Intermittent Fasting Slow Carb Diet Mashup

Ever since my late 30’s and early 40’s, I have been fiddling with a different diet every few months to see what works for me and which ones I have the highest likelihood of sticking with for longer than a week or two.

Initially the biggest dietary change I made away from the standard American way of eating which included all sorts of seed oils, fast food and highly processed highly palatable products, was learning how destructive those highly processed foods were and what a large percentage of my daily caloric input was actually made up of “food” that I now work very hard to avoid having in my house.

Once I set myself straight and realized that fast food restaurants were out from my everyday options, along with the daily consumption of crackers, bread, ice cream, cereal, packaged snacks and the like, then it was time to really figure out what that means each and every day.

Do I think that I want to give up pizza, bread or ice cream forever in order to hopefully live a cleaner healthier life?  Nope, not a realistic option.  At the same time, do I want to gain a little weight each and every year and become physically impaired and unhealthy by the time I might expect to become a grandparent or sooner?  Again, a big no.

Eating the very foods that I know, on an intellectual level, are not good for me brings me a certain amount of joy.  The actual act of eating real-deal ice cream or a warm loaf of bread from the oven, I find to be delightful.  In addition, I enjoy cooking for my friends and family, and I don’t like feeling overly constrained when hosting a dinner party or checking to see who is on a diet or not.

The smiles and compliments I receive when pulling fresh dinner rolls out of the oven when my relatives are visiting means that I am going to continue to cheat and eat bread, and pasta, pan roasted potatoes and even cheesecake, at least every now and then.

But I also realize it can’t all be dinner rolls and cake either!  I enjoy being physically fit and capable of walking without pain, running and playing sports if and when I choose to.  Which means I must balance two somewhat exclusionary ideas in my life at the same time.

First, I can’t eat everything I want, whenever I want to eat it.  If I do, and I’ve tried this in the past, I will gain weight.  A lot.  And quickly!  And Secondly, I need to leave room in my diet to eat whatever I want, and not be too scheduled, if I am going to have any realistic chance at long term success.

As a high school and college athlete, I grew up accustomed to eating whatever tempted me, as often as I wanted, whenever I wanted, with zero negative (apparent) consequences.

And soon after getting married I started taking a few cooking classes, and kinda took to it.  I learned how to make fresh bread, and fresh pasta.  Both delicious, but the weight started to add up.  Seriously, is it any wonder I started packing on a few pounds on the “all you can eat pasta and bread diet”?!

By the time my late 20’s or early 30’s rolled around, I was easily 20-30 pounds heavier than I was just five to 10 years earlier, hitting 200 on the scale, my heaviest weight ever.

At that point, I realized a few dietary changes were needed!

So I started looking at a few different approaches to eating.  I’ve never dabbled in veganism or vegetarianism, and I can’t imagine I ever will, but in the years since I first hit 200 on the scale, I have probably read about or tried just about every “diet” or approach to eating that you can think of.

And here’s what I’ve settled on, for now, as I pass 50 years old, and 20 years removed from 200 lbs…

I have combined my favorite parts of Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet, made famous in his 4-Hour Body book, with parts of an Intermittent Fasting diet, plus a few rules for myself and minus the extras that seem to get in the way of living a happy and less stressful life, and have found a working diet in which I can reliably lose weight when needed and still allow myself the freedom to eat all those foods that I love so much that I know are so bad for me!

Some people call it Flexible Eating or Flexible Dieting, but I call it common sense. In the end, if I want to lose weight and get into better shape I need to eat less and move more. Sorry, truth hurts. All of these diet schemes are really just trying to trick us into eating fewer calories than we are used to, and I have found the way that is easiest for me to trick myself.

First, here are Tim’s basic rules for his Slow Carb Diet, you’ll notice that highly refined foods are nowhere to be found…

1. Avoid white starchy carbohydrates
2. Eat the same meals over and over (and over and over)
3. Don’t drink your calories
4. Don’t eat fruit
5. Take one day off each week and eat whatever you want

And just as quickly, here are my complaints with this approach…

1. I don’t like eating the same meal over and over
2. I very much enjoy drinking some of my calories
3. I like to eat fruit
4. There are no constraints on how much food to eat
5. A wild eat fest or cheat day is included

That last two items are my biggest concerns, and are the same issues I’ve had with many dietary approaches in the past.  It’s great if I clean up my diet and eat only the most nutritious and healthiest of foods, but if I still consume 3500 calories a day with no regard to how it affects my body, and then sit around watching tv or working on my computer without visiting a gym every now and then, guess what?  I’m going to gain weight!

And if I do all sorts of good work during the week and lose a pound or two, only to eat so much garbage on the weekend to undo all of that hard work, what is the point?

I need some kind of control in place, to protect me from myself.  And measuring everything out to the gram is not the approach I’m looking for.  I don’t want to have to carry a scale with me at every meal for the rest of my life, to cross reference a macro-nutrient table to figure out if I am eating appropriately.  I want a fairly reliable system that just feels right and that gets the job done.

And if I can learn a little bit more about biology and physiology while I’m at it, that would be even better!

Trying to balance all of my concerns reminded me of a short book I had read years ago by Brad Pilon, when I first read about intermittent fasting.  He’s completely shredded and looks great, but I didn’t really buy what he was selling, until years after first reading his book and blog posts.  A few days each week, he barely eats, maybe 500-600 calories all day or not at all, and the other days, he eats like a champ.  Fun to read, but I didn’t see how that would apply to my life.  And I made sure it didn’t, for years and years. I’m still pretty good at avoiding those 500 calorie days!

But more recently I listened to an episode from Peter Attia’s podcast featuring Dr Jason Fung and his view on Intermittent Fasting and how the simple act of choosing not to eat for short periods of time can be extremely beneficial for most people.  And for whatever reason, this time around, it made a bit more sense to me. Not 100%, but more sense.

Dr Fung explained that when we eat, we start putting that food to work to provide energy to the body.  And in today’s society, before our internal systems are even done working on the food we ate earlier, we are back at it, snacking or eating a full meal.  And again, and again…

We no longer give our bodies a chance to not be full, not to be actively fed.  We never let ourselves get hungry.  But humans are designed to function quite well with long periods of being fasted instead of always being fed.

And here’s the explanation that made the most sense to me:  when we eat, we increase the glucose levels in our blood, which triggers insulin to rise to put the glucose somewhere safe, somewhere besides our blood stream.  If we keep eating all the time, then we are keeping our insulin levels high, and high insulin levels prevent our bodies from accessing our fat stores for energy.

Which means if we want to lose fat, if we want our bodies to use our stored fat cells to supply our body with energy, we have to allow for periods of not eating, of allowing our insulin to drop to baseline, which means less frequent eating! Intermittent. Fasting. Don’t eat all the time!

There are also plenty of people who think Dr. Fung is full of it and doesn’t know what he is talking about, see Layne Norton’s response to Dr. Fung here, and I don’t know enough to weigh in on the validity of all of the nutritional cycles discussed, but it seems to me to always come down to the basics… eat the right amount of the right types of food, and move more!

There are many different varieties of intermittent fasting, but they all have one thing in common… you occasionally don’t eat for longer periods of time that modern society has told you is normal. Again, like all other diet formats, this seems to be coming back to eating fewer calories each day. But saying that doesn’t sell very well.

For instance, some people try to eat only between noon and 8:00 pm, thereby “fasting” 16 hours each day and eating only within their self imposed 8 hour window.  Others might follow a 20-4 schedule.  Or a dinner to dinner routine, where you fast almost 24 hours in between dinner a few nights a week, and then eat “normally” the other days of the week.

But there’s more to intermittent fasting, according to a few researchers. It turns out that many studies, or at least many people reporting on many studies, have written about how restricted eating actually leads to many health benefits, such as longevity, mental clarity, stress resistance and insulin stability… all good things in my book!

I have not yet attempted a mulit-day fast, but holding off on a meal until lunch sounds very reasonable, and has been pretty easy to incorporate into my daily routine.  And if I find myself looking to lose a few pounds, I may try to get a little bit more aggressive and actually fast dinner to dinner once or twice in a week, as this tends to gets the scale moving a little quicker and is pretty easy to integrate into a family schedule. But a dinner to dinner fast is not something I enjoy and try to avoid as much as possible. Which is most of the time.

I may still go for a coffee in the morning a few days each week (less and less as each week goes by) usually without sugar, using monk fruit as my sweetener of choice, and just a little bit of cream or half and half.

Doesn’t the dairy count as calories, which means I’m not literally fasting anymore?  Yes it does.  But not by much, so it’s good enough for me.  And when I want to be stricter, it is fairly easy to skip the coffee, and conform to a true fast until I decide to eat a meal.

When lunch time rolls around, I borrow one of Tim’s Slow Carb Diet rules and try to eat meals I’ve had before.  Not because eating the same meal repeatedly is healthier for me, but rather because I know I won’t overeat if I choose only restaurants that provide portion control as part of their menu.

For me, that means that I alternate between Chipotle, or something similar, or a taco stand.  In both cases, I skip the tortillas, and end up with a meal consisting of protein, vegetables, guacamole and whatever salsas I’m in the mood for.

But taking Dr Fung’s and Peter Attia’s advice to heart I have cut snacks out of my daily routine. It has become more important to me that I allow my glucose and insulin levels to fall to baseline than it is to mindlessly snack on something I found in the fridge every few hours. Plus, I know that dinner is only a few hours away.

Lately I’ve been cooking at home six nights a week, with dinner out on Saturday nights.  At home, we avoid breads and grains, and focus on having a quality protein with two or three vegetable options each night.  But each night is different, I am ill suited to cooking, or eating, the same dinner night after night.

For example, a somewhat typical dinner might entail blackened fish, probably a local black drum, fresh guacamole, roasted squash, arugula or some other greens, and an avocado oil vinaigrette that I made earlier in the week.

And then no dessert. Well, no sugar desserts. In a departure from the Low Carb Diet, I sometimes have a piece of fruit in the evening. Like blueberries, or maybe a little bit of chocolate. And now that I live in Georgia, peaches are in the mix. But that’s it. No eating again until lunch or dinner the next day.

To summarize, here are my completely made up rules for this phase of my dieting journey, which I call my Intermittent Fasting And Slow Carb Diet Mashup:

1. I don’t eat between 8:00 pm and noon the following day, most days
2. Once a week, I don’t eat between dinner one night and the next
3. An occasional coffee is ok in the morning with limited cream and sweeteners
4. Small to medium sized lunch, quality protein and veggies, no processed food
5. No snacking
6. Full sized dinner, quality protein and veggies, no processed food, eat to comfortably full
7. High quality carbs are ok for me, few potatoes, small portion of rice, even homemade pasta, which I make with Einkorn flour avoiding over processed modern wheat
8. Feeling hungry before meals is a good sign
9. Weigh myself frequently and adjust food quantities and meal timing as needed
10. On holidays, special events and vacation, I throw all the rules out the window, and willingly pay the price when I get back on track.

Even with all of these rules laid out, I will state that this method is not my most effective weight loss strategy, but I can make it fit very well into my family’s daily routine and sometimes it is just easier to go along to get along.

As I get older, I find that I cannot attack Saturday quite as aggressively as I have in years past, and so my “cheat day” philosophy has evolved.  Part of my reasoning is that I would like to drop a little bit of body fat and my overly carb and calorie centric Saturdays were not helping me on that front.  When I push my cheat day consumption, I am simply eating too much food to lean out.

I no longer recover from my huge cheat day as quickly as I used to, and I find that I can not lose weight eating that way.  As I continue to learn, I now realize that my previous cheat day behaviors were spiking my glucose and insulin levels all day, mandating that my body store everything that I ate as fat.

And probably as or more importantly, it was too many calories. In short, I was eating too much of the wrong kinds of food at the wrong times.  Not a winning strategy.

So as I continue to modify my dietary habits, I will continue to eat regularly forbidden foods on Saturdays, or holidays, but just not as much of it.  Instead of a breakfast, huge lunch, huge snack, huge dinner and then dessert, I have found comfort starting with a coffee in the morning, a good sized lunch, small snack if any at all, then a relatively large dinner and dessert, and those changes have produced very stable and satisfactory results!

But my cheat day is (ideally) only on the weekend!  And a full day of cheating is really too much, for me, as I get older.  My one day of debauchery has turned into one or two cheat meals over the course of the week, and responsible eating the rest of the week.

Having said that, I still allow myself the flexibility of being able to throw a less than ideal meal in anytime I want.  For instance, if I go out to dinner with friends during the week, or have guests over, I am going to loosen up my rules.  But then I’ll snap back to it with a little fast until the next day’s dinner, or a few days of super clean eating.

One other point I’d like to make is when I feel the need to lose a few pounds, perhaps after vacation or a bad week or month where I haven’t eaten properly and really strayed from my preferred diet, I change up my routine a little.  I still skip breakfast most days, but try to skip lunch as well, eating only when it is time for a normal sized dinner.  I won’t fast dinner to dinner every day, but more often than before, until I achieve whatever goal I am shooting for.

I’ll also dump my cheat meals until I reach my desired weight or body fat percentage.  It is simply too disheartening to lose two pounds during the week to blow it all up in one day of crazy eating, and start the next week even heavier than I was!

Here is a pretty detailed record of a recent week of my eating after coming home from a five day vacation with my family where I absolutely ate whatever I wanted, including margaritas, tortilla chips and desserts!  You will see that even in a correction week, I still managed to sneak a few treats and cheats here and there, and still lost a few pounds!

Again, the main point here is not necessarily how long I go in between eating any calories, but rather that this is simply one tool that I can use to reduce the number of calories that I eat on a daily basis. By tracking food intake off and on over the past however many years I know pretty well how many calories I need to limit myself to when I want to drop a little weight. And intermittent fasting can help me with that goal.

Saturday night – first night back from vacation – 175.2 lbs

Sunday morning – 173.2
cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
11:00 am – two breakfast tacos without tortillas
small tomato and radish salad
handful pistachios
vitamins
6:00 pm – fish fillet with tomatilla salsa for dinner with asparagus and small serving of homemade pasta
whipped cream
Sunday evening – 173.2

Monday morning – 172.2
cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
8:00 am – yogurt with granola
hard workout at gym
chicken stock, handful pistachios, salami and cheese
cheese and crackers before dinner, vitamins
6:00 pm – steak, big salad with beets, greens, dressing and mashed cauliflower
dark chocolate and whipped cream
Monday evening – 174.0

Tuesday morning – 172.2
cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
vitamins
fast until dinner – from 8:00 pm night before to 6:00 pm dinner – 22 hour fast
chicken stock, chicken, large salad with dressing, snap peas, one potato wedge
dark chocolate and whipped cream
Tuesday evening – 172.8

Wednesday morning – 170.8
cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
vitamins
hard workout at gym
noon – handful of pistachios, two hard boiled eggs with a little olive oil, cheese and salami
Early dinner at Chipotle – no tortilla, served in a bowl, a little white rice, few black beans, chicken, tomato salsa, medium salsa and guacomole
stop eating by 5:30 pm
Wednesday evening – 173

Thursday morning -170.8
cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
no lunch – glassblowing studio, excessive sweating and water loss, I know I’ll lose weight today and gain it back later
late afternoon salami snack tray
Vitamins
Pistachios
6:00 – Salmon with tomatillo sauce, salad, cauliflower
Chocolate
Thursday evening – 169.0

Friday morning – 168.4
Cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
Gym
noon – 3 tacos with avocado, no tortilla
Late afternoon snack on bacon
Vitamins
6:00 pm – Indian cuisine at local restaurant, bread and rice
Ice cream out with waffle cone
Friday evening – 172.2

Saturday morning – 170.6
Cold brew with a little cream and sweetener
8:00 am – Homemade buttermilk biscuit made with Einkorn flour
Two scrambled eggs
Late afternoon snack – bacon and two boiled eggs
6:00 pm – Large salad with pulled pork, dressing, boiled egg, tomatoes and goat cheese
8:00 pm – Movie snack – peanut M&M’s (yikes!)
Saturday evening -172.2

Sunday morning – 170.4