Before Christmas I wrote about my aunt who was doing the Optifast very low calorie diet. I said I would report on her follow up results. She lost in all 10 kg in 3 months which she was very pleased with. These were the problems that she had to contend with:

• She was not able to go out for meals with friends. This was hard in the lead up to Christmas.
• She could go out for drinks so long as she drank 0 cal beverages, not much fun!
• She was very hungry a lot of the time.
• She felt very cold quite often.
• She had to cook the evening meal for her family.
• The shakes etc got very boring.

Ok she did it because she was determined to lose weight. She says it was easier than calories counting because although very strict it was certain what she could eat. She was kept going by weight loss every day.

Post Optifast- Did she keep the weight off?

When she stopped dieting it was Christmas Eve. She had always planned to eat on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She tells me that she tried to eat very carefully and not to have second helpings or large portions. I was with her a lot of the time and she was indeed being careful. She was eating everything but just small amounts.

After the Christmas period she was unable to motivate herself to start on such a strict diet again. Because she had lost so mch weight she looked and felt a whole lot better and that meant the need to diet was less. This I have heard is quite a common problem.

She has no several months later regained 6 kg of the weight she had lost. This is such a shame but it isn’t unusual.

I have written before about the body’s determination to regain lost fat after weight loss. Optifast is almost a fast because it is less than 800 calories a day. This is a physiological reaction and it will happen to anyone who loses fat on a VLCD then immediately comes off it and begins to eat an drink normally again. This has been found in animal studies too. You need to use more realistic methods of weight loss because a diet isn’t a success if the weight comes right back again is it?

I didn’t write about the Dukan Diet yesterday as promised and that is because I was reading the book. The Dukan Diet book arrived from Amazon and I was devouring it so I could write a useful post on the topic.

I discovered that just reading the brief outline of the diet plans as you can online quite easily, is not all there is to it. I had begun doing this diet without the book and was about 4 days in.  I had previously done Atkins and so thought I knew what I could eat on the protein only days at the start. But I was wrong!

This diet from Dr. Dukan is not like Atkins. There is no fat allowed for one thing! You can’t eat fatty food like nuts and I had eaten a few hazelnuts – well more than a few! Dr. Dukan says that Atkins was right about some things but he was incorrect about fat. To lose weight safely you mustn’t eat fat at all.

You begin with pure protein in non fatty meat, all kinds of fish including shellfish and zero fat dairy foods such as no fat yoghurt and cottage cheese. You can eat eggs too.

For the meat he says only to eat beef or veal because that is les fatty than pork and lamb. Not sure that is true where I live- New Zealand. I am sure our pork is lower fat and so is our lamb but I need to check the figures on that. I am adding venison too, although he fails to mention it possibly because it isn’t readily available in France or the UK.  It is here and it is the leanest meat you can find anywhere.

One new thing and you need to read Dukan Diet book for why but he adds 1.5 tablespoons of oat bran a day. You can cook it into a pancake with an egg and 0 fat milk or quark and sweeten it. I have found this to be very delicious! It has been a help to me because I am still going to a gym class three times a week and I need a little glycogen in my muscles tobe able to do that.

So I have been going for a week and that is including the forst 4 days when I did it wrong and have lost 4.4 lbs (2 kg). This may seem small but I am a YOYo dieter who now find it almost impossible to lose weight so it is a good result.

The diet is very low in fat. In fact he wants you to completely eliminate it.  So we have Low carbohydrate and low fat -we are left with protein. As pure protein as possible.

The Attack  part lasts from 1 to 10 days and you decide on this yourself depending on how much weight you need to lose I think. Then you go into what he calls Cruise Phase. This simply adds green leafy vegetables to your protein on alternate days. It makes sense to me that fat should go but I do not think the Atkins people will agree. I find without carbs you do not feel hungry and that makes all the difference to your staying power.  I will post more as I go along.

Optifast is radical! It is a  FAST. That means you don’t eat but of course you have to eat and so Optifast provides the absolute minimum – less than 800 calories a day. You really have to think of it as a fast, albeit a modified fast. Don’t do it unless you absolutely have no choice between that or surgery!

Honestly these VLC diets (very low calorie ) are too drastic for anything other than emergencies. I say this because I know what a diet like that can do to your body. Yes, make it thinner but what happens after the Optifast?

Your body is primed to grab any crumb it can find and to force you to gobble up everything in site so that it is prepared for the next famine. It needs to pile on the fat for you so you won’t starve! Once your body has been treated to a drastic diet that is what happens. Remember this picture:

Not funny really!!!

That said I can reveal that my relative has lost 14.7lbs in the 3 1/2 weeks she has been doing the Optifast diet!  OMG!

She is well aware that after she reaches goal she will have to be very careful. But she is feeling pretty happy right now. She says it is tough but the rewards on the scales keep her very motivated.

In some ways she says it is easy because you know exactly what to eat. No worries over measuring and weighing. You eat your greens once a day with a teaspoon of butter. Other than that you have a shake/soup/dessert or bar 3 times a day.

Will update on this again soon.

There is very fast weight loss with Optifast. Its pretty exciting and motivating when you weigh yourself after 1 week and discover you have-

LOST 3.3 kg  / 7.27lbs in the first week!

Yes-this is how much weight my aunt has lost in her first week on Optifast.

She has been as good as gold and has not cheated even once and she has been well rewarded. She says it is not hard to keep to it when you are seeing your fat simply melting away each day.

If she keeps it up she will have lost all her excess weight by Christmas, Wow!

I think she will be eating Christmas Dinner and is surely thankful that she is not an American in which case she would have to manage Thanksgiving as well!

So what do you eat on Optifast? Well I know that in the USA there are various types of Optifast Diet available. We only have the one kind and it is less than 800 cals a day. You eat 3 Optifast products and can choose between shakes/bars/soups/desserts.The only other thing you must eat is two cups of low starch vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, green beans etc. plus 1 teaspoon of oil.

That is it. Nothing else at all and yes she did feel hungry at times. She says she feels less hungry and more energetic now than she did in the first week. I think your body adapts and your appetite shrinks. I will update this each time that she loses weight and let you know how she is going.

She has to start doing some weights now I have told her because if she doesn’t she will lose more lean body mass. All low calorie diets cause you to lose lean body mass but you lose less if you do  strength training .

I must remember to tell her about Wii-Fit.

Optifast is a diet that doctors prescribe for patients before  gastric surgery such as lap banding is carried out. This tells me it is safe as far as nutrition goes. Now we know that diets are a good way to end up even fatter than you started out. So there has to be some caution applied to a drastic fat loss regimen such as optifast. However knowing that diets can make you fat is not much consolation to anyone who is obese. How are they to lose the weight if they can’t modify their diet?

I think we need to accept that people will diet to lose weight in spite of knowing that this might rebound on them. We only need to look at Oprah and Kirstie to see the truth in that. Therefore anyone embarking on a weight loss diet must think about the fact that they will be on some version of it for ever. They will never be able to go back to ad lib eating. If that is accepted a diet can be worthwhile.

Optifast is a modified fast. The “fast” in optifast has two meanings; it is a fast way to lose weight and it is a fast, a modified fast. It produces rapid weight loss. This is because it is less than 800 calories a day.

Very Fast Weight Loss with...

If you thought calories were not important think again! Calories are the energy in food. Without them we starve to death. Its pretty obvious that if you starve someone they will get thinner and thinner until the inevitable end. Optifast is a modified fast- meaning it is as close to a fast as you can get and still function.

Optifast is not for the faint hearted! It is for anyone who has lots of weight to lose and who wants to get it off fast and is willing to do what it takes to make that happen.

Read more…

Has it ever occurred to you that you could lose weight really quickly if you just stopped eating? You will burn up around 70 calories per hour, ie 1600 per day even if you stay in bed all day. It is obvious that if someone is starved, and we have all see those pitiful famine victims on the news, they will lose all of their body fat and eventually die.

So is fasting for weight loss a good idea ?  Not to extreme of course  but simply for amazing weight loss?

Fasting from food and simply drinking pure water for a long period would eventually work but not in the way you hope.

However your body will not take kindly to a complete withdrawal of food. At first you will lose weight quickly but very soon your body will notice that there is a famine and will slow down your metabolism so as to reduce the number of calories needed to keep you alive.   Because of the initial rapid weight loss you will experience a strong hunger.  You will simply not be able  to think of anything else than how much you need food.

You will also feel very tired and your brain will not work as quickly as it normally does. It is trying to conserve energy in order to keep yo alive.

Fatigue, dizziness and difficulty concentrating are only a few of the symptoms that will result from fasting to lose weight.  Dehydration is also likely, since much of our  fluid intake is from food, not drinks. So fasting removes a big source of the daily fluids that we need to function properly.  The result of this dehydration is kidney disease- not right away perhaps but in the future. Your kidneys have the job of cleaning waste material or toxins from your blood. Kidneys also regulate blood pressure and stimulate the bone marrow to make red blood cells. When you starve yourself you also increase the risk of heart attack .Even if your  fast is ended long before death which would happen in about 4 weeks, serious physical effects would occur.

Going without food for a few hours or even a day isn’t dangerous, though it can be uncomfortable since you’ll get very hungry.  If you fast for longer the weight you lose will not be only from body fat. No, the weight loss will come from your muscles including the heart muscle. You would die of heart failure if you continued to fast from all nutrients. That is what causes death in anorexics.

But what if you fasted only for a couple of weeks? Well even that isn’t the answer because you would lose muscle as well as fat and would end up very flabby unless you do some strength training exercises. But doing strength training  exercises  while fasting is almost impossible as you have no energy reserves.

When you finally begin to eat again the calories in your  food will be carefully conserved and any surplus stored so that you eventually regain more weight than you have lost. Your body will want to be very sparing with the amount of energy you burn because it wants to keep you alive. So your metabolism is slowed down.  This is also what happens with very low calorie diets. They seem to work like magic but the legacy they leave is very depressing. Fasting to lose weight and very low calorie diets are the way to grow fat!

Instead of fasting, eat a balanced, healthy diet of with slightly reduced calories and combine this  with a sensible exercise program.

Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle is a good example of a sensible and effective way to lose weight if you want to do something to lose weight. If you lose weight in healthy sustainable way you will succeed and will be able to stay fit and slim for the rest of your life. Its worth doing it properly for best results.