Welcome back to The Diet Oracle! It has been quite the week! If you are new here, we have been taking an up-close-and-personal look at June’s Diet of the Month, The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jason Fung, MD and Jimmy Moore and I have just wrapped up my own week-long immersion into the world of intermittent fasting. (If you’d like more information about the fasting schedule I followed, check out this post.) Today I’m excited to be sharing with you nutrition highlights for the week and my personal intermittent fasting weight loss results!

I definitely learned a lot, both about fasting as well as myself, and am looking forward to sharing with you the good, the bad, and the hungry. In upcoming posts, I’ll be serving up my best tips for success, from grocery shopping and meal prep to dealing with hunger and the foods/beverages I could NOT do without. Hopefully, my experience will shed a light on what intermittent fasting is really like and give you the tools you need for success, should you decide intermittent fasting might be a good fit for you.

But! Before we get to all of that, I want to do a little math and see how my week of intermittent fasting looks on paper. Plus, let’s chat about my results on the scale! It’s time to crunch some numbers and see where we stand.

My Weight Loss Results!

For the week, my average caloric intake was approximately 1253 calories with about 55% from fat, 25% from carbohydrate, and 20% from protein. For reference, I would typically need about 1700-1900 calories to maintain my weight, given my gender, height, weight, age, and a light activity level. Knowing that 1 pound of body weight contains roughly 3500 calories worth of energy, this would mean that over the course of the last week (well, EIGHT days, if we’re being precise), I have been in the hole approximately 3570-5200 calories, an amount which should create a 1-1.5 pound weight loss.

In reality, I lost just shy of 3 pounds!

(Granted, one must assume that part of this weight loss is water weight. It will be interesting to see in a few days from now–once I have returned to a more normal eating pattern–to what extent the scale goes back up.)

My Fasting Macros

Looking at my macronutrient breakdown, you’ll quickly see that my numbers don’t exactly measure up to what is typically recommended to Americans. Because I wanted to adhere to Fung’s recommendations as closely as possible, not only did I follow one of the provided fasting schedules but I also endeavored to consume a diet high in natural fats with an emphasis on whole, unprocessed foods and very limited refined grains and sugars.

Fasting & Ketosis

Given this very low intake of carbohydrate, one could argue that not only was I fasting, but I was also following something close to a ketogenic diet. This is a diet in which carbohydrate intake is so low that the body is forced into ketosis, a series of metabolic changes that triggers the body to more heavily utilize its own fat stores. Each day, I ended up getting in an average of 76 grams of carbohydrate; ketosis typically occurs at levels just under 50 grams per day. Both low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets have been shown to be very effective for weight loss.

So a very obvious question here is, does fasting offer any particular benefits that simple calorie cutting cannot provide? And, would fasting be as effective if the meals eaten were not so low in carbohydrate? We’ve got several confounding variables going on: fasting combined with a caloric deficit, high fat intake, and limited carbs. Does one of these factors deserve the greater share of credit for delivering results? Or do they all work together, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts?

Fasting Claims

In The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting, Dr. Jason Fung would argue, of course, that the advantages of fasting cannot be minimized or brushed aside. He claims several benefits, including:

• Reduced circulating insulin levels and increased insulin sensitivity
• Improved health and well-being
• Enhanced workouts and anti-aging benefits
• Successful weight loss without hunger or complicated diet plans to follow
• Flexible options that can work for anyone
• and more.

Find the right plan for you!

Every diet claims to have the key to fast and lasting weight loss. The truth is, a diet that’s incredibly effective for one person might be a no-go for somebody else. In my experience, the trick to weight loss success is finding the plan that’s just right for you. That might take some trial-and-error, but figuring out your best strategy is worth it. Is intermittent fasting your answer? My upcoming posts can help you decide!