End of self experiment: intermittent fasting

7 07 2012

I actually stopped intermittent fasting around June 28th, but have been lazy about posting.  Basically even without fasting/diet, as long as I work out my weight/look stays the same, so for now I’m not really doing much.

Conclusions:

IMF worked great!  I lost like 10 pounds in 2 months.  Keep in mind that is coming off of GOMAD.

Because of my lack of a sleep schedule, it was really difficult to maintain.

I seriously cannot believe anyone would deny themselves food, it’s a waking nightmare.  While on the schedule, it was not bad, but when I started adjusting hours/messing up some days, it was horrible.  Basically my stomach would hurt, growl, and I couldn’t think of anything but food.

Losing weight while eating mostly crap/fast food was possible.


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Categories : Self Experimentation

Life tip: finding an emergency hospital

29 05 2012

Life lesson: when searching for a hospital with Google Maps or something similar, search for “emergency services” or “urgent care”, not “hospital”!


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Categories : Health, Tips and Tricks

Self Experimentation: Ice Age

23 05 2012

Over the weekend I seriously cheated on my diet.  I went to SF to help my friend move back to Orange County and basically had a mini vacation of eating and drinking.  Anyway I’m back and the damage isn’t too bad, 177 pounds at last weigh in, up from about 175.

Although my weight loss is progressing, I decided to add a couple things from Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Body“, the chapter on “Ice Age.” The basic premise is that if your body is cold it must burn calories to heat back up.  There is some extra science in there, stuff about brown fat and how cold may stimulate it etc, but all that really matters is that introducing a little cold can catapult fat loss results results.  He has some crazy suggestions, but I am looking to add just a little extra “umph,” not to go crazy with it, so all I’m going to add is:

  • drinking 0.5 liters of ice cold water in the morning
  • switch to cold showers

I should note that I have taken cold showers before, but that was mainly to see if I could do it to save energy.  Once you get used to it, they’re not that bad.

To adjust, simply take normal showers, then at the end of each one add 30 seconds of as cold as you can take.  Once you can stay in for 30 seconds at the coldest setting, you’re ready to switch to a complete cold shower.  A small tip, when you first start, have the water hit your lower back, where your tramp stamp is.  I noticed that I don’t really feel the cold when it hits that spot and it helped me adjust.  If you really want to save the planet, switch to navy showers which are cold.  A step further would be to not shower every day.

The idea that cold can catapult weight loss shows a missing piece of the puzzle that is fat loss and human health.  People always talk about diet and exercise, but they don’t think about how most of the 1st world is temperature controlled and that this might play a roll.  There are some interesting implications.  A good observation is that morning cup of hot coffee you drink.  That cup of coffee helps warm your body up, which is the opposite of the ingesting ice cold water tactic.  Since I will be drinking 0.5 liters of ice cold water in the morning, I will not be drinking hot tea or coffee, at least not until a few hours later.

 

 


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Categories : Body, Experiment, Health, Lifehacking, Self Experimentation

Intermittent Fasting is kicking ass

15 05 2012

This morning I weighed myself in at about 175 pounds.  I don’t weigh myself religiously, but here’s a few of the weights that I did measure (note, I stopped doing GOMAD on 4-11-12):

4-10-12 182 pounds

4-25-12 180 pounds

5-2-12 178.5 pounds

5-15-12 175 pounds

In other words, in the past 5 weeks I’ve lost 7 pounds!  Taking into account water weight, bloat, and measuring error, saying I lost 5 pounds in 5 weeks is fair, and that would be mean about 1 pound per week.  Doesn’t sound like much?  If you lost 1 pound per week for a year, you’d have lost 52 pounds!

I have been following an intermittent fasting diet since 5-6-12, just over a week.  It’s important to mention that my diet has been far less than perfect in the past week, due to birthdays and mother’s day.  Yet, despite eating plenty of trash food, I have continued to lose weight!

Obviously I would lose weight in the first few weeks after I stopped drinking a gallon of milk a day; however, I believe that my progress would have stalled by now if I had not started intermittent fasting.  I still have a bit of a gut, so the next few weeks will show if I can continue losing weight stay tuned!

 


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Categories : Body, Health, Self Experimentation

A cool way to remember numbers

9 05 2012


I’ve been reading the above book on mnemonics recently and one of the cooler tricks I learned is how to remember numbers.  The system has been around for a long time and you can read more about it for free at this link.

The system is simple.  Convert each number into a phonetic sound.  Add in vowels/unused sounds to make words.  Remember those words, potentially using another mnemonic device such as “linking.”  Done.

The phonetic to number guide is below, along with simple ways to remember each.

1 – t or d, a typewritten “t” or “d” has just 1 downstroke
2 – n, a typewritten “n” has 2 downstrokes
3 – m, a typewritten “m” has 3 downstrokes
4 – r, the number 4 ends in the letter “r”
5 – l, hold out your left hand palm-outward and thumb out at a 90 degree angle – the five fingers form an “L” shape
6 – j or sh or ch or soft g, a “J” looks like a backward 6
7 – k or hard c or hard g, a “K”  can be made from two back-to-back 7’s
8 – f or v, a lower-case, written f  looks like an 8
9 – p or b, looks like a backward “p” or an upside-down “b”
0 – z or soft c (buzzing), the word “zero” begins with the letter “z”

It’s almost the 35th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope, so let’s do the date that the first Star Wars movie was released: May 25th, 1977, or 5251977.  The sounds we get are L, N, L, T/D, P/B, K, K.  I turned it into: Lan lit up kick.  I’m sure there’s better words, but I’m new, cut me some slack!

I will no longer forget my friend’s gatecode: share fun.  6582!

 


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Categories : Tips and Tricks

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