Hey y’all.
Newbie to this forum, but I’ve been doing low carb and keto on and off since 2009.
In April of 2009 I got laid off from my job. I was depressed and seriously overweight at around 420 pounds. I say around, because my scale only went up to 400 officially. It just said ERR when I stepped on it until I got down to around 410.
I started going to the gym every day and doing two hours of cardio. I also started to eat a standard low fat type diet. The weight dropped off pretty quickly for a while. I got down to 370 or so in 4 or 5 months. But it was harder and harder to keep it up. I started stopping by the store on the way home from the gym and gorging on candy. Weight loss slowed down considerably and I was always exhausted.
Then in September 2009, a friend said “have you tried the paleo diet?” I had never heard of it, so I checked out a couple of the web links he sent me and decided to give it a try. I went very low carb paleo and suddenly everything was easy again. Weight started dropping off again and I no longer had to weigh and measure anything. It was awesome. I got down to 270 pounds, but that was where it stopped. I started to regain weight. I’d tweak something in my diet and maybe lose a few pounds again, but the overall trend was up. Soon I was back to 300 pounds.
I stayed around 300-310 for a long time. I’d lose a few pounds, gain a few pounds, but generally stay in that range. Given where I started, I was quite happy at that weight. I’ve got a lot of lean body mass, around 190 pounds. So 300 was still a lot to be carrying around, but at least my back and knees didn’t ache all the time anymore.
So this was around 2012 or so. I continued to tweak my diet and exercise and continued to gain and lose the same 15 or 20 pounds over and over. Then last fall, I stepped on the scale and I was back up to 340 pounds. Ugh. I panicked. I read about Penn Gillete losing a ton of weight eating only potatoes. I decided to give it a try. I kept it up for about 3 weeks and I lost about 30 pounds. But I could not keep it up. I tried it again a couple months later and didn’t even last 2 weeks. Eating potatoes with no fat and little seasoning is VERY boring.
By this time I had become convinced that the years of eating very low carb had ruined my gut bacteria. When I tried to go keto, it would never register any on the urine test strips and would only be very minimal on the blood tests.
Then about a month ago, a friend was doing a 2 day fast. He had been doing keto for a while, and seeing some success, but kept falling off the wagon and gorging on carbs whenever he got stressed out. He said the fast was pretty easy and just not eating anything was actually relaxing.
I had done intermittent fasting and had some success with it, but I had never fasted for more than 24 hours. I decided to try a two day fast. And it was easy. It wasn’t a full fast, I had some MCT oil and HWC with my coffee a couple of times a day. But I went 55 hours without eating, lost about 8 pounds and felt great. Since then I have done another fast, 61 hours this time. My ketone blood tests are generally showing > 1.0 mmol/dl, a number I was never hitting before I started fasting.
I’m using the feast/fast/feast plan and it’s really working. Reading everyone’s stories here really helps, so thank you all for being here and trying all sorts of crazy things and finding what works. I’m starting to think I can get back down under 300 again and stay there.
