JEY, Liz shared with me the links to Dr. Fung's site and I have joined the ranks of fasters. I haven't read all the pages in this thread but I have skimmed a few and read your first post.

Thank you for sharing this. I've watched two videos and have read blog entries. It makes perfect sense to me. I'm in! (I'm going to have to re-read Liz's explanation on following the order of videos and articles. And I'll have to look to see what the cloud thingy is.)

I also agree with not saying a word about fasting or what one is eating. It is so much easier to keep mum. SO much easier.

Question: I saw whole milk and cream on the list of acceptables but not half & half. Any thoughts?

JEY, I've missed you terribly elsewhere. We all do. And I thought of you on your birthday in February. I know it's past but I wished you a good one anyway.

So.....let the fasting begin!

Oh my, it's Blue! Missed you too. Hope all is well "up north". My goddaughter already graduated from HS in Middleburg this spring, so no more driving through your area. Now we head down to Charleston for college… happy she picks schools in all the best towns to visit.

After four years, and with only general food guidelines from Dr. Fung, I still mostly follow Dr. Westman's food list. Really only adding more and higher carb vegetables and a little hummus. Lentils were tasteless and decided I can fast without those starches. Bleh. I often use almond or coconut milk in coffee, but if have run out or am in a coffee shop, it's half and half, which is just a combo of milk & cream anyway, and OK with Dr. W.

There is a "best of" Dr. Fung's lectures on Reddit; another way to get the basic concepts in 50 minutes. http://www.reddit.com/r/keto/commen...ghlight_videos/
All the Patient Resources on his website were most helpful in the beginning. Good luck, just do what you can, ease into it and we'll see you around

Congrats to your goddaughter and glad she picked such a visitor friendly location. Great place!

Thanks for the "best of" link. I started those today. This feels right to me. There were a couple of times midday that it got a little rough, but I told myself this is to heal my body, to get my hormones back in balance. That seemed to help!

You know me, if something sounds whacky to me I say so. It's one of my charms. But this sounds right to me which is why I'm enthusiastic about doing it. All the methods to "rev up the metabolism" have failed miserably with me and now I know it isn't me but the method!

I pre-ordered Jimmy Moore's and Eric Westman's new book a couple of weeks ago. It should be released next week. Can't wait to read it.

Well I decided to jump in with both feet even before having a chance to read anything - and finished my first 24-hour fast yesterday. It wasn't really that hard.

I had dinner at 6:30 PM the night before. Then yesterday I postponed my morning coffee until about 9 AM, then had two cups each with 1T of cream and 1T of coconut oil. I'm usually not very hungry in the morning anyway, so that held me well through the morning, but my noontime I decided I needed to get out of the house.

As mentioned, I'm up in very rural Canada on vacation right now. One of my hobbies is birdwatching, so I grabbed camera and binocs and went out to the Beaubassin Field Station run by Acadia University - situated in the Tantramar Marsh on the edge of the Bay of Fundy. The weather was glorious, and I spent a lovely hour there looking for birds. They I popped into the "big city" of Amherst, Nova Scotia to go to the grocery store - 40 minutes from my place but a much better selection than the little local stores. The Sobey's there even has a nice Natural Foods section.

So there I found apple cider vinegar - though it only came in a giant 945ML bottle which I'll never be able to use a fraction of before I have to leave here. I realized I wasn't even sure when to take ACV, how much, etc. I looked at the teeny entry for vinegar in the Tag Cloud but it didn't say much other than use it for salad dressings, which I'll never do as I loathe vinegary salad dressings - I guess I have to go back and read the whole thread again since I remember reading about it here. There was nothing in the "what to eat" page I copied from the Fung website either.

Hmm, I also bought some flaxmeal, some ground chia seed, some natural peanut butter, coconut cream, beef broth. By the time I got to the store about 1:30 PM the sight of all the food began giving me hunger pangs. You know they say never to grocery shop when you are hungry! But I tried to stick to a few things I remembered from the Fung lists. They also had black rice there which I'd never heard of until this thread, and even though it's an "occasional" food I bought some just for the novelty of a new item.

Took the back roads home which takes longer than the highway - stopped at the Tidnish Bridge Art Gallery to talk about some pottery I'm making for a class I'm taking there - then went on to do some birding again at the Tidnish Dock Provincial Park, then in Baie Verte, New Brunswick.

It was 4 PM by the time I reached home, and the day was still glorious, so I put on my boots and walked out to my fields to pick blueberries. I got about a 1/3 of a cup before backache set in so got back around 4:30. By then it was 22 hours fasting so I knew it would be easy peasy as my hunger pangs had vanished after leaving the grocery store.

I just had some sparkling water, and about 5:30 began to cook up some black rice. For dinner I had a veggie stir-fry (snow peas, mushrooms, a bit of onion, and garlic scapes) with a chopped up Blue Goose humanely-raised certified chicken sausage and some chopped almonds and chia seeds - melted a bit of coconut cream and peanut butter to mix into the stir-fry, and had over about a 1/3 cup of black rice. Dinner was 7 PM, and had a cup of my hibiscus tea with it.

I was up about *four times* during the night to pee though! Is this plan a diuretic? Breakfast about 9 AM this morning - flaxmeal/chiameal pancakes topped with fresh butter, cinnamon, and the blueberries, and two cups of black coffee. I had the coffee black as I cooked the pancakes in coconut oil, and cream was part of their ingredients. Almost noon now and I still feel as full as can be.

Yesterday's fast was so easy I hope tomorrow's will be as well, and need to read more now to see what I should do with ACV, beef broth, etc.

Maybe because he is Canadian? Half-and-half doesn't seem to be a Canadian concept. When I shop up here I find "blend cream" (10% butterfat), "cereal cream" (12% butterfat - about the same as half-and-half), "coffee cream" (18% butterfat), and then whipping cream. So from a Canadian standpoint perhaps he lumps all those together as "cream" - all higher in fat than whole milk. So if he thinks whole milk is okay then I guess any of the above would be too, depending on personal tastes or reactions.

Wow Merpig, what a wonderful day you had! All those areas sound absolutely beautiful.

Did you read all these resources? http://intensivedietarymanagement.c...ient-resources/

The beef broth is anytime you are hungry during the fast, something hot to drink may feel "like a meal". I have yet to see specifics on vinegar except here in the guidelines it lists 1T in 1c of water. I have been taking that right before any big meal. There is also a study, and people mention this on other diabetic sites, to also take 2T in water before bedtime and your morning FBG will be lower. I haven't been able to hack that yet. Drinking vinegar when I just want to go to sleep? Blech. Depends how desperate you are to lower FBG.

I lost about five "fluffy" off the LC Ranch pounds the first week...four were water, and I know that for the same reason!

Thanks, yes I had seen and read these, but of course could not remember anything that was in them by the time I got to the store! And when I finally got home it was so close to the end of my 24-hour fast I decided I would just wait and reread again before my next fast day. Alas up here in the wilds I don't have a printer as it would be nice to print out the guidelines so I could access them easily even when I'm not on my laptop.

And of course now I read that he says "no boxed broths" which of course is what I bought, not having any easy way to make real bone broths up here. But it's all organic 'real" ingredients with no bizarre unpronounceable ingredients, so I'm not going to fret that very much. stuff like organic beef, organic onion, organic garlic, sea salt, etc.

Anyway I'll read some of the blog posts - but it's another glorious day and I'm on vacation, so do want to get doing other things as well!

Debbie, he talks about ACV on his April 10, 2014 post, titled 'Why you should eat carbs with fat, fibre and vinegar'.
I am slowly going thru each post, and I just read that yesterday.
I don't like vinegar, and since I don't eat carbs, I have concluded I can skip it. Just as I skip fibre.
I am a bit envious of you, having no trouble fasting; it is quite the struggle for me, I feel totally yuck.
It may be that I don't eat much, even on non-fasting days; or it may be that I don't eat carbs. Maybe I don't need the fast at all, and my body is telling me just that. I don't know. Still working on it.
Have a wonderful vacation in our beautiful Eastern Canada. I lived in PEI in the eighties, loved it.

Do you have to do alternate day fasting on this regime, is this important, or would daily 23 hour fasts be acceptable?

It appeared that alternate day calorie levels were important to maintain metabolism (versus continuous calorie restriction) yet he also writes this in What to Expect:

Thanks for the response Janet

I wondered about that too. Also, does anyone know if one has to test blood sugars if they are not diabetic? Is it something a non-diabetic would do to check progress?

I'm not diabetic, but test blood sugars periodically to gauge how certain foods affect my blood glucose. And if I do venture into diabetic territory, I want to be the first to know.

However, Dr Fung's emphasis on insulin rather than blood sugar is making me call this practice into question a bit. If glycemic and insulin indexes only correlate 23% of the time, how useful is that information? In fact, if blood sugar is up, can I assume insulin might be down? Or is it up and my body is simply resistant to it? If blood sugar is down, is it because insulin is up? Now I want a home insulin test.

I've had high insulin for years, and much of the time quite low blood glucose (reactive hypoglycaemia), it's drifted up over the years as I've become more and more insulin resistant.

so no, BG is not a good way to monitor insulin - though even when my BG was normal, I always knew my insulin was still high because I don't get post meal BG rises - mine always falls, regardless of what I eat. But I think I'm an unusual case.

And I have sort of the opposite problem. My HgbA1c been between 5.7 and 5.9, just below the diabetic threshold, for 6-8 years, all of which time I've been eating LC. We moved last year and my new doc was rather concerned about that, so she ordered an insulin test. It came out at "5" which on this particular scale was the lowest number in the normal category. So, my circulating insulin is low and yet my average blood glucose is high. Not sure if that is good or bad.

Chris Kresser has a theory that the A1c test is not appropriate for those with normal blood sugars - that their red blood cells may well survive longer than 90 days and are therefore more subject to glycation. I ran that by my doc, but she didn't buy it. So, for now I continue to monitor my glucose, fasting and pp, and try to keep it <140 pp.