I've just embarked on a five-week diet. This is unusual, because until quite recently I hadn't ever thought of myself as someone who need to watch what they eat.
In my twenties and early thirties, I ate and drank whatever I wanted to. I weighed in at somewhere between 10 to 10.5 stones (63.6 to 66.8 kg) and was the proud owner of a 28" waist! I was active and fit, lithe even. Those days are now a distant memory, a golden-hued halcyon blur; I'm in my early forties, and in the last eight years or so my lifestyle has become more sedentary: I've been slowly but steadily gaining weight.
I now sport a comfortable trouser with a 34" waist, and I have a drawer full of old tee-shirts that I fear would split open at the seams if I tried to put them on! But still, I can't bear to throw them out in case one day they miraculously fit me once more. But as I said, until now I haven't felt the need to diet, and I still haven't managed to work out a way of getting a thorough work-out while sitting at my desk.
And then two weeks ago, something changed. My wife and I watched a Horizon documentary entitled "Eat, Fast and Live Longer" (note crucially placed punctuation mark), made by British journalist, producer and TV presenter, Dr Michael Mosley.
The basic premise of the documentary was that Dr Mosley, himself at "the foothills of old age" as he put it, wanted to find a way that would help him to reduce the risk of falling prey to age-related diseases such as cancers, heart disease, diabetes and even Alzheimers. The answer, it turns out, is to restrict the number of calories that you eat on certain days: in fact, to fast.
Dr Mosley tries varous different ways of fasting, before finally settling on one that he thinks he can manage to keep up for a reasonable length of time: first he fasts for three days and four nights (hey, why not start with the toughest one! He's allowed a few Cup-A-Soups though), then he tries alternate day fasting (eat what you like on one day, then fast the next), then finally he tries five days of normal eating with two fast days, each week, for five weeks (according to Dr Mosley's Twitter feed, he split the two fast days, fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays most weeks).
The results were quite startling: he lost about a stone in weight, and reduced his percentage body fat from 27% to less than 20%, in just five weeks. He felt healthier, and tests showed that he'd significantly reduced the risks of contracting age-related diseases. As far as I'm aware, Dr Mosley has kept up the intermittent fasting (as it's known), although he found that he needed to fast for just on day per week from time to time, in order to slow down the weight loss (it was just too fast, pun intended).
So, short story long and all that, I thought it would be a good idea to document my progress. Partly because I thought it might be useful to other people, but (if I'm honest) mainly because I'm an anally-retentive type, and tend to record such things anyway.
Over the next few days and weeks, maybe months (who knows really), I intend to update my blog with the gory details of fast days, including meals that I've eaten with approximate calorific values, and how I'm feeling (fine/hungry/starving/unconscious etc). I also hope to post the results of a weekly weigh-in at my doctors' surgery: weight and BMI (Body Mass Index).
I did go to see my doctor before I started, and not only did he give me the green light to go ahead, he'd also watched the Horizon programme and asked me to check back in from time-to-time and let him know how things were going!
If you've read this far, chances are that you might be interested in Dr Mosley's experiment, so here are some useful links.
The Horizon page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01lxyzc
BBC News article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19112549
Daily Telegraph article, with recipe ideas!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9480451/The-52-diet-can-it-help-you-lose-weight-and-live-longer.html
Dr Mosley's Twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/DrMichaelMosley
More updates to follow.
"Eat, Fast and Live Long".
Alex.
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