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First let me say that juice fasting is not really fasting because you are getting a lot of nourishment from the fruits and vegetables. So “juice fasting” is a misnomer. You never really feel hungry on juice and you do not give your digestive system a rest. I

t does give you a time in which you have only nourishing foods are taken in. There are no animal products in your diet during a juice fast. That is a major benefit in itself as it is the animal products that cause so much trouble to our health. During your juice fast you get pure fruit and vegetables without the fiber. Now there is nothing wrong with fiber but on the juice fast you are excluding them in order to be able to take in more nutrients from the vegetables and fruits.

On a 10 day juice fast you lose weight because there is no fat in your diet and it is almost impossible to over eat on juices.

Water fasts however are real fasts. You literally have nothing at all to eat or drink except water. I have never done a water fast but I have read about them. I understand that you produce ketones after the first 48 hours without eating. The ketones are needed to feed the brain which can’t live on protein or fat.

Fasting for Health

Ketones come from body fat so you are using up your fat to produce them. This is why a water fast is a great way to lose excess body fat. The ketones also prevent hunger. Very little lean muscle is lost during a water fast-more is lost on a juice fast.

I learned about this from a book I bought recently by Dr. Joel Fuhram called ‘Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease‘ If you are interested in the idea of fasting for weight loss and health I suggest you read this excellent book.

I haven’t quite finished reading it yet and I have to say I am not sure if I could do a water fast-not sure if I would be brave enough. I might though as it seems as if it could be a great way to lose weight fast.

What do you think about fasting for weight loss and for health? Anyone experienced a full water fast?

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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 resume  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 now 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 and 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?

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A Crash Diet

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.

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Follow up on Optifast

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Optifast For Rapid Weight Loss

I wonder if anyone has tried Optifast? If so I would love to hear from you. I am going to talk about  the Optifast Diet because I have some experience with it.  A family member of mine has been doing it and so I thought I would review it here.

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.

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…
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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.

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!

One kind of fasting that can be effective is juice fasting. Although it is called fasting it really isn’t because you are able to drink as much freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juice as you need. You get enough fluids and you get super nutrition which includes vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Learn more about the juice fast I undertook .