Yay, Turtle! So glad it continues to work for you.

People in the LCHF world dislike CICO being shoved at them, BUT when we (older fatter females) try to say what works, or not, for us there is some disbelief.

Over in MFP moderators are creating 'challenges' to eat only fatty meat for 30 days..just because the moderator is successful at it.

I see comments from women of all ages/health/weight asking questions and are told YES this is exactly how it will work for you too. WTF? How do they know? MFP is a diet version of Facebook, a social construct.

I wish more of them would discover this site and educate themselves..for their own safety of health if nothing else.

In Dr. Bert Herring's Fast5 Facebook page i saw a video clip by a trainer who said MANY women do not do well on IF because they ARE women with a fully different chemistry. But when they try and fail they blame themselves, stay silent, and thus the real 'truth' that it does not work well for all is lost.

Expecting the same success of buff 26 year olds makes as much sense as forcing CICO on all. Bodybuilders are worshipped on their websites as the real nutrition experts! AND I have seen REAL scientists derided for being 'old and fat with bad hair' over and over…as unbelievable. The posters not realizing their youth, but not their stupidity, is fleeting.

The PHYSICAL healing that seems to occur with IF is reason enough to try it for anyone. I am happy to see women it works for in weight loss, hope i am one too.

Week 5 The Disaster

I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a mulligan for this past week. Things got completely out of hand. Just a disaster. It may even be that this experiment was over as of the four week mark. I’m not sure yet if it will go on. Kind of strange after last week when I thought things were going so well.

I had some digestive problems and decided that I needed to get more food, and specifically, more fiber, into my body. Once I started I couldn’t stop. My body said halleluiah, the famine is over, and I ate way, way too much for three straight days. Even assuming I now have regained control over my appetite, it’s a scary notion that this might happen again anytime I lower my guard.

The damage: gained back 5 lbs and my FBGs went right back to where they were before I started this. My FBG this morning was 113, and it's been that high for the last 3 days, even though yesterday was a below 800 calorie day.

That FBG is a real disappointment. I understand packing on quick pounds when I overeat, but why did the FBG go back up so quickly? Even if it soon returns to the 80s, I can’t understand why it shot up so high in so little time. I did eat way too much, and too many carbs, but there was no sugary junk food. No cake or cookies or that sort of thing. Surely those regained pounds didn’t all go directly to my liver and clog things up again. Surely I didn’t eat so much in those three days that it’s all still floating around in my bloodstream.

Seems to me there’s some kind of setpoint in evidence here, with my body happily going right back to the blood sugar levels it had before the 4 weeks of strict dieting. Of course, I realized all along that going back to old, bad ways of eating would probably raise my FBG, but I didn't think it would happen in just a few days. Will it do the same at the end of another 4 weeks of very low calories, even if I manage to raise my calorie levels gently at that time, and not in a complete blowout? I just don’t know.

One good sign, I guess, is that it did take 3 days of overeating to send the FBG that high. A one day binge raised it, but only a little, so maybe I could have gotten away with that one day of excessive eating.

Maybe this is a part of the experiment. After 4 good weeks, and my blood sugars doing so well, I learned that I can quickly end up right back where I started. Now I can see if another few weeks makes a more permanent change. After that, it would also be interesting to know if I could get away with that occasional one bad day without affecting my FBG too badly.

I’ll see how it goes for the next few days before deciding if this is still an experiment. If it is, I'll just count this week as a kind of hiatus, and do four more weeks starting from now.

Seeing this in another thread made me wonder if this isn't the problem. If you take a person with a previous metabolic rate of 2400 calories, and drop them to 800--there'll probably be some slow-down, but still a thousand calorie deficit or more. Somebody who doesn't lose at 1400 calories wouldn't end up with nearly as significant a deficit at 800 calories.

I think this is a problem for most everyone eating a very low calorie diet. There is this rebound effect where hunger is greatly increased. What I wondered about Taylor's protocol was if the short term success people experienced could be easily translated into a long term effect. My guess would be probably not unless you ate low carb and maybe intermittent fasting as well. If that's the case why not just eat low carb and do IF and omit the 800 calories a day. Jason Fung says that his protocol does what bariatric surgery does without the negative effects of surgery. Taylor says that eating 800 calories a day does what bariatric surgery does without the surgery. The difference, it seems to me, is that Fung's protocol is sustainable while Taylor's is not, or at least it would not be for me.

Yeah, well, this 4 week experiment is at an end. I can't get restarted at this at all.


To be honest, it's not really that I can't lose at all at 1400 calories per day; it's that I aim for 1400 or 1500 and end up eating 1800 or 1900, or I stay at 1500 day after day, lose a tiny amount, and then regain that small amount over a weekend of eating too much. That's why this very low calorie plan seemed so great, since I was losing much, much faster than I can usually manage, and for a while it seemed so darned easy. The IF kept the hungries at bay.

It will still be a net win, weight loss wise, if I can just keep from regaining it all. On the other hand, if I did lose some fat from my liver and pancreas, as Taylor says will happen, it was obviously not enough in my case to make a permanent change for my blood sugars. Maybe it would have been different if I could have managed the full 8 weeks.

Turtle, gurl I do understand…..often I think that NOT knowing a thing about all this science, as people didnt 100 years ago, might be a lot easier on us, and easier to lose weight with less focus. some days my brain spins from so many Pubmed studies i've read and saved in tidy topics.

For a semi-laugh please consider a modern for the masses FIVE BITE diet. this IDEA is actually great for a very short term weight loss, as it is semi starvation,and only for 2 weeks.

Personally I am very interested in trying this with MY version of the 5 bites of nutrition daily.

Now DONT KILL ME for showing this..Look thru the silliness SHOWN and consider the actual thinking of the diet. It is fasting..it is short term, and controlled, on the principle you can't kill yourself with it.

you eat ONLY 5 bites, or sips, 2x a day..which is 500-600 calories..and lots of water, and then stop, go back to a healthy diet. (whatever that is)

IF you can tolerate the absolute self centered ass of a host interviewer, and LISTEN to what the MD is saying..get what value you can. The biggest MISTAKE we will see is showing a Snickers bar as the example of what 5 bites are!! but for the desperate chubby masses who see this, eating a candy bar twice a day sounds logical if they can lose 20 lbs quick.

Have fun- The Gregory Mantell Show -- The Five Bite Diet
Dr. Al Lewis is author of "Why Weight Around?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW7Er0kti_U

Turtle, I know this is belated, but I'm catching up on lots of old threads I never saw the first time around. I was curious about the Newcastle protocol as well and had toyed with the idea of trying it.

But in the meantime Dr. Fung claims to be getting similar results, and his plan seemed more sustainable to me, even for a lifetime. Dr. Fung claims that limited calorie eating eventually slows the metabolism, but that actual fasting does not, and even revs up the metabolism! I'd also heard here and there that shaking up calorie intake between higher and lower also keeps the body guessing and the metabolism revved up. Instinctively I liked the idea of fasting and "feasting". So I'm trying his plan now, incorporating about 3 24-hour fasts per week, and eating "normally" the other days. Have a few days a week to eat as I choose without worrying about calories is feeling good so far, ,and I have lost 15 pounds at this point - to hit a weight I have not seen since 2012.

On the eating days I still eat in a restricted 4-6 hour window - usually with a meal about 12-1 PM, another at about 6 PM, possibly a snack in-between.

My pattern currently is:
1)"Normal Day" (yesterday "normal" first meal at 1 PM was a cheese omelet with grilled tomato, garlic and onion, coffee with heavy cream and some coconut oil) ... snack of peanut butter mixed with some whipping cream, and a dash of Candian Sugar Twin, dinner at 6 PM was a chicken sausage sauteed in coconut oil with some fresh spinach, and some full-fat Greek yogurt). After dinner no more food.
2) Fasting day ... starts with black coffee, then nothing but water, maybe tea, during the day. Then about 6 PM a tiny (300-400 calories) meal.
3) Eating day again, trying to hold off until noon st least before eating.

I don't think I overeat on the eating days, but I admit I don't count calories and that is a blessing as I hate to do that. My BG has been bad this past year and is STILL bad, but coming down quite a bit so far with this eating plan.

I think about those women who could not lose any weight on a sustained 700-calorie diet, and I really wonder what their results would have been if they had fasted with 0 calories for one day, and then eaten 1400 calories on the other day. It still would have been an average of 700 a day, but 1400 is enough to eat in a fairly "normal" fashion and not feel deprived, whereas I don't think 700 is. And fasting completely gets easier the more often you do it.

Hmm, that would be a really interesting study: two metabolically resistant groups - put one on a sustained 700-calorie diet, and the other on an alternate of 0 calories/1400 calories. Best would be in the food was identical, but one group got to eat all the food one day and none the next, whereas the other group would eat half the amount every day. Too bad no one will ever get funding for something like that! Though Dr. Johnson, in his book, says that the alternate day method yields far better health outcomes - for mice!

Dr. Eades in one of his books talked about a patient who lost weight on a LC diet but could only maintain her loss if she didn't exceed 1000 calories a day, which just felt so deprivational to her. So she ended up alternating, so that one day she ate only 500 calories,and the alternate day she ate 1500 which allowed her to feel like she could eat like a more normal person on those days. Still and average of 1000 a day and she maintained.

Hah! Very much like Fung, JUDDD, 5:2, etc. At any rate I'm trying to give Fung and alternate day fasting a good try as it seems sustainable long-term, as Newcastle doesn't.