It’s time to check in on your measurements and assess how you are doing.  No matter what you should be feeling great, but we all have a need to measure results.  If you are not seeing the results you hoped for, then go back to your tracker and analyse what you are eating.  How much protein are you eating each day?  Is it too much, such that some of it is being converted to glucose and affecting your state of ketosis?  What about the carbs you are eating each day?  Is it consistently under 50 grams?  For most of us, that should be enough to keep us in ketosis but you may be different.  You may require less.  Try reducing it by 5 grams.  Give it at least a week to see if you see any change before reducing it further.  If you are consistently below 25 grams and you are not eating too much protein then, most likely, your total calorie intake is a little high.

I know the theory is that you should not need to count calories but, as I have mentioned before, most of us have a broken apistat which needs to heal before it is totally reliable and it needs help until that happens.  Take a look at your total calories.  If you are eating 2,200 calories a day on average, for example, then try reduce it to 2,000 for a week and, reduce it a further 200 after a week if you see no change.  You can make this reduction easily by reducing, slightly, the amount of fat in your diet. Since fat is so high in energy that a 200 calorie reduction is easy to achieve.  Just one handful (1 Oz) of Macadamia nuts, for example, will get you there.  You can normally sneak in a slight reduction in a few items to total 200 calories and you won’t even register a difference in your hunger.  Remember also, that a lot of what we perceive to be hunger is just our brains telling us we need to eat because we haven’t eaten nearly the volume of food in a day as we are used to eating.  Make sure you consider very carefully whether or not you are really hungry or just feel like you should be hungry because you haven’t eaten much food.  Remember, you are now eating very nutrient dense food and you have normally eaten more than enough without even realizing it.

You may also be one of those people who is extremely insulin resistant.  If you persist with this diet and keep tracking your intake and constantly tweaking things your level of insulin resistance will improve over time and you will eventually lose the weight you are looking to lose.  But there may be a way to kick start that process and increase the rate of improvement of your insulin resistance.  This is addressed towards the end of the next lesson when we talk about Therapeutic Fasting.

Last week, I introduced you to the concept and the benefits of Intermittent Fasting.  I gave some of you the option of dabbling with it a little yourself, but this week I am encouraging you all to really start to work on implementing it for real.  For some this may be a lengthy process depending, mainly, on how fixed your brain is on the concept of eating at least 3 times a day.  By now you should be well on your way to adaptation and therefore not driven any longer by constant hunger.  When I first started, I tried to push out the time I first ate until about 11 am.

I found myself waiting for 11 am to come around so that I could eat, but realized after a while that I was not actually hungry but just used to eating at breakfast. As soon as I worked out that I was not hungry I forgot about it and started to look up from my work at noon and think, “wow, I should probably get some lunch”.

It wasn’t long before I could go easily till 2 pm before I had lunch and I make sure I eat my last meal before 8 pm. Effectively I started to eat only twice a day and, even then, the evening meal is usually little more than a snack.  If I feel I needed something after that I make sure it is just fat; so a fat bomb, or some Keto Koffee or tea with Heavy Cream. This brings up the case of Keto Koffee in the morning as well.  It seems that you can have something like Tea or Coffee with butter or Heavy Cream in the morning without affecting the benefits of Intermittent Fasting.

Then, every now and then I will go a full 24 hours without eating (often without actually planning it) and so, that day, I just eat once.b It’s quite amazing to realize quite how easy it is and quite how beneficial it is.

For a lot of us, Intermittent Fasting is really just reverting to a more natural cycle of eating, just as we were designed to function a very long time ago.  However, some of us may choose (or need) to take this a step further.  This is where we start to look at the concept of Therapeutic Fasting.  While Intermittent Fasting has some incredible benefits and does allow your apistat to heal and insulin resistance to improve, some of us need more than that to heal totally.  This is where we take fasting to whole new level and we extend the fast beyond 24 hours, often over many days.  The video below by Dr. Jason Fung provides an introduction to fasting and, more importantly, to address fasting over many days in order to heal your metabolism and attack Obesity right where it hurts.

Dr. Fung is the world’s leading authority on Therapeutic Fasting and the real cause of Obesity.  His recent book, ‘The Obesity Code‘, is outstanding and provides great insights into the mechanisms of fasting and how to use it to heal your body and conquer Obesity.  I’m sure there were times when our ancestors went for many days without eating but if you are considering pushing your fasting window out beyond 24 hours to engage in real Therapeutic Fasting then I would highly recommend that you read Dr. Fung’s book and, especially if you are pregnant or suffering from any sort of ailment, that you consult your “Low Carb Friendly” doctor before embarking on this journey.

The bottom line is that we were never designed to eat 3 or more times a day and the closer we get back to eating the way we were designed to eat the better our bodies react and more our health benefits. For a lot of you this concept is difficult to get your head around. We have all been brainwashed so severely since the day we were born that it takes a lot to overcome those preconceived ideas.  Just take it one day at a time and introduce changes in very small steps.  If this is hard for you or you don’t feel like you can do it, start by try pushing your fasting window out by 15 minutes at a time.  If you normally have breakfast at 8 am, push it to 8:15 for a few days and then 8:30.  Over time you will be eating your first meal after 11 am without a problem.  Then you should not feel hungry till the evening and you can now have your second meal for supper in the evening.  Now you are down to 2 meals, brunch and dinner.  Very soon your life will no longer revolve around mealtimes and you will eat whenever you need to and not when society tries to tell you to eat.