Essentials, Changes & Details :The Things That Worked.

The changes that iv’e made that seem to working for weight loss.

At close to six months into my grand project and 10 Kg’s down so far I think I can see what has worked so far, the things that I now consider essential and those things that might be helping but which I largely regard as fluff.

Essentials 1 (Diet) Above everything else I consider it essential to reduce Insulin as I regard that as the driving force (hormonal drive) for laying down visceral fat. Iv’e used one main method to achieve that and two other things that are big contributors to achieving a low Insulin state. The main one of course is to reduce the amount of metabolic poison I was consuming, the main part of which was firstly biscuits and secondly high cardohydrate foods such as bread and rice. I haven’t stopped the latter group although I am down to one thick slice of locally baked bread per day with my morning poached egg and we often don’t have the dish I used to make with Chinese style flied lice. At some time I need to reconsider my favorite weekly meal which has pasta parcels, garlic bread and a marinara sauce made up with bacon and onion – sounds weird but tastes great.

Nearly essentials 1. There are things that I consider essential and then there’s a load of detail that I consider really useful or essential/adjuncts. The ones that go directly with diet are to : 1, practice daily intermittent fasting – I now eat during an eating window of around 8-9 hours and then spend the rest of 24 Hrs in a fasted state. From what iv’e been able to learn and from what I experience myself the overnight fasted period gives me a longer period in a low insulin state and I think that it’s mainly during that time that i’m actively metabolizing visceral fat. The less powerful but useful adjuncts that add to that are to have my first walk before I eat and to have my final walk of the day after our evening meal – what iv’e learned is that walking immediately after eating blunts or flattens the Insulin spikes from carb rich meals.

Essentials 2 ; Exercise. My second essential is some form of exercise that gets done every day – or nearly so. My choice was walking as that has the lowest point of entry and very little to learn. Up until May my walking target was 7500 steps per day averaged out at 45000 steps per week although I regard my exercise and diet week as being 6 days. Since the beginning of May iv’e had to reduce that, initially to 5000 steps per day but even now i’m building that back up again. I did also have the habit of performing body weight squats which gradually morphed into (slightly) weighted squats but my current knee problems have made me cut that out.

For a bit of extra detail I have to walk using a pair of crutches and all of my walking includes moderately steep Cornish lanes so the average workload is greater than the same step count done in somewhere dead flat. My reasoning for that amount of daily exercise comes from the world of cardiology where several studies seem to indicate that 7500 steps per day is the sweet spot for heart health. More than that seems to be unecessary for heart health and the loss of visceral fat doesn’t seem to increase by much.

There is an accessory element to walking and that is that I treat at least one of my medium distance (2800) routes as a level 2 cardio workout as I can get a stride on up a steep lane, Level 2 cardio is still easy cardio – the definition being that I should be working a bit harder and breathing more deeply but I should still be able to maintain a conversation as I walk. The second accessory detail that relates to both diet and exercise is that I consider added protein essential : I regularly have a poached egg for breakfast and most days I munch on a cooked chicken thigh around lunch time. Our dinners almost always have protein in them – in fact i’m slowly working our diet away from carbohydrates and towards protein, fat and fiber.

Anything more with diet I consider as ‘fluff’ ; the world doesn’t need another diet book and I consider styles of eating as tribal in the sense that we have a carnivore tribe, a vegetarian tribe, paleo tribe, keto diet tribe and so on and so forth – honestly I really don’t care how people eat as long as it’s real food and not industrial food-like product which much of the standard English diet currently is. The only dietary style I have no truck with is veganism, which I don’t see as being about nutrition at all but some kind of morally grandstanding pseudo-religion.

That’s about it folks.

Best wishes Y’awl.