug at avoiding something not good for you by using power from personality quirk. For example, I have “cheap streak” – I get positive kick from saving penny, and my soul aches when I have not gotten my money-penny worth out of a buy. I use this quirk successfully to avoid overeating or bad eating (and many other unhealthful over-activities) by getting a jolt of positively reinforcing happiness contemplating how much money I save by not going to this or that junk food restaurant, by not buying this or that junk food, by refusing to wait on line to eat overpriced junk. Another reader may be ultra fastidious and refuse to eat at a dirty, low-class surrounding. And on and on ! Set your edge to work using power of your quirk. Having a contrary edge means, at times, to do just the opposite of what you desire at the moment. Say you see a cherry pie in the supermarket and desire it? So just because you note the desire, you make a point not to buy it. That is pure contrary edge! Cultivate it and you’ll be a most happy long lived fella or gal!

Food Additive: Stop shaking salt on or putting it into cooking. You get enough in food. It causes high blood pressure, damages kidneys and stresses heart muscle. Sugar or sweetener too ! A flavoring like ketchup and mustard ought also to stop due to its salt and cancer-causing additive. Honey is the ideal flavor taste substitute.

Monitor of Under-nutrition: How do I know whether I am losing too much weight for good health? Best test is red blood cell in whole blood (development of anemia in under-nutrition) and albumin in serum (low blood test total protein in under-nutrition). Also routine vitamin levels blood testing once a year. BMI below 17 is too low.

Preferred Food: Among carbohydrates – cereal, rice and potato are better than bread because less processed. A special case is matzoh, the biscuit-like unleavened bread used by religious Jews; it is a best substitute for bread.  Spaghetti (also has protein) slim-size 50 pieces is best filler for meals and easiest on the digestion.

Lipid: Cook with salad oil (includes olive oil). For cooking, don’t use butter or margarine. For all eating, avoid animal fat. Limit to 1 egg max a day because of cholesterol

Protein: High quality protein (amino acid mix) is in egg yolk (the yellow); but egg yolk’s cholesterol causes limitation. White of egg is pure albumin protein of lower quality but still not bad to eat. Tofu is good plant protein from beans. The less meat the better. Nutritionally, meat is source of high quality protein, iron and vitamin B12, but also gives bad dose of saturated fat, and antibiotic and hormone used to increase animal mass. Vegetarian (Allows dairy product foods) or vegan (No dairy products or eggs, pure veg. diet) lives longer than meat eater but risks vitamin B12 deficiency, which takes years of pure vegan diet and is preventable by taking adequate dose B12 pills (500 microgram) by mouth with meals. Meat is also a source of mad cow and trichinosis.

I favor animal-rights: We have reached the stage where it is easy for a human to exist healthily without killing another animal for food, and each of us should cultivate this fine feeling. If one believes in animal rights, one’s energy, firstly, should be involved in limiting human population by backing birth control and abortion and delaying child-making. In 2021, vegetarianism on a scale needed to protect the animal population now being slaughtered for food requires a sharply reduced human population and needs educational input on its advantages and morality. It is good for one’s own health and for the animals, among which we ought to be highest in all ways.

Beverage: Soup, juice and soda give little nutrition and are bad habit. Tea or especially coffee is useful to keep alert and motivated and as appetite suppressor and no-calorie food substitute. Tea ought to be favored with coffee limited to time we need motivation. A 70⁰ C temperature at serving should be max for those who like food or drink “hot”; in mouth, 50-60⁰C temperature is satisfying without risk of esophageal cancer. And heat in Pyrex.

Our Bad Eating: All of us brought up in whatever Culture have been conditioned to “enjoy” bad habits. Even knowing what is good and what is bad for us, we still revert to bad habits. Eating and/or drinking what we know is bad should never cause us to give up healthy eating. Reverting to bad habit should not begin a binge. Always keep in view the goal of enjoying longest, happiest, healthiest life that one’s DNA, as well as Lady Luck can sustain, given some help from good health behavior. “Pick self up, brush self off, and continue the good eating and drinking program” is paraphrase of song lyric for us good-health freeks (sic).

Self-Experimental Approach to Eating: We each respond to food in same ways, but there is individual variation and changing need over lifetime. Milk is excellent for baby and growing child but gradually becomes bad for adult because of its fat. (Correct that by low fat, low Na [sodium] milk at supermarket) Egg is another example, being good for growing child but in adult having too high cholesterol at more than one egg day. So when I say a food is good, always reserve judgment pending self testing (Does it cause diarrhea? Does it make you feel bad after eating? Do blood tests show it may be elevating a chemical dangerously?). This is what I mean by “self-experimental approach”, which I take to life in general.

Pills or  Surgery for Weight Loss   For those who wish to try pills the following have been approved by the U.S. FDA as effective and safe: Orlistat (Xenical), 360 mg a day, blocks the digestion of fatty foods which pass through the GI tract and make bulky foul-smelling BMs.   Sibutramine (Meridian), 10-15 mg, a phenylethylamine SSNRI, a mild stimulant that depresses appetite.  Loraserine (Belviq), 10 mg, is selective serotonin agonist that depresses appetite,. And Phentermine-Topiramate (Qsymia), 3.75-15 mg Ph. & 23-92 To is a combination appetite depressant and anti-impulse pill.  The pill should be used as long as it produces weekly weight loss and then tapered off with care to control return of appetite or other sign of overeating.

            Surgery is now being advised for BMI>40 or >35 plus medical complication from the obesity. The most used is gastric banding by laparoscopy, which creates a smaller stomach volume and speeds satiety, limiting food intake. 

 

Endnotes: Points of restaurant eating and from convenience store are: 1) buying for lowest price and/or lowest calories, 2) splitting the single portion, 3) single-item ordering for a dinner (Low calorie, cheapest), 4) if choice, get smallest portion,  5) vegetable is better than animal meat, and 6) drink pure water instead of calorie beverage. 

End-end-notes   

Lowest calorie (in Japan 198 Kcalorie) Light Cup Noodle is a good main course eating to lose healthy weight. Why? Because with the small volume, low-calorie serving, in a very tasty format it knocks out appetite for several hours.

Uncontrolled Crazy Appetite: After 40 years of succeeding at losing weight during which my BMI dropped from then 24 to now 17, I am experiencing sprees of what I call crazy appetite. For example, I indulge in pancakes and sausage breakfast, or a steak & potato dinner, or a strawberry and ice cream parfait desert after a long time going without the food and then it seems I cannot stop repeating; it has become almost obsessive-compulsive. I think I have figured it out. There are two stimuli to appetite: one`s blood glucose and one`s imagination, which is part of the psyche, or mind and emanates from the brain and is under the control of the appetite center aka appestat in the hypothalamus at the base of the brain. The appestat seems to have an idea of what one's body weight should be and by means of secreting its hormones it keeps one at that weight (i.e., if one goes below it, the appestat stimulates appetite until it gets the weight back to its imagined normality and vice-versa).  I guess in my case, my appestat has my normal weight around 65 to 70 kg (BMI c.19) and the present BMI 17, (body weight 50 to 55) is too low for it so I get runs of crazy appetite. The question is: how to change my appestat's setting?  Crazy appetite may be caused by a medication you are taking. Check it by stopping for a week with doctor permission.

To continue now, click 2.3 More on Eating Healthily