Записки сумасшедшего

Этот пост будет в основном про моё здоровье и очередную попытку похудеть. Если эта животрепещущая тема вас не интересует, можете смело пропускать.

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За последний год я летал в Калифорнию, Германию и Россию, и ни разу не имел никаких проблем со сном: на следующее же утро просыпался в своё обычное время (6-7 часов по местному времени), причём независимо от того, на запад летел или на восток.

Неужели и это объясняется диетой? Других объяснений не вижу... Странно, но приятно.

Another full month has passed, so it’s time to summarize my progress. This is a graph for the month.



Overall, my weight loss has visibly slowed down. Maybe, it’s more “visibly” than actually — after all, the red averaged line went down 8 pounds in a month — but it did feel a little bit frustrating sometimes. Though now, looking at the number, I am quite satisfied. 2 pounds a week looks like a healthy rate.

Why did it slow down? Many people report that the closer is their weight to the “ideal” — whatever it is — the harder it is to loose it. I don’t quite understand why it could be the case, but I don’t have any reason not to trust them.

Actually, one explanation could be that as they progress with their diet, their metabolism slows down, so they spend less energy. And the metabolism slowdown may be explained both by the body adjusting to not having enough calories, and by the decreased weight (the less you weigh, the less energy you need to carry yourself around).

Another explanation to me personal slowdown is that I became less strict in counting calories. I still do it, and I still aim to 1600 calories per day, but I am generally less pedantic and pay less attention to it.

I did a couple of one-day fasts and a couple of juice fasts this month, and I find them quite helpful, both psychologically and physiologically. I think that that’s how I am going to use them going forward: to compensate for the bad eating behavior, or just when the body feels it needs some rest.

To put things into perspective, here is my weight for the entire time (four months since January 18):



Now, the question is, when do I stop? I honestly don’t know. I still feel fatter then I want to be, so I guess I am going to continue shrinking myself until I am satisfied with the results.

At work, many people finally started noticing that I am getting thinner — that’s after 50 pounds, heh — and many people tell me these days that I should stop losing weight and work out more, to convert the existing fat to muscles. Of course, it is physically impossible. Fat and muscles are two different types of tissues, and they just don’t convert to each other. Sadly, it’s also physically impossible to grow muscles while losing fat, and that’s why: to loose fat, one needs to eat less calories than he spends. To gain weight (the muscle mass, in this case), one needs to eat more calories than he spends. There is just no way to have it both ways at the same time.

So let me finish the losing weight business, and then we’ll talk about the body building.

As I have written already, in January I was diagnosed with a mysterious disease called "fatty liver". It is mysterious because its causes are not known, and there is no treatment.

There are no medical or surgical treatments for fatty liver
American Liver Foundation

Well, guess what. Today I finally received the new ultrasound resuts, and there is no fatty liver whatsoever. Gone. Disappeared.

	January	May
Abdominal ultrasound	Diffuse increased echnogenicity throughout the liver, consistent with fatty infiltration. More severe forms of liver disease [...] cannot be excluded.	The liver has normal size and appearence without any evidence of fatty infiltration.

This adds to my list of ills and diseases just evaporated with extra pounds. I am going to write about this separately, but important point is this: if you ever get (non-alcoholic) fatty liver, know that it can be reversed with proper diet / weight loss.

У меня завалялись старые тренировочные штаны. Я в них в школе ходил на физкультутру. В институте они стали мне малы, а потом и вообще застёгиваться перестали.

Сегодня я их нашёл случайно и решил померить. Они с меня сваливаются.

It's been exactly three months since I started tracking my weight, and I don't have much to report, really. I lost 44 pounds in 3 months, and I even managed to lose 5 pounds during my vacation. I have pretty much plateaued since then, though. This is a beauty of daily weighing and graphing results: I know that I have a (potential) problem, and I know how to address it (eat less or move more). I am not to concerned about the plateau, though, since I am so much closer to my target weight now. (Whatever my target weight is -- I really have no clue! The idea is to go down until it feels right. My guess is that loosing ten more pounds will not hurt at all.)

I also started something that I should have started from the very beginning: tracking my body fat weight percentage. When you lose weight, especially as quickly as I did, you always lose some fat and some muscles. It is unavoidable.* However the goal is obviously to lose fat, not muscles. That's why it is important to track your body fat weight (or percentage). If I had this idea when I started, I would've, for example, measured my waist every morning and recording the results. (I have some indirect evidence, though: I went down 6 pants sizes so far, from 36 to 30.)

I know even better now. I got a special fat measuring gadget called Accu-Measure Calipers. It looks like cheap plastic calipers, and for a good reason. It is cheap plastic calipers. However, they say that it is a rather accurate way of measuring body fat -- allegedly the best you can do at home. So far, according to it, I have 22% of body fat, which is "normal" but not great. It will be interesting to see how this number changes and how my fat weight loss will be correlated with my total weight loss.


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*There are actually two ways to avoid it: either loose weight very slowly and exercise a lot (to offset the muscle losses), or fast for a long time (to enter the state of ketosis, when the body uses almost exclusively fat for the metabolism). I might try the both approaches soon -- but not right now.

I did my first-ever 3 day fast this week. I would've preferred to do it later, but that was the only time I could squeeze it in my schedule before the vacation.

I have conflicting impressions about the fast. It was certainly worth doing, but I didn't feel too great, especially on the third day. I knew very well that it could be the case. On the second-third day of a fast the body switches to a special mode called ketosis, which essentially means that it would be getting all the energy it needs from the body fat, and leave muscles and other important tissues alone. So, it is a known fact that it gets better after the third day. I wonder, though, if it is useful to fast for three days at all, or if one should always go for more to get the cleansing benefits of ketosis.

In any case, I am glad I did it. I know now a little bit more about my body, and I am a little bit more self-confident. The breaking of the fast was an interesting experience too. By the way, I didn't realize before that "breakfast" is so called because it is used to break a fast. Anyway, I had three wedges of an orange for breakfast, and felt totally, absolutely full. I think it will take me at least three days, maybe more, to go back to my pre-fast eating patterns.

To lose more weight was not my explicit goal for this fast, but it happened nevertheless. In the course of four days (fasting + breaking the fast) I lost 9 pounds! I am impressed. It puts me at exactly 40 pounds less then when I started, after exactly 9 weeks. I weigh now below 160 pounds, which was my original goal. I expected back then that it would take 20 weeks, if not more, to reach that goal. Well, I am not going to officially declare the victory until the red line crosses 160 pounds, but I am definitely very close. Also, my average BMI is well below 25. Nice.

It's been exactly 8 weeks since I started to track my weight, so I think it's a good time for a review.

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It's been exactly 4 weeks since I started tracking my weight. Even though I had a feeling lately that my weight loss has somewhat slowed, in fact this is not so: for the last 3 weeks, I've been losing exactly 4 pounds per week. Overall, I lost 18 pounds in 4 weeks. The red "trend" (moving average) line goes down pretty steadily. I am quite satisfied by the progress.

For some time already, I am feeling rather comfortable with my diet. I don't feel any of the wonderful things some people report after substantial diet changes (like a boost of energy), but I also don't have any of the negative effects I've expected -- no headaches, no tiredness, no hunger. In short, I feel just about "normal".

This allows me to start trying different experiments. So far I am doing two things:

Drinking at least one cup of fresh vegetable juice per day. I think I'll write a separate post about juicing.

Completely avoiding all dairy products. I've read a certain amount of anti-milk propaganda (you can start from notmilk.com if you are interested), so I decided to try to live without it for two or three months and see what happens.

One other thing I am going to try soon is to completely fast a day per week. I am curious to see how it feels. For the rest of the week I am going to eat more than now -- maybe 1500 or 1600 calories per day -- though it's not clear to me how I am going to fit that much food into myself. I am quite full with my current 1200 calories per day. What a weird problem to have! Well, I'll probably try eating more nuts.

So far, the progress is much more rapid than I expected. I lost 7 pounds in 8 days, almost 1 pound per day. This, of course, seems to be contradicting the theory that 1 pound is equivalent to 3500 calories: it is highly unlikely that I spend 4500 calories per day.

What could be the explanations? Maybe the theory is wrong. Or maybe I have a highly unusual metabolism. Or maybe (and most likely) this is a fluke and my weight loss will slow down and average to a more reasonable amount.

I am going to wait one more week, and if it is still that fast, I'll start to increase my daily calorie budget. Which will be a pity, because I have no problems maintaining 1000 calories per day, and I like losing weight fast :)